Names
Han, Mitakuyepi,
Greetings, All My Relations,
Indigenous people receive different names over their lives. As you know, my ancestry is about half Indigenous to Turtle Island, but I was adopted to European Americans, as was my birth mother. So I cannot find out the extent of my ancestry, beyond half, and I cannot find out the particular Oyate, people - "named" variously "tribes" and "nations" and now we are returning to the original name that WE used for ourselves, people - with whom my ancestors lived, whose cultures and spiritualities they practiced, and sufferings and genocides they suffered. So I do not have those names, those particular Oyate names. An individual person is only a very small part of people. But I know more about names for me than about the names of my ancestors, or the names of the particular Oyate of which they were small parts.
You know already that, apart from Indigenous names, I have many, many, many names. But today I will talk briefly about my Indigenous names. A person is given their names by their Elders, or by a Wakan Wicasa or Wakan Winyan - a Sacred-Medicine Man or a Sacred-Medicine Woman - or because of dreams of visions that person has. These names are related to the characteristics of that person; to what that person does, or has done, or will do. The Wakan Wicasa or Wakan Winyan, or that person can know what they wil do through communication with Wakan Tanka, and the Wakan Spirits, in dreams or visions, for example.
My first Indigenous name was given to me by my Elder and Leksi, Hante Unpan Winyan, Cedar Elk Woman. Hante, Cedar. Cedar represents, purity and the East (from which I came). It is one of our four Wakan green relatives used for Wakan purposes. Hante, Cedar, can be burned for purification, of a place, an object, a person, a prayer, a gathering, a Ceremony. It can be mixed with other Wakan green relatives and burned, again, creating purification. Unpan, Female Elk (Black Elk, a man, is called Hehaka Sapa, Black Male Elk). I do not know much yet about what the four-legged relative Elk represents - though I have always thought they are very beautiful and strong and graceful, so I feel honored to be given this name. I do know that Elk, like Cedar, represent the East, from which I came.
Today, I want to tell you that I am taking a second Indigenous name. It did not come from a dream or a vision. It came from a lifetime of anger and rage, and grief and mourning, over what has been done to Indigenous people. This began as a child, before speech. We believe our ancestors speak to us in our blood. This would explain why I turned the television set to black when cowboys or cavalries hurt or killed "Indians". Why I was always on the side of Indians. Why I played Indians, not Cowboys. Why my adoptive grandmother who came from Norway by herself on a ship at age 18 to escape severe parental abuse, then inflicted on her chidren, including my adoptive mother, who inflicted it on me. But my adoptive grandmother and I loved each other strongly. She was tender and kind and gentle and loving with me alone. In her old age after a life of unimaginable hard work, she worked her "fingers to the bone" to make an Indian dress for me. I have no idea how she could have found the image to copy. But she did. Because the dress this elderly Norwegian woman, uneducated, unassimilated (though she forced her children to assimilate, forbidding them to speak Norwegian, punishing them for accents) was authentic. It had leather fringe at the hem, and at the bottom of the sleeves. It had teeth, rows and rows and rows of teeth, each sown on individually, circling the neck first, then continuing in ever widening circles to form a yolk. It had beadwork. It was fashioned, with her failing eyesight and arthritic hands, over who knows how many hours and evenings...because she wanted to make me, the little girl who loved Indians, happy. And she did, she did. I am crying now as I write this. So, from a child, from birth, my Ancestors were telling me I was an Indian. How we lived. What a village smelled like, sounded like, felt like. How I found shade in which to play. How happy I was there. What we ate, how we made it. How we rode horses - which I did passionately and obsessively until I turned that abuse onto myself, or tried to escape it, in self-destructive life, in slow suicide of alcoholism and drug abuse and addiction, in cutting my wrists with a razor blade to the bone, through the veins, through the tendons, to the bone. In taking the only thing I had in an empty apartment, a window, and breaking it, and using the broken glass to cut and stab and slash myself 241 times. How many Indians did these things? How many are doing them today? Walking to school with a boy named Benjy, meeting him at the orphanage in which he lived. We were walking to kindergarten or first grade so we were five years old. Benjy made me laugh. Benjy was my friend. So I could ask him, it was ok to ask him, why he was in the orphanage. Because