Last Monday, Oct. 14, was Indigenous People’s Day, a celebration of Indigenous folks worldwide. Despite not having the day off, I still took the time to reflect on the day and my identity.
In the 19 years I have been around I have only recently begun to feel more connected to my Indigenous identity and culture. Growing up, my only connection to my culture was through my family both immediate and extended, and what they had taught me was what had been taught to them. Like many tribal nations, mine passes knowledge and traditions down to the next generations through oral history rather than written. Which considering that there are not that many Ho-Chunk speakers due to the lasting impacts of relocation and boarding schools.
One of the times I felt the disconnect between my culture and identity was when we would visit our extended family that live in both Wisconsin and Nebraska. While I enjoyed spending time with my relatives I only see during summer or spring breaks, there were moments when I felt this invisible divide between us, almost like I was outside looking in. My extended family was more in touch with our culture and the language because they live closer to the reservation and use it more than I do.
When I was a little kid, I was able to understand and speak the basics in Ho-Chunk like counting to 10 and naming colors. In between Pre-K and Kindergarten, I started losing my abilities until I did not know how to say them in Ho-Chunk anymore. I am currently trying to re-learn the language, so far the only things I know are the commands to make our dog sit and stay. The main way I’m learning my language is through my great-grandma who is more fluent in our native language and who I see more often to learn from.
I felt the divide in middle school when once again, I was one of the few Indigenous students at my middle school. At least until my seventh-grade year when I met one of my friends, Laurie, who was not only Indigenous but funny. So any class we had together we would goof off just a little before and after classes. I also was a part of an Indigenous youth group at the American Indian Family Center (AIFC) and met some good people and made connections. It was amazing to find other Indigenous people my age and work to do some pretty cool things like we hosted various little workshops and even got to hold a conference on Indigenous issues. I loved working with them and just spending time with other Indigenous folks.
The divide I previously felt got smaller and smaller as the year went by and by the time I entered high school it was almost non-existent. For me, high school is where I felt the most connected to my Indigenous identity. During my years there I was a part of two amazing advisories, one was made up of students from different tribal nations and the other one was advocacy advisory. In both of them, I found my sense of community and it helped strengthen my connection to my identity.
However, life is not just full of positives and good memories but also the negatives and the shortcomings. Up until middle school I hated learning history, not only because it felt repetitive but because I hated learning about the Westward Expansion and what it led to. Being one of the few Indigenous students, I always felt this subtle anger when learning about the treaties, the boarding schools and all the things Indigenous people in the United States had to go through. I got my work done but I hated every second of learning about it because I knew about the small things that were left out of the textbooks and the history lessons. While we did learn about boarding schools, it never really talked about the various lasting impacts like loss of language and the fact that boarding schools forbid indigenous students from practicing culture or speaking their language. While much has been done not only in terms of preserving the language, there is still work to be done about other issues that affect Indigenous people.
For example, last year on Feb. 14 I attended the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives march. This march spread awareness about a topic that is getting talked about more but not enough.
According to Wilder Reserch’s Aug. 2023 report, in Minnesota, the number of missing American Indian women and girls ranged from 27 to 54 in any given month during the past decade. Eight percent of all murdered women and girls in Minnesota were American Indian—even though American Indian women and girls make up only 1% of the state’s population. This is a statistic that has stuck with me as I’ve grown up and is always in the back of my mind. However, Minnesota has done something to help this—back in 2021, the Minnesota legislature created the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives (MMIR) Office, which is one way to help address one of the issues many Indigenous people face.
In short, Indigenous People’s Day for me is a day to reflect on the resilience of Indigenous people and how much they fought for the seven generations after them, but also be reminded of the work we still have to do.
I love being Indigenous, and no matter what comes I will still feel this way for the rest of my life.
If there is anything you take away from reading this article, I hope that it is the fact that we are here despite how colonization tried to erase us.