Support for your next step
Stories can remind you that you don’t need to take that next step alone.
That’s the door I want to open, helping people connect back to their own heritage, because the hunger is real.
I didn’t understand my own heritage until I was a teenager, and I know what it’s like to be the kid nobody explained anything to. Now my daughter and I teach others what our traditions actually mean, including how the tobacco sold today is different from what our people used to grow.
Trigger Warning: Teen pregnancy, family separation, racial shame and discrimination
I didn’t understand what my heritage was until I was a teenager, because my grandma wouldn’t allow it. We used to hang out at the park with the local Indians, and when my grandma found out, she sent me straight back to my mom’s. She was embarrassed to be Native. My mom was only thirteen when she had my sibling, and she and her uncle were put in a mission where they weren’t taught their own heritage either. My grandma walked her own hard road. Not knowing where you come from, it sucks. I mean that plainly. There’s no softer word for it.
So when I finally found my way to it, I held on with both hands. My mom inspired us to start making things. We used to have a gift shop and bead store on the reservation in Montana, near Flathead State Park. That’s where it started: making things, and teaching people, Native and non-Native, what those things mean. What a dream catcher actually is. What a ribbon skirt represents. What MMIW stands for, what Orange Shirt Day is about, what the drumming means when you hear it. My daughter and I run the Bead Catchers now for exactly that reason, education matters. So many non-Natives still think we just wear feathers and that’s the whole picture. There’s so much more to explain, and I’d rather explain it than let people guess.
Out of my five kids, only one really grasped onto the culture in a deep way. She’s the one who works the shop with me. Another daughter flies a Flathead Nation flag but doesn’t go looking for the culture beyond that. My youngest wants to be more involved, sits on the health board, but isn’t always someone I can count on to follow through. And one daughter is working on her regalia right now. She wants to dance while she’s also finishing her doctorate in business. Everybody finds their own way in, in their own time, and I’ve stopped expecting it to look the same for each of them.
What I hear most from people, especially urban Natives, is that they’re searching. Those who didn’t grow up on a reservation, who don’t have family members to ask, they’re out there looking for a way in and don’t know where to start. That’s the door I want to open, helping people connect back to their own heritage, because the hunger for it is real.
People want to know about the rituals. How do you smudge? Which one do you smudge first? What’s it actually for? You open your doors and windows when you smudge so the negativity has somewhere to go. Any new home, any new vehicle, you smudge it, or you can do a smudge bath. With tobacco, it’s the same hunger for the real thing, you offer it to Mother Earth, but people don’t always realize the tobacco sold today isn’t what our people used; it used to be pure, organic, and now there are chemicals in it. It’s the same with sage, people want to know where it came from, how it was gathered. A lot of Natives believe sage shouldn’t be sold at all, only gifted, and that’s something we take seriously at the shop. My daughter started a garden with a greenhouse, and we’ve talked about growing our own sage next year instead.
We hand out flyers, we pass out information, we keep the door open. Not long ago there was a shop in Tacoma running workshops on regalia and moccasins, and it reminded me how much this work is happening in small pockets everywhere, one person teaching another. That’s really all this is. Helping people find some answers when nobody else will sit down and give them any. I know what it’s like to be the kid nobody explained anything to. I don’t want that for anyone else who’s still looking.
Do you really know where you came from? That’s when the healing starts
I grew up Sioux but never close to any of it, until two Native veterans at the Elders' center opened the door back to my own people. What I found wasn't a guarantee of answers, just a direction: help the next person who has less than you do.
Don’t let the stories burn the way the totem poles did. Pass them down, exactly as they were given to you, so we don’t lose them, and so we don’t make the same mistakes again.
I grew up hearing “prayers up, tobacco down” without ever being taught what it truly meant, so I held onto it through memory instead: my great-grandfather’s pipe, my grandmother’s blanket, the stories told at every potlatch. Now I pass those same stories to my own children, exactly as they were given to me, so nothing gets lost the way our totem poles were.
There’s nothing like a grandmother’s love, and I never got that piece of it.
I lost many of my Native ways before I had the chance to learn them. Over time, sound, stories, drumming, flute, and community became ways to reconnect with culture and make space for healing.
What matters most to me now is remembering I represent my grandchildren every time I make a choice.
Smoking stayed with me through decades of building a life as a carver, a mother, and a community leader, even after I quit once and relapsed under stress. Getting healthy enough to quit for good gave me more years to carry my culture and my family's stories forward.
When he found out he had cancer, he smoked one cigarette on the drive to the hospital, and then he told my sister to quit.
My dad died before he could teach my kids the things I wish he’d taught me: the arrowheads, the traditional pipes, the stories that went with them. His diagnosis came fast, and I think about how much sooner we could have talked about quitting.