he had accidentally shot out his brother's eye with a slingshot. Benjy is an Ojibwa, an Anishinabe. I pray he is in this world today. If he is not in this world today, he is in the Spirit World today. Han, Sic' Esi! Benjy and I said to each other, because we knew, at age five - he an Ojibwa, an Anishinabe, stolen, ripped, torn, wrenched, from his family and put in a prison for children; me, adopted out and being raised and abused by Europeans - we knew and said that he was put in an Orphanage because he shot his brother's eye out by accident with slingshot BECAUSE HE WAS AN INDIAN. We, wise ones walking to school at age five, said to each other, "If a white boy shot his brother's eye out by accident with a slingshot, they wouldn't have taken him away and put him in an Orphanage." I had never thought about Benji as an Indian. He was my friend. That was not my virtue. Where I grew up, there were only whites and Indians, and we didn't make distinctions. I have gone back many times and thought about all the people I grew up with from kindergarten through high school that I didn't think about as Indians, that no one thought about as Indians, that no one spoke about as Indians. They were kids, funny kids, guys, band guys, whatever. There were so many Indians I grew up with, adopted, not adopted, Rez, "Urban" - quite a stretch in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan - and I only lately began to realize it. I remember going to the reservations with my adoptive mother and her friends doing "charity". I remember going into a house on a rez with my adoptive mother in the winter. It was freezing outside and the same temperature inside. No windows, no heat. Having been "raised" to be polite, I waited until we were in the car and the doors were closed and the windows were rolled up and the car was started. Then I asked, "Why didn't they have windows? Why didn't they have heat? It's so cold!" I guess she said something to the effect that they were poor. She didn't buy them windows or a furnace and fuel. That's what Indians do. But at LEAST I don't remember her saying they were drunk or lazy and it was their fault.
However, I do remember another winter day, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, before global warming, high snow, below zero. Riding in a car with my adoptive mother. We saw, I am crying again and again and again as I write this, this time in shame, we saw an Indian man, unconscious in a snowbank beside the street. My instinct - a human instinct - the ONLY instinct I can understand, like getting windows and a furnace and fuel for that freezing family - was to stop the car, try to help him, and call an ambulance. I said something to her, to my adoptive mother. There's a man in the snow! He's sick or hurt! I assumed that she would stop and help him and call an ambulance. She kept driving. I was scared for him, confused by her. But there's a man! In the snow! He's sick or hurt! And she kept driving. I was under nine years old at the time because we still lived in Sault Ste. Marie, and we moved from there when I was nine. I couldn't - I didn't think - do anything myself. She was abusive. One did not disobey her. One did not do things without her permission. But I did WRONG that day. I did WRONG. My relative, wherever you are, please hear me when I say that I KNOW now, as I KNEW THEN, that I was doing WRONG by letting her keep driving. I KNEW BETTER. I KNEW YOU NEEDED HELP. I did WRONG AND I FEEL SHAME TO THIS DAY. Our people do not apologize. We do not ask for forgiveness. We just do not do it again. So, my relative, maybe you know, if you were in the Spirit World when this happened, if you are there now, that I did not do that again. I was in the back seat of the car, my adoptive father was driving, my adoptive mother in the front seat, and we passed an accident: a man and his motorcycle down on the highway, he was unconcious, it was the middle of the night, dark. I waited for my father to slow down and stop. He was not slowing down. I knew I would pay for this but I dared to tell my adoptive parents to do something. "Stop!!!! Stop!!!!" Nothing. So I opened the car door in the back seat. Yelling yelling: what do you think you're doing???? Shut that door!!!! Anger, anger. I put my foot out the door. A highway, 55 mies per hour. My father, confused, is starting to slow the car down. He is hurt, he needs help!!! Stop the car!!!! Back and forth the yelling, I keep the door open slowly moving to jump out of the car, my adoptive father slowly slowing the car down and I jumped out. I ran back to the man, and did the things I learned about accidents, unconciousness, don't move them, check for a pulse...someone else called an ambulance. I kept people away from the man. My adoptive father kept traffic away from the middle of the road where he and his motorcyle lay. I did this, my relative, because we do not apologize - I had not had that teaching yet, but my Ancestors were teaching me - we do not do it again.
