17
Finding One Another

LATASHA MORRISON began Be the Bridge in 2016 as a space for the church to foster conversations on racial reconciliation and justice. When our church in Atlanta announced that it was participating, I joined right away, because I was hungry for conversations on intersectionality and truth-telling, especially within a church context. Over the next few months, a group of about twelve of us met to share our stories, led by our group leader, Zach, who facilitated the conversations. The people of color in the room shared their experiences in America, and I shared my experiences as an Indigenous woman. We became close, not because we have a lot in common but because we gathered for the purpose of listening, of making room, of testing the status quo given to us for so long both in America and in the church.

Intersectionality as an idea was discussed as early as 1892 by Anna J. Cooper, a Black liberation activist and educator. The term intersectionality was coined more recently, in 1989, by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a pioneer of critical race theory, who gave a TED talk on the subject.1 She defines intersectionality as “the complex, cumulative manner in which the effects of different forms of discrimination combine, overlap, or intersect.” Crenshaw’s work focuses on the intersection of race and gender, and on how race and gender overlap to disenfranchise Black women. She says, “We have to be willing to bear witness to the often painful realities that we would just rather not confront.” What I see in these expressions is the invisibility of Indigenous women in America as well. I learned in my Be the Bridge group and from the Black women in my life that Black and Indigenous women must work together, must partner together, and must actively join with other women of color to lead the way forward in America. Intersectionality brings us together, because Black women, Indigenous women, and other women of color across the spectrum are ignored, mistreated, and called angry for speaking up about basic human rights. Bridging this gap means having more conversations on intersectionality within our churches and communities. It means men stepping down and women stepping up to tell our stories. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson says, “For me, engagement with the theories and practices of co-resistors is powerful because it often illuminates colonial thinking in myself, and demonstrates different possibilities in analysis and action in response to similar systems of oppression and dispossession.”2

At the 2019 Oscars, in his acceptance speech for the award won by his film BlacKkKlansman, Spike Lee called on Black and Indigenous peoples to honor our ancestors by working together, by rising together in America in 2019 and 2020 as the presidential election draws closer. It was a beautiful message of solidarity that we all need to hold on to as we do this difficult work. I am reminded of my friend Darryl, a Black pastor in Atlanta, and of my good friend Amena, an incredible poet and writer. We meet for coffee every now and then to discuss the ways in which our identities overlap and differ, and these conversations bring us solidarity. They help us remain willing to do the work necessary to make justice happen, especially within the church.

Intersectionality also stretches into interspiritual dialogue, spaces in which, as an Indigenous woman and a Christian, I listen to my Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist, Hindu, atheist, and Jewish friends. Just as the religious rights of Indigenous peoples have been taken away in America throughout history, the religious rights of many minority cultures and religions have been taken, and we need to have these conversations about revival, renewal, and, in some cases, reparations. In the era of Trump, when hate crimes are high, we need to listen to these voices. In 2017, hate crimes rose 17 percent, and a large number of those hate crimes were anti-Semitic.3 My friend Arjun Singh Sethi, a Sikh lawyer, activist, and educator, released a book in 2018 called American Hate: Survivors Speak Out in which he chronicles stories of hate crimes across many races, religions, and ethnic groups. He says in the introduction, “The rhetoric and policies of this administration, and the hate and bigotry of everyday people, have terrorized communities in ways that we still cannot fully comprehend.”4 I met Arjun in 2018 at an event in Atlanta while he was on his book tour. This is what the work of solidarity is: at an event to celebrate his own book, Arjun invited people that he knew and trusted to share about their work so that together, we might all fight against hate. It is essential that in America today, we stand with one another, we practice solidarity with one another, and we work to dismantle any institutions that have oppressed people throughout time, even if it is, indeed, the church.

In America, Black people, Indigenous people, other people of color, and religious minorities have run out of time. There is no more time to tiptoe around conversations, no more time for white people to say, “This isn’t who we are!” There is no more time for Indigenous bodies, women’s bodies, two-spirit Indigenous bodies, trans bodies, Sikh bodies, Asian bodies, disabled bodies, or Black bodies to be attacked and for everyone to misunderstand why it happened. This is the America we know and have always known. History tells the story, and if we can’t gather in a living room to tell the truth and listen to one another, we will never gather in the streets, in our churches, or in our political spaces to ask for change. It must begin with our experiences, with our words, and with our bodies, and lead us to a better way forward.

In the summer of 2018, Travis and I celebrated our ten-year anniversary. We’d had an intense season over the last few years; he’d been in a PhD program in political science at a nearby university, and I’d just published my first book, Glory Happening: Finding the Divine in Everyday Places. We were tired, a little traumatized, and working to create space for each other and fruitful conversations as we dreamed of the future. In the midst of that, we were remembering and celebrating the ten years we’d been married. So we decided to get tattoos, and as the day approached, I struggled with what to get.

