[Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] tuan lakota oyate in the sichang lakota it's very important for me to greet all of you in my lakota nakota language because it's not only a connection to my cultural identity my family and who i am today but it's a connection to my ancestors given everything that our ancestors went through as indigenous people it's a revolutionary act to speak the same language that they spoke those very words were attempted to be eradicated through assimilation so it's a great honor of mine to be able to talk about the topic of intergenerational trauma and healing when i was in my 20s i began to experience a lot of really really difficult emotional and psychological things i was confused i was having trauma symptoms i felt alone i was away from everyone i was living in boston at the time and i remember one night i had a dream and in this dream it brought great insight into the path that i would forge ahead personally and professionally in this dream i was at the bottom of the ocean floor i was looking around me and it was literally literally at the bottom of the ocean and next to me there were 13 other people i didn't know those people but we both we we all had an understanding that we were there for a reason in front of us stood this very tall beautiful slender woman who had long long dark hair and it went all the way down to her feet and her hair would kind of move around and she had a long dark blue dress on and her her dress flowed and she said to us not with her words but through her mind to our hearts and minds we understood she said this water that we we are in right now it is within your bodies and it is within the earth body it is very sacred in this water with the energy that each human has inside of them with set intention you can create different things with this water and she started to use her hands and she started to make beautiful formations and we were watching her create all of these things and then she stepped forward closer to us and she started to create a circle and in that circle a tornado formed and it was a little tornado and we were watching her hold this and she took that tornado and she threw it down on the ocean floor and it cracked a huge divide and when that happened a huge tsunami wave came up and in that wave it was as far as you could see on both sides and as high as the sky and she froze the wave and she walked over to me and she said do you see this wave and and i told her i said i'm terrified i don't know where my family is i don't know where anyone is i'm terrified i'm going to die and they're going to die and she told me this huge fear this wave that you feel is what your people feel every single day because of the effects of everything that you have been through it's grief it's shame it's addiction it's death it's genocide it's all of those things that you feel and i said to her when this wave comes down i'm going to die i'm not going to survive and she reminded me that those things are not true you don't want to get swept away with a wave you have more tools and resiliency through your lineage than you can even imagine and she handed me this stick almost like gandalf and lord of the rings it became very very majestical but it was it was truly very powerful there was something in that she gave it to me and she said you stand strong you stand strong because when this wave comes down if you believe and you hold on to that your ancestors will be with you and the wave came down and i was okay when i woke up i had profound clarity about the work i wanted to do and the work i knew i needed to do personally to become a better person a better woman and eventually one day a better mother as we talk about these experiences of trauma that i'm mentioning we have to kind of break it down a little bit first so the first one is what you hear the most which is psychological trauma which is referred to usually in the individual aspects of who we are so things like a single event or multiple events can happen in your life that can alter your brain chemistry it can alter your biology and really interfere with your overall functioning we move on to more of a collective trauma which is this intergenerational trauma intergenerational trauma simply is the passing on of trauma from one generation to the next this can happen biologically we know now through epigenetics that the things that happened to people that came before us are literally alive and can be activated within our dna because of markers and imprints that happened to them generations ago so that's biologically but we also know behaviorally that we can pick up things in our environment and we can emulate them because it's what we learned and it's what we knew so that's how the intergenerational transmission can happen more specifically for native people um we know no historical trauma which is an emotional and psychological wounding because of massive group trauma we know that for um here in in what we call turtle island or the us it's been centuries upon centuries of genocide and various things that have brought us to conditions today that is the most frequent question i hear from non-native people who don't know about the true history and know about how it affects their families still today they ask the question why do so many native people struggle with alcoholism why are the suicide rates so high why is there poverty we can't even broach that question without first understanding the history and how um it's not a it's not a blaming game it's not to say you know that we we're owed these things it's simply about education and connecting so that we can move forward so the most common example there's something called the boarding school era that started in the early 1800s this is a picture of carlisle boarding school and what happened generation after generation is that native children through government law were taken from their families kidnapped and placed in these schools so that they could be assimilated and become the best white christianized version that they could be so in this process we know through lots of documentation and stories from survivors and family members of those survivors that sexual abuse physical abuse spiritual abuse be the moment they walked through the doors they had to cut their hair they were told that they were sinful for being born native and all of these things as you can tell are traumatic so we have whole generations of our native youth that were disrupted from their kinship systems and everything that kept them feeling whole and safe and if you think about generation after generation when they would leave the school and try to go out and have families you can imagine how difficult that was shame upon shame so there's a famous saying called kill the indian save the man this picture really does illuminate that how our people has such a rich beautiful connection to the land to stories through the clothing that we wore the foods very intelligent ecological systems that we knew how to navigate all of those things are present right and then you move to the picture to the next or the next picture over and it really does show the attempt to kill the indian and save the man so as you can imagine when someone repeatedly tells you who you inherently are is wrong everything