So, many years later, I am on the Red Road. Wopila!!!! I can't find my "blood tribes" because the whites have gone to extremes to hide the fact that there were any Indians in my ancestry, much less half of my Ancestors, or my birth mother's ancestry. "English. Protestant." That is how both of my blood parents were described to my adopive parents. I could laugh at what a joke that is. How far from the truth. The lies, the trail of broken laws: the birth certificate without the name of my grandfather, illegal in Canada at least at the time, because he was a FULL BLOOD and I AM PROUD, the illegal adoption across the border from Canada, no record, no papers. The ancestry of my blood father, for whom I was not searching, came back in the papers, mixed blood, like me - I AM PROUD AGAIN - MORE INDIAN BLOOD IN ME. I am still trying to find "my blood tribes" so I can "get enrolled" and be an Indian in the eyes of the illegal occupation government of Turtle Island. I don't need to know. By this time I have a tribe, a people, a tiospaye, extended family. But one of them wants to know, because of her experiences as an Indian woman. So I have been spending many years researching my genealogy to find two things: my mixed blood father whom I have been told officially is a mixed blood, and who, in the photo I receive, has BLACK hair, BLACK eyes, DARK skin, is "officially" Scottish. His mother and father list themselves, on two censuses, as "Scottish". And with his mother and father, my grandmother and grandfather, the trail of lies goes cold. They disappear. They have no ancestors. She has come from Canada to the United States, "Scottish" nationality, "English" language. He has come from either Indiana - where Natives were not forced on trails of tears and broken treaties forced marches onto concentration camps in the West, because they are intermarried and they OWN property and stores and their white relatives OWN property and stores. But there is no record of someone of his name and birthdate being born in Indiana. Or even of his name. Or his birthdate. Or, he has come from Wisconsin. Again, if he was born in Wisconsin, there is no record. I am still looking. But the second thing I found is that they don't list tribes in any records, they list "nationality" and if you are an "Indian" they list you as an "Indian". But, I have started this search and I will continue. I am learning much along the way, so it is a good journey.
My name. Yesterday, after years of the rage, and the pain only people who have been hated, and killed for 514 years, physical genocide, cultural genocide, spiritual genocide, emotional genocide, intellectual genocide can feel, I was at a meeting, and a camp, where we are fighting an important battle, over Creator's most Wakan place, that we need to use for prayer and Ceremonies, that wasicus are destroying and desecrating - as always, for gold: the most Wakan Mountain in the Black Mountains, Wakan Mato Paha, Sacred Bear Butte, in the Wakan He Sapa. As I listened in the sun I cried with my Elders, with the Chiefs, who spoke powerful words of truth, tears of RAGE, tears of PAIN, tears of MOURNING, tears of GRIEF, tears of wanting to fight, Hoka he!!!! It is a good day to die!!!! Hoka he!!!! It is a good day for you to die. My three fires, spirit, mind, heart, were being expressed by my Elders by the Chiefs: they stole these lands, our cultures, our ways, our children, they killed 95% of us, now they want to destroy this most Sacred Mountain and today we say ENOUGH. Today we begin to fight back. Today is a battle in a war over this land, Creator's land, loaned to us by Creator, and by our childreen, as Crazy Horse says. You cannot sell land, as Crazy Horse says. So you cannot buy it. Or own it, but you can steal it, and misuse it and destroy it. Like you destroy a people. OR TRY TO DESTROY A PEOPLE.
So, I sat, a half BLOOD INDIAN RED RED, crying in grief and mourning, making my face RED, crying in RAGE, making my face RED, sitting long in the heat and sun, making my face RED, I gave myself a new name. Last night it was longer. Last night is was ENRAGED, MOURNING RED WOMAN. Then, I shortened it so it would stand for more. RED WOMAN. WINYAN LUTA. That is my newest name. It is male language to say hoka he! I will borrow it, for with this battle in this war, we are the attackers, after 514 years and tears, and trying to defend our selves, our cultures, our children, our lands, WE are beginning the battles, WE are rekindling our lives, our cultures, our traditions, our languages, our ways, our children, this WAR. We will win the ongoing "Indian Wars". ENOUGH. HOKE HE!!!!
