Waking Up a Buried History that Gave Way to an Epidemic

I recently read an opinion piece by Henry Louis Gates Jr., someone I have long admired. He addressed the divisive attempts to erase Black history. This is clearly an important topic that racism, politics and privilege have been able to suppress for many years, and anything that works to reject the current dark environment mired in hate working to erase critical race theory and the words of so many important people in our history is a good thing in my book.

It also got me thinking about the plight of women and how many analogies can be drawn and how the governing powers and the all-mighty, starchy literary canon have managed to keep marginalized women and their words buried under the concrete pillar of racism and behind the gates of convention for generations, their voices drowned out by a loud rhetoric whose buzz has numbed a population.

The gatekeepers of language have for so long buried the words of women in the name of the literary canon, that bastion of purported truth that deems which books should be read by students. From generation to generation, this canon dominated by white male writers has been handed down, ignoring those unconventional voices like Stevie Smith, Elizabeth Bowen, Rebecca West, writers of color and those writers who explored subjects outside of the post-Victorian playbook like LGBTQ. Fortunately, I was introduced to these wonderful authors when I took graduate courses in intermodernism, a term coined by Prof. Kristin Bluemel. It opened my eyes and ears!

In the Native American communities, those racist trenches are even deeper for the women living there.

From addictions and domestic abuse to suicide and mental illness, insufficient reparations and holes in the justice system have taken their toll on Native American communities for generations despite efforts from others in the community to emphasize that you are not what happened to you. The pull from the past has proven to be much stronger in far too many cases.

Today, Native women are murdered at a rate 10 times the average, and it is estimated that four out of five have experienced violence in their lifetimes. Many of these women and girls are lured into human trafficking. This crisis of Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) has deep roots in colonization and genocide and can be attributed to the lack of legal protections as a result of the systematic erosion of tribal sovereignty stretching back more than 500 years.

There are many people who still try to suppress this truth, or even rip the pages out of history books—literally in some cases, when you consider how books are being taken off shelves. They express racist and homophobic beliefs, would like you to believe there was "nothing here," because if there was “nothing here," then the blood on the hands of their ancestors would not exist, and they could absolve themselves of their complicity.

By erasing Natives from their history, they seek to render them invisible, and they smother their voices as well as the hearts and voices of the children. For the Native American communities, the tears never stopped falling. And those tears have soaked through generations of families.

MMIWG is a movement that advocates for the end of violence against Native women. It also seeks to draw attention to the high rates of disappearances and murders of Native people, particularly women and girls.

It’s everyone’s responsibility to support their efforts.

Yesterday’s children and their legacy, today’s children and the children of the future deserve better. They deserve a choice. They deserve a voice and a place in our history books.

For more information, visit www.niwrc.org/resources/pocket-guide/when-loved-one-goes-missing-understanding-and-responding-crisis-missing-and

--Heather Mistretta

Yes, We…They Can

“You’ve always had the power my dear, you just had to learn it for yourself.” – L. Frank Baum’s character, Glinda the Good Witch from the Wizard of Oz

By Heather Mistretta

As we near the end of our mentoring this summer, I feel gratitude and hope and honestly, I can say, a sigh of relief.  Really. Some of the lives of the kids we mentor are teetering on the precipice between success and doom. They’re dealing with things that no child should ever have to face. Some of them are evident; others are masked by silence, despondence or an arrogant or misguided skillset of survival skills.

I can’t wait to reconnect with these kids on another program, hopefully this fall. But right now, once again for another year, I’m feeling humbled by the fact that the youth we mentored weren’t the only ones who learned something. If only they all realized their power and value and the joy they bring those lucky enough to be around them. Each day at least one of them amazed me with their words or expression through art.

It’s a steep hill some of these kids climb, but I’m hopeful they have the courage, tools and guides to get them to the top or wherever along the hill they choose to reach. There are loose stones along the way, and the climate can get pretty rough at times, but I’m left feeling that many of them will be okay. To those who are obviously suffering and dealing with what might seem like insurmountable challenges, please know there is always someone out there to help you, including me.

