Indigenous love story
People around the world will celebrate Valentine's Day this weekend.
And in honor of this holiday, we're taking a look at love through the eyes of two experiences of two elders. How do they keep their relationship strong, fresh, and fun? Both have struggles in life that could have prevented them from finding love or even being a good partner. How have they overcome their challenges?
Sandy White Hawk is Sicangu Lakota. At a young age she was adopted out of her home on the Rosebud Sioux reservation in South Dakota. Her experience as an adoptee has become her life's work as a spokesman on issues of native identity that adoption and foster care have determined.
George McCauley is a citizen of the Omaha Nation and Mason, Nebraska. He graduated from Flandreau Indian Boarding School and after high school he worked, but for a number of reasons, he ended up becoming addicted to alcohol. George managed to get sober and today has 45 years of sobriety.
Throughout history artists have taken up causes and created art that shows the world what concerns them and raises the issue so that others will take notice and perhaps be moved to do something, to change something.
Sandra Hale Schulman is Cherokee Nation. She recently profiled two artists who are doing just that with their work around the issue of Missing and Murdered Indigenous people. Her article, “The powerful image of a red hand print” was recently posted on our website.
A slice of our Indigenous World
- A Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons Pilot Project is getting underway in Alaska.
- A bill to ban Native mascots, logos and symbols in public schools is being debated in the Washington state Legislature.
- A member of parliament in New Zealand gets ejected from parliament for refusing to wear a tie. Some quotes from today's show
- Fifty more Yellowstone National Park bison were transferred to the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes in Montana.
- The nation’s oldest organization for the LGBTQ community celebrates its 10th annual pow wow.
Some quotes from today's show
George McCauley
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"I don't know what it is that people experience about having to not be together for a while. I need to take a break ,and fortunately and happily. We haven't had that part in our relationship during the pandemic or before”.
"You know how you see somebody across the room or across the street or across the road. And, you know, it's love at first sight for us. It wasn't like that took a lot of work to get where we are today”.
Sandy White Hawk
"So many nights we've gone to bed and I've said, baby, are we fortunate and blessed to be a couple that enjoys each other's company everyday all day long. And I even have thought to myself, are we what they call immeshed solely mesh that we don't even know we should be sick of each other."
“In that healing process during one of my sessions that I had it came up that I had never looked at that my adoption impacted me. I didn't understand that. And I ironically, I'd been to all these counselors so many years and no one ever even talked about or asked me a question about what it had been like for me to grow up as the only brown girl in this town".
Sandra Hale Schulman
“He digitally printed a red hand print onto these beautiful skirts, large, very large, and made a line of 400 skirts that is almost sold out. He's donated many of them. And it's a, it's a beautiful way of getting the message out, but also something wearable and gorgeous”.
"He said the idea is to create medicine bundles with the skirts. The packages and the skirts with, I guess, sweet grass and width, and would stage bundles kind of gives a whole healing kit to go along with the skirts, which is really nice, interesting idea, because it gives a fuller, healing process, a fuller package, I guess you could say, as to what the intention of this skirt is”.
Mark Trahant, Shoshone-Bannock, is editor of Indian Country Today. On Twitter: @TrahantReports Trahant is based in Phoenix.
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