Mitakuye Oyasin, Winyan Luta, RED WOMAN
Greetings, All My Relations,
Indigenous people receive different names over their lives. As you know, my ancestry is about half Indigenous to Turtle Island, but I was adopted to European Americans, as was my birth mother. So I cannot find out the extent of my ancestry, beyond half, and I cannot find out the particular Oyate, people - "named" variously "tribes" and "nations" and now we are returning to the original name that WE used for ourselves, people - with whom my ancestors lived, whose cultures and spiritualities they practiced, and sufferings and genocides they suffered. So I do not have those names, those particular Oyate names. An individual person is only a very small part of people. But I know more about names for me than about the names of my ancestors, or the names of the particular Oyate of which they were small parts.
You know already that, apart from Indigenous names, I have many, many, many names. But today I will talk briefly about my Indigenous names. A person is given their names by their Elders, or by a Wakan Wicasa or Wakan Winyan - a Sacred-Medicine Man or a Sacred-Medicine Woman - or because of dreams of visions that person has. These names are related to the characteristics of that person; to what that person does, or has done, or will do. The Wakan Wicasa or Wakan Winyan, or that person can know what they wil do through communication with Wakan Tanka, and the Wakan Spirits, in dreams or visions, for example.
My first Indigenous name was given to me by my Elder and Leksi, Hante Unpan Winyan, Cedar Elk Woman. Hante, Cedar. Cedar represents, purity and the East (from which I came). It is one of our four Wakan green relatives used for Wakan purposes. Hante, Cedar, can be burned for purification, of a place, an object, a person, a prayer, a gathering, a Ceremony. It can be mixed with other Wakan green relatives and burned, again, creating purification. Unpan, Female Elk (Black Elk, a man, is called Hehaka Sapa, Black Male Elk). I do not know much yet about what the four-legged relative Elk represents - though I have always thought they are very beautiful and strong and graceful, so I feel honored to be given this name. I do know that Elk, like Cedar, represent the East, from which I came.
Today, I want to tell you that I am taking a second Indigenous name. It did not come from a dream or a vision. It came from a lifetime of anger and rage, and grief and mourning, over what has been done to Indigenous people. This began as a child, before speech. We believe our ancestors speak to us in our blood. This would explain why I turned the television set to black when cowboys or cavalries hurt or killed "Indians". Why I was always on the side of Indians. Why I played Indians, not Cowboys. Why my adoptive grandmother who came from Norway by herself on a ship at age 18 to escape severe parental abuse, then inflicted on her chidren, including my adoptive mother, who inflicted it on me. But my adoptive grandmother and I loved each other strongly. She was tender and kind and gentle and loving with me alone. In her old age after a life of unimaginable hard work, she worked her "fingers to the bone" to make an Indian dress for me. I have no idea how she could have found the image to copy. But she did. Because the dress this elderly Norwegian woman, uneducated, unassimilated (though she forced her children to assimilate, forbidding them to speak Norwegian, punishing them for accents) was authentic. It had leather fringe at the hem, and at the bottom of the sleeves. It had teeth, rows and rows and rows of teeth, each sown on individually, circling the neck first, then continuing in ever widening circles to form a yolk. It had beadwork. It was fashioned, with her failing eyesight and arthritic hands, over who knows how many hours and evenings...because she wanted to make me, the little girl who loved Indians, happy. And she did, she did. I am crying now as I write this. So, from a child, from birth, my Ancestors were telling me I was an Indian. How we lived. What a village smelled like, sounded like, felt like. How I found shade in which to play. How happy I was there. What we ate, how we made it. How we rode horses - which I did passionately and obsessively until I turned that abuse onto myself, or tried to escape it, in self-destructive life, in slow suicide of alcoholism and drug abuse and addiction, in cutting my wrists with a razor blade to the bone, through the veins, through the tendons, to the bone. In taking the only thing I had in an empty apartment, a window, and breaking it, and using the broken glass to cut and stab and slash myself 241 times. How many Indians did these things? How many are doing them today? Walking to school with a boy named Benjy, meeting him at the orphanage in which he lived. We were walking to kindergarten or first grade so we were five years old. Benjy made me laugh. Benjy was my friend. So I could ask him, it was ok to ask him, why he was in the orphanage. Because