We booked an appointment for our tattoos, celebrating who we were when we were first married and who we are today, people who are the same but different, people who have grown but are still growing.

I was scrolling through Instagram posts when I came across a picture by Chief Lady Bird, a Chippewa/Potawatomi artist in Canada. The artwork on the post represented the seven generations, seven flowers reaching up toward a bright yellow sun, back to our ancestors, back to the beginning before colonization took so much from us. Our Seven Fires/Seven Generations story tells the journey of our people, our struggles and triumphs, our interactions with whiteness, and our hope that future generations will choose to remember what it means to be Potawatomi so that our culture will not only survive but thrive. The seventh generation is the time when the young people will return to our ways, seeking to know what it means to be Potawatomi, to be Anishinaabe. This story means so much to my journey, and it keeps me tethered to who I am so that I can remind my two children who they are as we journey together.

So, with permission, I got the image designed by Chief Lady Bird on my left inside forearm. The process was akin to giving birth to my babies without pain medication to numb labor; I practiced deep breaths every time the needle dug into my skin, a process that I knew would bring to life something new on my body and inside my soul.

In the following weeks as I tended to this fresh wound on my skin, I thought about what it means to heal. I thought about the Indigenous friends I’ve been finding along the way in this journey. I thought about the incredible work they do, people like Chief Lady Bird. I thought about how our individual healing is tied to our universal healing and how breaking the bonds of colonization is an essential part of that. As the flakes of skin peeled off to reveal the finished image, the realization cemented itself in me: I belong to my ancestors, I belong to those who came before, to a vision of all of us that keeps us tethered. The work that we must do together, whether we all get tattoos or not, is to help each other see that vision of wholeness beyond colonization and hate. We must carry one another’s stories with grace and honor, and lead each other toward a kind of healing that heals whole systems, not just people. If we have learned anything from the church, and if we have learned anything from injustice, we know that it is individuals who act as a part of systems that continue oppressive cycles, yet those same individuals can band together to create change. When we call out racism, yes, we are calling out our own hearts, but we are calling out the systems that have created that hate, and the decisions we make as a whole within our institutions that propel us toward hate and ignorance instead of toward truth-telling wholeness. But if we choose to really see one another, we will work toward healing, and it will look like the seventh generation finding their way home again.

I started therapy for the first time in my life when I was thirty years old. I found a trauma counselor who deals with intersectionality, and as a mixed Indigenous woman, I was hopeful that she’d help me work through some difficult parts of my life. What I wasn’t expecting was how she helps me tell my own story. She is helping me see that transformation is part of healing, and that healing cannot happen unless we honestly ask how we came to be. We cannot heal until we discover the wound, and naming our trauma is part of that process. Finally, I began to understand that trauma is real and has consequences, including the trauma and consequences of years of cultural genocide and forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples that I carry inside my bones. Giving a name and a face to every real trauma in my life allows me to ask what it means to heal from it. And beyond that, I discover that in decolonizing, I am healing every single day.

This is where community comes in. This is where the hard work of brushing up against the stories of others comes to meet us, comes to ask us difficult questions of ourselves. If we hold grace for our own story, we can reach across dividing lines to say, “I see your story. I see your experiences. They matter. Let’s decolonize together.”

The story of my dear friend, an immigrant from Ethiopia, matters. The story of every missing and murdered Indigenous woman matters. The stories of resilience and hope among people of color and disabled people matters, just as the stories of LGBTQ+ youth who have been turned out of their homes and the church matter.

With so many conversations about white supremacy, hate, racism, and toxic patriarchy, we aren’t going to get anywhere unless we consider narrative. We’ve got to honestly talk about the story America is telling itself and the truth of where we came from: we were built by settler colonialism, by one group (and later many more groups) pushing out another group to create a culture that identifies itself by toxic empire. If we start there, with that recognition, we will move forward, just as I moved forward in my own process of healing. When we name our trauma, when we name the parts of our story that have been in hiding, we come closer to naming truth.

And when we name truth, we call our fear into the light. We face it.

“I think of a good conversation as an adventure,” Krista Tippett said.5 If conversation is an adventure, so too are the stories we tell within those conversations, the glimpses we get into the lives and experiences of others. Maybe we are all just barely getting started. Maybe we are all transforming, whether we know it or not, and we are simply to hold on and wait to see what’s on the other side.

In the Ojibwe creation story, when Original Man and the wolf walk the earth, they spend time with one another and with all of creation. They tell each other stories. They build community, and when the time comes, Great Spirit separates them so they can go on their own journeys, always repeating those stories they shared together.

What we learn from Original Man and the wolf is that our time is limited. While we are here, we invest in our own stories, our own healing, and in the stories and healing of others.

We walk the earth and learn what it means to be communal.

We honor the work of transformation, recognizing that we can’t possibly truly transform unless we are actively decolonizing along the way.