19
Returning

Everything comes from something that came before, which was once nothing.

Tommy Orange, There, There

ABOUT TWO YEARS after my first trip to Sweetwater Creek, we returned to the water. I stood watching the water rush over the rocks, and I was ushered back again, asked to look and remember. We spend our whole lives asking ourselves who we are and what we should be about, but what if those things are the forces that find us, some sort of sacred movement on the wind that does not let us go but tarries here and there, letting us know of its presence?

For over twenty years of my life I spent little time knowing or asking to be known by this Mystery, this sacred space of who I am and will always be. Now that I’ve found her, I cannot let her go. She is my essence, the voice that calls me back to myself, to the land, to the people, to Kche Mnedo, the one who leads.

It is no coincidence that Sweetwater Creek on Muscogee Creek and Cherokee land found me, that an evening spent walking a short trail led me straight to myself. So I walk it, and on this visit, I ask the waters what they speak of, what they’ve seen in their long and wise years.

And I ask the cicadas in the trees who their ancestors used to sing to, ask those trees what kind of creatures have climbed them and napped in their shade—and the reality is that it was all sorts: the Cherokee people and the ants, enslaved people and plantation owners, mill workers, squirrels, soldiers, tired fathers, mothers, and children.

The water told me to keep my eyes open. We are told to pay attention.

What does it look like to return, again and again, to the voice of Mystery in our lives? Perhaps it looks like building relationships with people who are not like us. Perhaps it requires following people on social media who come from different racial or religious backgrounds. Perhaps it means letting the earth speak and taking the time to listen. It always means asking how we can become people who love better.

One of my favorite church seasons is Lent, the forty days before Easter in which we remember that we come from dust, and we will return to it. The Potawatomi word for earth is aki, and it speaks to this same idea—we are made from earth, from dirt. This is a universal belief and does not just belong to the church, and yet, growing up I had never heard of Lent. As an adult, I’ve learned that it’s a time in which the church is brought into a space of wilderness to ask who we are and where we are headed. When you live on the outside, you know the liminal spaces, the in-between spaces, the thin places where you feel the physical and spiritual intertwine. I believe that’s what Jesus’s life was marked by. As Richard Rohr writes, “People who empty themselves in the wilderness always meet a God who is greater than they would have dared to hope.”1

It is what Indigenous peoples find when we fast, pray, listen, engage.

It is what people who long for sacredness find when they take the time to listen.

So, for Lent in 2019, I decided to spend more intentional time outside.

I went into our backyard and touched the trees.

I gazed out windows more often.

I sat still because I knew I should.

I remembered in that space my dust-to-dustness once again, and there I remembered what it means to pray.

We pray because the creatures of the earth teach us how to pray.

We lament because creation laments, and we must work to fix what we’ve broken.

We repair because God is always repairing.

And we decolonize because it is always a return to the kindness of Mystery.

It is also a return to asking hard questions, to making room for the work of forging a new path. Rachel Held Evans wrote, “The prophet’s voice is routinely dismissed as too critical, but she always challenges from a place of deep love for her community.”2 She is commenting on that important piece of stepping into the church or whatever community we are part of. When we step into it, we make room for change, and the wisdom to bring that change is often born in the wilderness, in darkness, even in grief. We bring up hard things like history, and we challenge ourselves to make things better for future generations. It must be the only way.

The earth leads us. The water leads us. And to bear fruit for a better world, we must lead one another.

Living in Atlanta as a Potawatomi woman has been challenging. Here, history of who originally inhabited this land, the Muscogee Creek and Cherokee peoples, is covered up by other history. It’s covered up by Confederate history, and it seems that in many spaces, it’s difficult for people to draw connections from the forced removal of the Indigenous peoples of this land to the mistreatment and enslavement of African peoples when they were taken from their homes and forced here on ships. Atlanta is a transient city, with people moving in and out every few years for work and school. One day, I found a group of Indigenous people who gather in my city. As we got to know each other, I knew what it felt like to be home, even though I’m miles from my own tribe, hometown, and family.

Like on the day I returned to Sweetwater Creek, I returned to parts of myself that had long been ignored. My friend Meredith and I would get coffee every now and then, and I noticed the magic that happens between two Indigenous women who share space together. We laughed. We talked about traumatic things that only Indigenous women can explain with tears in our eyes. We celebrated the work of Indigenous peoples all around us. And then we laughed more. You see, when Indigenous peoples come together to share our stories and our cultures, we are joining our ancestors throughout time who banded together to fight assimilation, oppression, and genocide, who laughed together because it was medicine. We remember them when we look in each other’s eyes.

