Help Native Young Women Visit UN
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Their names are: Kaitlyn Greybear, Jessica Gray Hawk, Marissa Follet, Taylor Reese, Kristina Mikkelsen, TyRae Afraid of His Track, Anamarie Long, and Patience Muth. They are high school aged women of the Fort Peck Dakota, Lakota, and Nakona Tribes. Resilience and the stubbornness to rise are both in their history and their day-to-day reality. They come from a people who continue to survive beyond an unspoken and astronomical genocide. Their stories are still largely undetermined. They are in a delicate and monumental phase of life – a phase of increasing choices and limited exposure to a diversity of decisions.
Soon, they will be traveling to New York City. Eight female high school students, two from each high school on the Fort Peck Reservation, will be attending the UN Commission on the Status of Women from March 13-17th. This year's Commission will focus on economic development and indigenous women.
This travel will provide an opportunity for them to: expand their senses of self, their expectations, and understandings of their powerful potentials. Their empowerment will spread, beyond individuals and into their communities. The students are already in the process of brainstorming ways to organize around their shared experiences of trauma.
As a recent Fort Peck Reservation transplant, I (one of their school counselors and chaperones) am continuously learning about life in this corner of northeastern Montana through the minds of these young women. I am much more familiar with strong womanhood. However, for a long time womanhood was an identity I failed to take seriously for fear of accepting certain social limitations.
I can now acknowledge that I was a tomboy through most of childhood because I was committed to freedom – the freedom to say no to pink, to exercise strength, to become self-dependent. These were freedoms most of my female friends didn’t feel. Many committed their identity to traditional and unhealthy standards of beauty. Many felt tentative about taking up a sport. Many felt their value only through the affirmation of others — most commonly through male peers.
When I think about myself as that young girl, I think about my parents. I think about their insistence that I could be whatever I wanted to be both then and when I was older. I could be the best kickball player at my elementary school. I could ride dirt bikes. I could climb mountains, and kill and cook fish for sustenance. I could sit in the courtroom during the trial of my pedophile, fifth-grade teacher and look him in the eye when he disingenuously apologized for raping seven girls (within the statute of limitations). I remember my Dad always reminding me to be careful with the word can't. It was through the could’s that I discovered myself and tasted freedom.
I was lucky, damn lucky. I was white and middle class — raised by two parents who had the opportunity to make a conscious, daily effort to love themselves and each other as much as they loved me. It was a revolutionary house. Love is a luxury hundreds of miles away from the scrappiness of survival. It is sacrificial in a way that facilitates growth instead of death. It is taught — or it is not. When it is not we become our smallest selves, mechanically reduced to merely maintaining.
I've studied genocides since high school (2005-9) but I have never before lived with the direct decedents of one until now. Living in Poplar, Montana has made me want to speak the word differently, louder, angrier, and more often. Genocides fester – their physical and psychological violence, in the silence of days for hundreds of years.
My question — the purpose for my life and work on Fort Peck Reservation — has become, “How does a people heal?” I think the answer is somewhere in proving genocidal justifications wrong: the one that dignified killing the buffalo, the one that put a price on human scalps, the one that displaced people from their homes, the one that stole children from their families and their cultures.
Genocides have not only been sustained through physical violence but also through deep psychological wounding. When a people is framed as deserving of certain treatment and death, they are framed as beneath the benevolent murderers who are preforming a service to cleanse society of it's human filth. Both parties, the murderers and the murdered, must understand and internalize this genocidal justification or face their own extermination isolated, ostracized, and alone.
Gender works on similar psychological levels. One feels their gender on the inside and with practice can also take note of it external ramifications. When ten percent of the female students at Poplar High School are pregnant it is difficult to dismiss gender’s regulatory limitations. I am working to respond stagnating situations for young women of the Fort Peck Reservation: of young motherhood, of familial drug abuse, of suicide, of boyfriends for the purpose of stable housing, of sexual violence and trafficking, and of cyclical incarceration.
