Native Rising
∞ A Passion Path® Creation
Exploring the Process of Decolonizing and Unsettling
Warning: This WILL upset your WHITE cultural programming.
I will stand in the hope that for each drop of colonized whiteness I shed as a tear, a drop of Native will rise.
This is a collection of stories and articles about my search, as a white-skinned Native person (by blood, not by culture) from an assimilated family, for the path out of assimilation and back to my roots. It deals with colonization, intergenerational healing, history (from an Indigenous perspective), and the process of understanding and relinquishing the poisonous white fairy tale of godliness, exceptionalism, and freedom. True freedom cannot be built on stolen land and stolen labor. Until we deal with this reality, no one will ever be truly free.
I am writing as someone who holds within my blood both sides of the genocide against Native people and as someone who grew up in an assimilated family. I am healing from the effects of assimilation and from the contextless, inherited, intergenerational trauma of growing up in a family that essentially disowned our heritage and with it, the societal consequences and benefits of that heritage.
Unveiling America’s Darkest “Secrets,” Hiding in Plain Sight
Whether you know these historical realities or not, I am here to tell you that these national secrets must be told, understood, and healed.
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The Cost of My Un-Belonging Is Death
Each soul that gave up the ghost on the killing fields of these United States is a jewel I hold in my heart as family, as the ties of ancestry breaking and knitting themselves back together again, as hope fading and bursting to life anew, as prayers uttered on dying breath, unanswered and yet answered in the reality that we are still here.
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America’s Original Sin: Reflections on the Moment I Lost Abraham Lincoln
But I can damn sure say my reckoning with truth is more than theoretical. It runs bone and blood deep.
I ask of you the same gut wrenching, liberating accountability. Let the truth hit you at the very core of who you are. Let it shred who you have been.
Living in Different Worlds: Why White People Will Never Fully Understand Racism
Our shared outrage leads many white-skinned people to believe that we now have a shared basis for understanding racism. Find out why this is VERY wrong.
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Filaments of Hope and Redemption in the Valley of the Shadow of Death
We will find our way back to one another. And if God, if Great Spirit, can take the RED LONGING in my heart and make some good of the evil the conquerors brought to my people by making me, their descendant, a pane breaker, I think they would approve. I think my great grandmother would approve!
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Free Woman, Rooted in Belonging: Awakening Journey
When you belong, you do not take succor with those who mean to exploit you with a shilling’s worth of “love.” You do not bow your eyes at the first sign of trouble either. Instead, you hold that sense of belonging as a warrior’s truth. This can be your truth too! Read more.
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