An editor wrote of a 72-year-old Native American writer and activist this week in Rumpus: “Barbara [Robidoux] is an extraordinary mythmaker, but the myth is not about a trickster, or a spider, or a familiar moral tale. She’s charged like lightning, even after decades of resistance, demonstrations, marches, and rallies. It’s the magic of Indigenous resistance, the continuation of life after they thought they killed the Indian to save the man. It’s the continuity that will baffle Trump.”
Today, the editor, Terese Mailhot’s prescience, is tangible. The power of hope is palpable as Standing Rock protestors ― Native Americans, veterans, celebrities, supporters of all backgrounds ― cheer their substantial victory banning an oil pipeline from indigenous land.
“The message, and just in time in these dark days of Trump tribulations is: you don’t have to deny who you are or where you come from just because others got it wrong or did it wrong or hurt you along the way.”
The visionary writer Ursula le Goin said, in a recent speech, “…we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality.”
I know this is true, because I was born and raised in a Christian fundamentalist group where my limitations and inferiority as a woman were made clear to me, from early on. I agonized over the question of what each of us, with our gifts and limitations, can personally do when faced with mighty and unjust forces outside our control. I found the power of my voice through writing, and that gave me the strength to find my own faith, outside their rules.
Today’s victory reminds me the colonialist can never take the land, at the least, from the heart of the Native American, and, for me, the false Christian cannot negotiate God from the heart of the true seeker.
Heidi Hough escaped physical, verbal and spiritual abuse through an unlikely college scholarship. She is completing a masters in creative writing at Dartmouth College, and a memoir called Jezebel. Learn more at heidihough.com and follow her @heidstar
Before You Go