With your generous help, we hope to travel with the two awardees from each high school to the Commission’s panel discussions, Colombia University, the Brooklyn Art Museum, and a Broadway Performance. This incredible opportunity will give our students the chance to watch and learn from other powerful women — women we know they can be — women we hope to watch them become.
Even the smallest contribution can help us reach the goal of giving these young women a rich emotional memory. Thank you for any support you can offer.
Soon, they will be traveling to New York City. Eight female high school students, two from each high school on the Fort Peck Reservation, will be attending the UN Commission on the Status of Women from March 13-17th. This year's Commission will focus on economic development and indigenous women.
This travel will provide an opportunity for them to: expand their senses of self, their expectations, and understandings of their powerful potentials. Their empowerment will spread, beyond individuals and into their communities. The students are already in the process of brainstorming ways to organize around their shared experiences of trauma.
As a recent Fort Peck Reservation transplant, I (one of their school counselors and chaperones) am continuously learning about life in this corner of northeastern Montana through the minds of these young women. I am much more familiar with strong womanhood. However, for a long time womanhood was an identity I failed to take seriously for fear of accepting certain social limitations.
I can now acknowledge that I was a tomboy through most of childhood because I was committed to freedom – the freedom to say no to pink, to exercise strength, to become self-dependent. These were freedoms most of my female friends didn’t feel. Many committed their identity to traditional and unhealthy standards of beauty. Many felt tentative about taking up a sport. Many felt their value only through the affirmation of others — most commonly through male peers.
When I think about myself as that young girl, I think about my parents. I think about their insistence that I could be whatever I wanted to be both then and when I was older. I could be the best kickball player at my elementary school. I could ride dirt bikes. I could climb mountains, and kill and cook fish for sustenance. I could sit in the courtroom during the trial of my pedophile, fifth-grade teacher and look him in the eye when he disingenuously apologized for raping seven girls (within the statute of limitations). I remember my Dad always reminding me to be careful with the word can't. It was through the could’s that I discovered myself and tasted freedom.
I was lucky, damn lucky. I was white and middle class — raised by two parents who had the opportunity to make a conscious, daily effort to love themselves and each other as much as they loved me. It was a revolutionary house. Love is a luxury hundreds of miles away from the scrappiness of survival. It is sacrificial in a way that facilitates growth instead of death. It is taught — or it is not. When it is not we become our smallest selves, mechanically reduced to merely maintaining.
I've studied genocides since high school (2005-9) but I have never before lived with the direct decedents of one until now. Living in Poplar, Montana has made me want to speak the word differently, louder, angrier, and more often. Genocides fester – their physical and psychological violence, in the silence of days for hundreds of years.
My question — the purpose for my life and work on Fort Peck Reservation — has become, “How does a people heal?” I think the answer is somewhere in proving genocidal justifications wrong: the one that dignified killing the buffalo, the one that put a price on human scalps, the one that displaced people from their homes, the one that stole children from their families and their cultures.
Genocides have not only been sustained through physical violence but also through deep psychological wounding. When a people is framed as deserving of certain treatment and death, they are framed as beneath the benevolent murderers who are preforming a service to cleanse society of it's human filth. Both parties, the murderers and the murdered, must understand and internalize this genocidal justification or face their own extermination isolated, ostracized, and alone.
Gender works on similar psychological levels. One feels their gender on the inside and with practice can also take note of it external ramifications. When ten percent of the female students at Poplar High School are pregnant it is difficult to dismiss gender’s regulatory limitations. I am working to respond stagnating situations for young women of the Fort Peck Reservation: of young motherhood, of familial drug abuse, of suicide, of boyfriends for the purpose of stable housing, of sexual violence and trafficking, and of cyclical incarceration.
With your generous help, we hope to travel with the two awardees from each high school to the Commission’s panel discussions, Colombia University, the Brooklyn Art Museum, and a Broadway Performance. This incredible opportunity will give our students the chance to watch and learn from other powerful women — women we know they can be — women we hope to watch them become.
Even the smallest contribution can help us reach the goal of giving these young women a rich emotional memory. Thank you for any support you can offer.
Organizer
Carly Nicole
Organizer
Poplar, MT