It's not your fault

My reconnection journey kind of happened all at once and quickly. I found my very favorite podcast, All My Relations, hosted by Matika Wilbur & Adrienne Keene (and sometimes Dr. Dr. Desi.) Matika is a Swinomish & Tulalip woman (local to Seattle!) who was raised in her culture and Adrienne is a reconnecting Cherokee. Dr. Dr. Desi has two Doctorates and is Cheyanne & Chicana living in Aotearoa. I binged their episodes. It was all I listened to in the car for weeks and I spend a lot of time in the car. Highly recommend.

Around the same time I found a Cherokee genealogy group which led to a Cherokee culture Facebook group. From there I found countless other groups, including one including my distant Cherokee cousins! All My Relations was great for making me think about issues facing Natives today, the culture group has been invaluable for learning Cherokee culture, customs, language and history. (Have you ever tried to Google Cherokee?!? 99% percent of what you find is pan-Indian, a crazy mix of Native cultures all attributed to Cherokee. For the first time in my life I was learning true Cherokee culture from actual Cherokees.

This ikshe pops up when you google Cherokee Indians. Don't get me started on Pinterest.

I lurked in the Cherokee groups for a long time. My tendency, in new spaces, is to observe. Although the culture group was clearly full of people who were still learning, I felt like maybe they were still more connected to our culture than I am and wanted to be culturally sensitive.

Then one day, at the end of an All My Relations episode, Matika said something that changed my life:

It's not your fault.

I can't even describe how I felt hearing those words. I was driving and I think my body actually shuddered. And then I cried.

On one episode Matika pointed out that due to colonization it is not our fault that we don’t know our culture. They did everything they could to erase us: the Trail of Tears, the Dawes Act & allotment, Indian boarding schools, the 60s scoop…it is not our fault.

 My heart felt like she was giving me permission to feel like maybe it was possible to reconnect. I felt like her words helped release some of the shame (sadness?) I felt about not knowing our culture.