he had accidentally shot out his brother's eye with a slingshot. Benjy is an Ojibwa, an Anishinabe. I pray he is in this world today. If he is not in this world today, he is in the Spirit World today. Han, Sic' Esi! Benjy and I said to each other, because we knew, at age five - he an Ojibwa, an Anishinabe, stolen, ripped, torn, wrenched, from his family and put in a prison for children; me, adopted out and being raised and abused by Europeans - we knew and said that he was put in an Orphanage because he shot his brother's eye out by accident with slingshot BECAUSE HE WAS AN INDIAN. We, wise ones walking to school at age five, said to each other, "If a white boy shot his brother's eye out by accident with a slingshot, they wouldn't have taken him away and put him in an Orphanage." I had never thought about Benji as an Indian. He was my friend. That was not my virtue. Where I grew up, there were only whites and Indians, and we didn't make distinctions. I have gone back many times and thought about all the people I grew up with from kindergarten through high school that I didn't think about as Indians, that no one thought about as Indians, that no one spoke about as Indians. They were kids, funny kids, guys, band guys, whatever. There were so many Indians I grew up with, adopted, not adopted, Rez, "Urban" - quite a stretch in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan - and I only lately began to realize it. I remember going to the reservations with my adoptive mother and her friends doing "charity". I remember going into a house on a rez with my adoptive mother in the winter. It was freezing outside and the same temperature inside. No windows, no heat. Having been "raised" to be polite, I waited until we were in the car and the doors were closed and the windows were rolled up and the car was started. Then I asked, "Why didn't they have windows? Why didn't they have heat? It's so cold!" I guess she said something to the effect that they were poor. She didn't buy them windows or a furnace and fuel. That's what Indians do. But at LEAST I don't remember her saying they were drunk or lazy and it was their fault.
However, I do remember another winter day, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, before global warming, high snow, below zero. Riding in a car with my adoptive mother. We saw, I am crying again and again and again as I write this, this time in shame, we saw an Indian man, unconscious in a snowbank beside the street. My instinct - a human instinct - the ONLY instinct I can understand, like getting windows and a furnace and fuel for that freezing family - was to stop the car, try to help him, and call an ambulance. I said something to her, to my adoptive mother. There's a man in the snow! He's sick or hurt! I assumed that she would stop and help him and call an ambulance. She kept driving. I was scared for him, confused by her. But there's a man! In the snow! He's sick or hurt! And she kept driving. I was under nine years old at the time because we still lived in Sault Ste. Marie, and we moved from there when I was nine. I couldn't - I didn't think - do anything myself. She was abusive. One did not disobey her. One did not do things without her permission. But I did WRONG that day. I did WRONG. My relative, wherever you are, please hear me when I say that I KNOW now, as I KNEW THEN, that I was doing WRONG by letting her keep driving. I KNEW BETTER. I KNEW YOU NEEDED HELP. I did WRONG AND I FEEL SHAME TO THIS DAY. Our people do not apologize. We do not ask for forgiveness. We just do not do it again. So, my relative, maybe you know, if you were in the Spirit World when this happened, if you are there now, that I did not do that again. I was in the back seat of the car, my adoptive father was driving, my adoptive mother in the front seat, and we passed an accident: a man and his motorcycle down on the highway, he was unconcious, it was the middle of the night, dark. I waited for my father to slow down and stop. He was not slowing down. I knew I would pay for this but I dared to tell my adoptive parents to do something. "Stop!!!! Stop!!!!" Nothing. So I opened the car door in the back seat. Yelling yelling: what do you think you're doing???? Shut that door!!!! Anger, anger. I put my foot out the door. A highway, 55 mies per hour. My father, confused, is starting to slow the car down. He is hurt, he needs help!!! Stop the car!!!! Back and forth the yelling, I keep the door open slowly moving to jump out of the car, my adoptive father slowly slowing the car down and I jumped out. I ran back to the man, and did the things I learned about accidents, unconciousness, don't move them, check for a pulse...someone else called an ambulance. I kept people away from the man. My adoptive father kept traffic away from the middle of the road where he and his motorcyle lay. I did this, my relative, because we do not apologize - I had not had that teaching yet, but my Ancestors were teaching me - we do not do it again.