about you is wrong and in order to be saved you have to become this other person you'll never fully be that person but if you follow us enough maybe you can be saved what happens is something called internalized depression internalized oppression is the act of feeling as if you no longer need any of the external abuse because you're doing it to yourself so that internalized depression becomes really a poison for your heart and your mind and the basis of it is shame so again this is not a native only experience right i think everyone can relate to something in their lives where they felt maybe was very negative or difficult or abusive and how you internalize that to be true and we know that those things are not true what happens in our communities is sometimes this internalized depression turns to what we call lateral oppression lateral oppression is where we are turning against each other as native people at different times resources just different things and because we haven't navigated the space yet of understanding how to heal from all of the traumas that have been handed down to us so epigenetics is an amazing growing body of research that really talks about how the events in our environment can leave imprints within our genetic makeup and like i said earlier those things can be handed down to the next generation dr eduardo duran does amazing work in this field and he talks about something called the soul wound and i feel like it's really important when we're having this discussion to mention the soul wound because he talks about how the elders taught that the soul wound is where intergenerational historical trauma it flows it goes to a place where no blood flows which means our spirit it means our soul and for native people for us to continue thriving and healing things that our ancestors simply did not have the space or time to heal because they were literally in survival mode that we have a unique opportunity right now to heal things within our genetic makeup because we have more of a stable ground and more tools and things that they did not so when i was younger in my 20s and i around the time i had this dream it felt so heavy what our people were going through what my family was going through it felt so heavy that some days i felt like i couldn't breathe what i realized now what once felt like a burden feels like a privilege and feels like a responsibility to be able to honor them by creating changes in my life today and being able to see that maybe there's some things that i was born into that are not only difficult and traumatic but are profound and powerful so some of the symptoms that are unique to intergenerational trauma and historical trauma are that it's not just the typical ptsd symptoms a lot of native people in dr maria yellow horse braveheart's research actually report having flashbacks or nightmares of being a part of some form of genocide or battle or attack and so this is something that really i think illuminates that epigenetics is very much real and alive in a spiritual way as well for our people i want to mention my best friend i always bring him with me into talks because he is a profound soul he's no longer here in the physical form but he is here in the spiritual realm and the spiritual way and before he passed he and i had many many talks about doing this very work together and i was going to be the the kid sister that let him come up front because he was handsome charming knowledgeable knew the songs he was all those things and i was the kid's sister that would support him so when he left he passed away of addiction so he is very much a part of this intergenerational story this historical trauma he embodies to me the the polarities of what trauma can bring we know when we experience great trauma we experience things in black and white things are all or nothing i'm either safe or i'm terrified and my brother did embody those things and i used to feel such deep deep pain about that but what i realized now is his his life had so much meaning and so much power and he was such a teacher that even though he left the earth realm in his late 30s he taught us so much while he was here about healing and his hopes for he helping our people to heal that i had to bring him with me in this talk today because i know that he would be so proud of all the work we're doing and yes that's the two of us as little babies reading a book together he did tell me a couple years before he passed away we were looking at that picture and you can't see it in this picture but we're looking at a book and he said you know sister i distinctly remember pointing my finger so that i could look like i was like really smart and old in the colder brother and he said i had no idea what was on that book but i just was and that was so my brother so as as we think about the people we love around us not only as native people but human beings we think about the different ways that we can heal i think we have to really broaden our horizons and really shift the paradigm of what healing looks like it's different for every person we need our clinical westernized interventions we need those things but in addition to that we need to go back to the roots of what it means to be human how to learn to be in our bodies again how to learn how to be a good relative some of these things can only happen through community and so we need to provide spaces and build healthy communities to be able to address some of these things so one thing i wanted to mention that's really powerful in terms of creating healing we've talked a lot about the trauma itself but there are many things that we do to remember our ancestors and one of them is called the bigfoot ride and if you don't know about this ride you should really research it look into it it's a powerful way that our through a dream the man who started this received this dream of you need to go back and honor your ancestors you need to pray for their spirits and so they go on this ride through the the winter and they end up at the site and they say prayers now we can't take back the trauma the difficult things that happen but a big part of healing our trauma is both individually and collectively is finding a way to integrate those difficult painful things into our daily existence that has purpose and meaning so i'd like to leave you all with contemplating what it is that you carry for your ancestors for your family for your lineage that maybe you run from that maybe there's a lot of fear that you don't want to face it's actually a really unique powerful opportunity every time you feel anxiety and grief in all of those things to look deep inside and realize that you do have all of the resources you have all of that energy to be able to heal and i end with this my brother is one of the last pictures that he took he passed away in hawaii and i bring the water back in because in the beginning we talked about the power of water water itself is neither good nor bad it's sacred and the water in this picture reminds me of the stillness that he had even through his difficulties and his trauma and his addictions we have the ability to heal and now i think of the grief that i carried so profoundly after he passed and i feel still i feel like the water is still because i know that he's with me thank you