One day the group of us met at a coffee shop, and Melanie and Meredith brought their beading. My oldest son, Eliot, was with me. He watched these two women work, one on earrings, another on designs for a skirt. He watched in awe, connecting dots in his own head. Melanie handed him some beads, thread, and a needle, and he began his own little project. I watched in awe as my son began to heal some of my own scars, as he began to renew something in me. He has a chance to know what it means to be Potawatomi far more than I ever did, and I plan to give him that chance. My youngest son, Isaiah, has been tasked by his father to find things that are wrong and make them right, and I can see those thoughts taking shape in him, even as a five-year-old. I can see him thinking on a communal level, wondering at things like the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., who was assassinated, who was targeted by a government and a white church that did not want freedom from white supremacy. My son is wondering about the Thanksgiving story we tell, about what it means to speak the truth when it matters.

Both my sons will learn these stories and know why they are important because they have been to places like Sweetwater Creek, and they know the power that water holds. They know the power that Indigenous women hold, and they know the power that they themselves hold in one day being men who will carry on a legacy of fighting injustice and oppression, a legacy that always calls them home.

The story of the prodigal son, one I’ve mentioned a few times in this book, is told again and again in the church as a triumphant story about a son who went astray, who degraded his father’s name, returning home to his father’s open arms and a celebration in his honor. Many Christians like to use this story to talk about those who have wandered away from the church, the ones they believe are on the outside and trying to get right with God again, the ones God welcomes back with open arms.

I don’t know what it means to waste a life, if that is even possible, and I don’t know that we can step so far outside the love of Mystery that we are not seen and known even in that distance. But there is always something important about returning. There is always something about the way a community welcomes us home. Young people who are forced out of their communities by traumatic events must return home and learn what it means to be part of their people again. I think about young Black men who are wrongfully imprisoned in the United States, who return home to reintegrate into society. I think about LGBTQ+ youth who are kicked out of their homes and communities and must find new homes with strangers who welcome them in. I think of Indigenous people separated from their communities through boarding schools, who must learn what it means to know themselves when their stories are riddled with trauma.

The work of returning is communal work, and we must all lead one another. When I sit down to write and tell my own story, I can feel the fire burn brighter again, and the work of returning leads me deeper into who I am and who God is.

I come again to the reality of myself, of my name, of my people. I remember, I tell the stories, I let my experiences flow from my fingers into a machine that cannot possibly process them but can record them for the future, for my children, for those who will never know my life experiences. I let the stories flow from my mouth so that they are embedded into the bodies of my own children, who will carry them forward. The fire must be lit and the fire must be re-lit, for all of us to remember, to know, to find the way home.

So many of us have forgotten the way home, the way back to ourselves, so we must support one another on the journey; it may begin with setting healthy habits for ourselves, but it will lead to healing all around us. Buy books from women of color. Support Indigenous artists. Give your money to organizations that are working to break down toxic systems like patriarchy, sexism, ableism, and homophobia. The only way we can make our way home is to support one another on the journey.

When I arrived to speak at the 2018 Evolving Faith conference, Sarah Bessey and Rachel Held Evans took the time to tell me that they appreciated my presence, and they gave me a card and a gift so I would know that they saw the weight I carry when I speak in predominantly white, non-Native spaces. They were letting me know that on my journey toward finding myself and finding my way home, they would stand beside me in the questions and the difficulties, and they would see that the work Indigenous people, Black people, and other people of color do costs us a lot. It costs us a lot of energy, because the work of returning to ourselves, the work of fighting against systems of whiteness, is traumatic. If we are free to be ourselves in those traumatic spaces, to have people we can trust, who will truly hold space with us, we will all learn to find our way home, wherever home may be. Sometimes home is land, like it is land to Indigenous peoples. But home is also a space inside ourselves and with others that we can return to, a space we can find that we’ve never been to before, where we are accepted as we are with all the implications that has for the church, for America, for our systems, for the world. If we can return to the essence of our identities, we can teach the children around us to know who they are from a young age, and perhaps one day, when they are older, when they create the future, they will work together to change things and to heal systems we had no idea how to heal.