So, many years later, I am on the Red Road. Wopila!!!! I can't find my "blood tribes" because the whites have gone to extremes to hide the fact that there were any Indians in my ancestry, much less half of my Ancestors, or my birth mother's ancestry. "English. Protestant." That is how both of my blood parents were described to my adopive parents. I could laugh at what a joke that is. How far from the truth. The lies, the trail of broken laws: the birth certificate without the name of my grandfather, illegal in Canada at least at the time, because he was a FULL BLOOD and I AM PROUD, the illegal adoption across the border from Canada, no record, no papers. The ancestry of my blood father, for whom I was not searching, came back in the papers, mixed blood, like me - I AM PROUD AGAIN - MORE INDIAN BLOOD IN ME. I am still trying to find "my blood tribes" so I can "get enrolled" and be an Indian in the eyes of the illegal occupation government of Turtle Island. I don't need to know. By this time I have a tribe, a people, a tiospaye, extended family. But one of them wants to know, because of her experiences as an Indian woman. So I have been spending many years researching my genealogy to find two things: my mixed blood father whom I have been told officially is a mixed blood, and who, in the photo I receive, has BLACK hair, BLACK eyes, DARK skin, is "officially" Scottish. His mother and father list themselves, on two censuses, as "Scottish". And with his mother and father, my grandmother and grandfather, the trail of lies goes cold. They disappear. They have no ancestors. She has come from Canada to the United States, "Scottish" nationality, "English" language. He has come from either Indiana - where Natives were not forced on trails of tears and broken treaties forced marches onto concentration camps in the West, because they are intermarried and they OWN property and stores and their white relatives OWN property and stores. But there is no record of someone of his name and birthdate being born in Indiana. Or even of his name. Or his birthdate. Or, he has come from Wisconsin. Again, if he was born in Wisconsin, there is no record. I am still looking. But the second thing I found is that they don't list tribes in any records, they list "nationality" and if you are an "Indian" they list you as an "Indian". But, I have started this search and I will continue. I am learning much along the way, so it is a good journey.
My name. Yesterday, after years of the rage, and the pain only people who have been hated, and killed for 514 years, physical genocide, cultural genocide, spiritual genocide, emotional genocide, intellectual genocide can feel, I was at a meeting, and a camp, where we are fighting an important battle, over Creator's most Wakan place, that we need to use for prayer and Ceremonies, that wasicus are destroying and desecrating - as always, for gold: the most Wakan Mountain in the Black Mountains, Wakan Mato Paha, Sacred Bear Butte, in the Wakan He Sapa. As I listened in the sun I cried with my Elders, with the Chiefs, who spoke powerful words of truth, tears of RAGE, tears of PAIN, tears of MOURNING, tears of GRIEF, tears of wanting to fight, Hoka he!!!! It is a good day to die!!!! Hoka he!!!! It is a good day for you to die. My three fires, spirit, mind, heart, were being expressed by my Elders by the Chiefs: they stole these lands, our cultures, our ways, our children, they killed 95% of us, now they want to destroy this most Sacred Mountain and today we say ENOUGH. Today we begin to fight back. Today is a battle in a war over this land, Creator's land, loaned to us by Creator, and by our childreen, as Crazy Horse says. You cannot sell land, as Crazy Horse says. So you cannot buy it. Or own it, but you can steal it, and misuse it and destroy it. Like you destroy a people. OR TRY TO DESTROY A PEOPLE.
So, I sat, a half BLOOD INDIAN RED RED, crying in grief and mourning, making my face RED, crying in RAGE, making my face RED, sitting long in the heat and sun, making my face RED, I gave myself a new name. Last night it was longer. Last night is was ENRAGED, MOURNING RED WOMAN. Then, I shortened it so it would stand for more. RED WOMAN. WINYAN LUTA. That is my newest name. It is male language to say hoka he! I will borrow it, for with this battle in this war, we are the attackers, after 514 years and tears, and trying to defend our selves, our cultures, our children, our lands, WE are beginning the battles, WE are rekindling our lives, our cultures, our traditions, our languages, our ways, our children, this WAR. We will win the ongoing "Indian Wars". ENOUGH. HOKE HE!!!!
Mitakuye Oyasin, Winyan Luta, RED WOMAN
posted by CedarElkWoman at
7:28 AM
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