Being thankful.

I struggle with the holidays for several reasons.

1. I have worked retail for twenty years.  This morning I wrote out work schedules since I have no time at actual work to do paperwork.  We get slammed.  All our business happens all at once.  It can feel like pure insanity at times.  And managing employees in chaotic times can be somewhat challenging.  I feel like a football coach at times.  Choosing the best players for the right tasks.  Being on top of our game to avoid complaints and be the very best we can for a demanding public.  And the exhaustion at the end of the day!  Eek!

2.  Family.  It's still only been a year since grandmere died.  The family is scattered this year.  Parents traveled to Oklahoma for Thanksgiving on the farm.  Brothers are with friends in two different states.  Aunts are in Florida.  In-laws don't really get together much and stick to their own families.  Grandmere was the glue and heart and soul of my family time and it's just all so different now.  And I don't feel like I have my own family.  The mister and our cat.

3.  The Thanksgiving story.  I subscribe to Indian Country Today Media online and the hostility surrounding this holiday and Native Americans is rampant.  I can't say I don't blame them.  The way history works and how life is often sugar-coated to cover up atrocities and truths is horrendous.  I love a sappy Disney movie but real life isn't always like a fairy tale.  I wish there was a way to reconcile such difficulties in so many 'race-related' wars.  But I haven't found the way.

That's not to say I'm not thankful for what I have.  I am thankful for my own ethnic diversity that has made me so so aware of what the world is really like.  And I'm thankful for my eternal optimism, even in previous dark hours of depression and despair...I am thankful that I can always see a light through hard work and perseverance.  (Did I spell that right?). I am thankful for my loved ones, despite distance.  And my home.

I will leave you with this somber voice.  A poem.  Just something to think about.  I think about it.

November 19, 2013 at 5:56pm

Thank you for relocating relations, relocating their hearts, some forgetting or ashamed of their Indigenous roots.

Thank you for alcohol that now courses like blood through reservation veins.

Thank you for teaching our young, impressionable, heavily reserved minds your history and overlooking ours in reservation schools.

Thank you for Catholic boarding school surgeons painfully removing our Native tongue without anesthetic until our mouths bled English.

Thank you for that old white man in the white owned store on my rez that showed my 8 year old eyes the color of my skin as he stalked me like prey aisle-to-aisle, always a thief in his adult eyes.

Thank you for the bruises that covered my sister like war paint, painted by fists, baseball bat and a love created and mixed by your reservations, in wars she never won, dying every time.

Thank you for the U.S.D.A. approved diabetes that has stolen uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, fathers, my mother.

Thank you for BIA and its IHS replacing our ceremonial medicine with prescribed addictions that have now stolen so many visions on the rez that it’s hard to see what comes next.

Thank you for compulsory sterilization creating and rewriting so many stories forever left broken and unfinished.

Thank you for the children starving reservations wide, left alone and staying up late, hoping their parent or parents didn’t drink or shoot up all the check.

Thank you for the alcohol related car wrecks that have turned epic poems into tragic short stories.

Thank for the tiny white crosses plunged deep like hot knives into our land and the reservation roadsides that always claim another victim from families dying a little inside every time they drive past them.

Thank you for the F.A.S. and F.A.E. babies turned high school dropouts because the Caucasian teacher from a different world was never taught enough before coming to the rez to teach.

Thank you for the reservation suicides that have killed the spirits of those left behind.

Thank you for using us as mascots, making our young ones feel uncertain in their skin and redefining honor for them by turning us into a cold, unfeeling, symbol for a sports team where drunken fans honor us by mocking us.

Thank you for leading us on to reservations with no guidebooks on how to live in your world on our land, where we are still stumbling and learning, trial by heartbreaking error, to this day.

Thank you for your stereotypical portrayal of us in film and the movies where the white men are the heroes saving the Indians despite the Native-like titles like Dances With Wolves, Thunderheart.

Thank you for stealing our land, raping it like some woman you never knew the name of, leaving her crying, traumatized, bleeding.

* * *

Thank you for razing our homeland, cutting it up into states, poorly piecing it together and shrouding us in it like a quilt infested with smallpox.

I am thankful for all of this for making me feel too fucking much.

I am thankful for all of this turning me into a clenched fist in times when words don’t hit hard enough.