I don’t know violence in the streets and abuse at the hands of those who brought them into this life, but I do know what abuse from someone who says they love you feels like. It’s that bruise that’s sometimes invisible but still hurts when you put pressure or a light on it.

I often told the kids that I would only give them something I knew they were capable of doing, and I meant it. I also told them that I would never make them do anything that threatened their self-worth or safety…and I hoped they would do the same for themselves.

Because I needed to honor my promise, I encountered one kid who challenged me on that. He was an awesome smart kid. I never made him do any assignment he didn’t want to do, but I also told him that when he was in college or had a job and a professor or boss who asked him to do something, telling him that it was voluntary, you do that assignment every single time. He totally got it.

You never want to be that someone who does the bare minimum.

So, as I sit here at my computer remembering many moments of mentoring, I’m left feeling like the indomitable Dolores Huerta. “Yes, we can.”

Perfection is Unattainable: A mantra for our children

By Heather Mistretta

Best, most, more and other superlatives run rampant across the internet. Every day we are walloped with swaths of messages of how and why we need to follow certain paths while screams of self-adulation and comparisons dance in our heads and all around us.

We’re told that if we just follow five easy steps or try a new product that can be bought with just one click, that we will be more beautiful, smarter and more successful. We’re even given examples of people who are at the pinnacle of all these…or at least that’s what we’re told or inferred through images…ad nauseum.

For adults, most of us are able to disseminate this information and weed out what we don’t want or see as unrealistic. We can ignore it and resist the urge to internalize it. But for children, who are still growing and easily influenced, battling waves of hormonal changes and finding their places in this chaotic and multifaceted world filled with a rash of opportunities and pitfalls, that deciphering may not be as easy.

Silent abuse

The faces of violence against women and men regularly hit the air waves and pages of print media—faces that shock, scare, sympathize and disgust us. This transparency is of course important as many cultures suppressed this awareness (and some still do) for many years, and instead subjected the victim to ridicule, shame and additional violence.

This correlation between the abused and the abuser is evident, and it is this abuse WAGE is hoping to prevent or end through education, mentoring, fundraising and working with like-minded organizations.

However, one perpetrator of violence and abuse that is also insidious but can be much more silent, one that may be overlooked because of its indirect perpetrators is suicide.

Teenage suicide has been climbing for several years. The CDC reports that from 1999 to 2017, the suicide rate among boys ages 10 to 14 grew from 1.9 suicides per 100,000 people to 3.3. Among girls, suicides roughly tripled from 0.5 per 100,000 to 1.7.

As I hear stories of seemingly normal and happy teens taking their lives, I am left feeling helpless and aching for them and their loved ones, but I am also haunted by this prospect as I watch my 18-year-old son grow and learn how to cope with new challenges and make difficult decisions.

Competition is fierce today, and not just in the classroom. Teens are not only expected to excel in school and have their futures meticulously mapped out, but outside the classroom they are expected to be almost perfect in looks, personality and activity.

This unrealistic expectation is damaging our children. Their self-esteems are being battered, riddled with holes as they attempt to achieve the unreachable, falling short every time. They are left feeling inferior and unfulfilled.

As we try to help guide our children into bright futures, we need to erase perfection from their goal setting and instead encourage them to set smaller, more manageable goals that are achievable. This is contentment, not complacency.

By no means am I suggesting that they should not be encouraged to dream and perhaps set goals that seem lofty at the time, but the idea that perfection is attainable needs to disappear. We need to empower our children into thinking they are already strong enough and beautiful beings now and that the goal should be to enhance all the wonderful things they already are.

I have shared this quote before, but I like it and think it reflects how we need to emphasize to our children that they are beautiful and need to embrace their minds, bodies and souls.

“Everything you desire, crave, need and want is within us. You are your own soulmate and the time you spend in your own solitude, the beauty you find in your laugh lines, the time you take to not smooth those curves, but to love them, is maybe not what you were looking for but something you are blessed to have found.”—Seema Kapoor

Also, here is an article on how we can help those contemplating or facing suicide: https://afsp.org/advice-talking-someone-suicidal-thoughtsfrom-someone-whos-suicidal-thoughts/