I am thankful for all of this, for stirring the spirits of warriors dormant in us for centuries.

I am thankful for all of this because without it, I could never write this.

Thank you for the artillery, arrows for my bow.

Born a few centuries too late and raised on U.S.D.A. approved commodity everything, Jonathan Garfield is an enrolled Assiniboine tribal member of the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux reservation in Montana. His stories document the tragedy forced on “his people” (which he loves saying ‘cause it sounds cool) that is the rez. Jonathan has been published in various Art & Literature magazines and quarterlies. His short story, “Reservation Warparties”, became a short film, adapted to a screenplay and directed by Angelique Midthunnder. The short film was featured on the program, Independent Lens, on PBS. Jonathan Garfield continues to write poetry and short stories. He is also a practicing trickster. 

Read more athttp://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/11/28/thanksgiving-poem-jonathan-garfield-152466

Ho Ho Ho, Who wouldn't go....

Greetings.

Somehow twenty years just slapped me in the face yesterday.  I arranged another hangout with my former high school art teacher and brought along an amazing artist, mom, dancer-turned-psychologist friend from high school senior art class to join in the fun.  We sat and yapped and drank and ate and reminisced and laughed and yapped some more for about four hours yesterday.  This particular friend struggled with a high school pregnancy when we were young and we even meandered through the first two years of higher education after that together.  Her son is now 20.  Whaaa?!  That's crazy.  We were young and confused back then and seemed so much older and wiser as we discussed days of yore.  Still battle little hang-ups and insecurities and decisions that seem to froth at the mouth with each angle we try to approach them from.  But it was all so delightful.

....but twenty years!?!?  Really!?!?!?  Twenty friggin years!?!?

Anyway.

The holidays have descended upon us yet again.   Hanukkah is Thanksgiving this year and Thanksgiving is just the start of Black Friday.  I really feel for those poor retail workers having to cut Turkey dinner early to go punch that time clock and deal with the MANIACS again this year.  Don't get me wrong...I love shopping for Christmas gifts and live on a budget and am always seeking extra discounts and ways to save.  But it's not my EVERYTHING.  Luckily, I get to sleep in til 7:45 a.m. Black Friday morning before I go figure things out in Small Business Land.  I'm thinking good thoughts.  Feeling some positive vibrations, mon.  We shall see where this year takes us.  Hopefully a little richer so I can actually get a raise for the ten added responsibilities I have taken on since taking over as manager of the boutique.

I really could use a financial break.  Really really could.

Sigh.

Starting out.

I have these ongoing struggles about what to do with my life, but I seem to have satisfied some of my more motherly instincts by managing college age and twentysomethings at the shop as they start off on their own life adventures.  I try to ingrain specific qualities in them. Whatever stepping stones they encounter as they shoot for their career and life goals, there are ALWAYS opportunities in whatever job they find themselves doing.  With THIS job, they can learn solid skills and techniques to advance and move towards their long term desires.  Every new lesson is another moment of experience to discuss in future professional interviews in their field.  I try to work with these girls individually, focusing on their background and how they could incorporate these lessons toward another one.  Am I trying to do too much?  I don't know.  Maybe the young kids could really care less.  But I'd like to think optimistically.

One of my key holders is a fashion designer, and while she gets stressed about her leadership abilities I try to encourage her in continuing the practice because it will only help her down the road as she leads her interns and assistants.  Coordinating and balancing and delegating gets easier with practice.  It's a rotating door of other employees as they each land their much desired 9-5 money-making gigs and I cannot lie and say the turnover doesn't bother me.  It does.  Tremendously so.  I sacrifice my own days off and free time to keep the operation running smoothly and cover all the shifts they don't want to do.  I know the owners appreciate what I'm doing, but I'm not always so sure the young girls do.  But hopefully the interview after interview after interview that I'm conducting will yield an assistant manager to complement my endeavors of teaching these girls life skills.

And hopefully I can actually take a vacation.  Or sign up for a French class at the Alliance Francaise.  Or take a jewelry making class.  Something to balance MY own life!

Or maybe the stress of it all will force me to find something new.  Again.

Today is my day off, and I'm feeling some creative surges of some sort.  It's my meditation.  And I need it.