CW // This story references abuse, sexual assault, drugs, alcohol, suicide, & Indigenous genocide.
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Jaike Spotted Wolf
In a Talking Circle at the Camp Out, Pipe Out water protector camp yesterday, I was asked to share my history of activism.
It started by looking two police officers in the eye, and outwardly stating that yes, my predators, a stepfather and a stepbrother, had been both physically and sexually assaulting me for years, and stating that yes, I do not feel safe with them near or around me – and finally winning my six year long battle of having them both removed from my physical space.
Though they left physically, they couldn’t be scrubbed, starved, drank, studied or worked away from my spirit and my mind.
It would be 27 years later, when my primary therapist in a treatment center for eating disorders would explain the mess that lived inside my head and my body for what equates to a lifetime. “Jaike, you didn’t drink alcoholically because you’re morally broken. You didn’t take drugs because you’re a troublemaker. You didn’t starve yourself for years because you truly believe self-flagellation is the road to moral purity, or so you could try to force your body to vanish away into the ether of lost souls because you were tortured. You have complex and chronic PTSD, alcohol/drug dependency, and atypical anorexia. These are DIAGNOSES, not personal failures. You’re neurodivergent, Jaike. Not stupid, not inherently destructive, not altogether broken.”
Well, holy shit. If someone could have whispered that into the ear of Mr. Scherer, my junior high school counselor so he could explain that to me instead of pawning me off to Mr. Miller and enrolling me in drama classes “for my mental health”, I may have been spared one decade of complete self destruction in active alcoholic and drug dependent madness and two more of sober, yet absolute, mental and spiritual chaos (or what I dotingly refer to as my time spent in the 7th level of Hell). Try living with cPTSD, high functioning depression, generalized anxiety disorder and, eventually, chronic pain, stone cold sober. It’s like visiting your demons every day on the highest speaker volume possible while everything you touch feels like molten lava that will melt you into oblivion. The insomnia adds a level of complexity and desperation that truly has you fully accepting that God is the cruelest creature and he made you purely to watch you writhe in agony for his pleasure and entertainment.
Now couple all of this with your sense of duty to your people, your culture, and your heritage. When I visit my reservation I witness first hand the cruelty that inspired my white pedophile stepfather in all of his colonized slop. I see the neglected children, the burned out HUD houses, the low – grade quality cans of commodity food in the cupboard (grey-colored hamburger, anyone? how ‘bout ‘canned fish product’ or some powdered eggs?) I see the playground with no trees for shade, and the one available metal slide that’s too hot to play on in the hundred degree heat of the plains in northeastern Montana. The broken swing, the empty swimming pool, the one grocery store in a town of 5,000 people that closes at 6:00 pm where the price gouging is 2-3xs that of the Walmart in Detroit.
Montana has a fucked up law that anyone who perishes in a car accident has a cross placed on the spot where they died. I count the crosses that line the road between Poplar and Wolf Point, MT. A 29 mile stretch of road boasts (at my last count) 32 crosses.
I sit across from the 9 year old girl at the local ice cream shop. She’s a cousin to my nieces. She tells me – while looking me straight in the eyes – and without so much as a grimace – how her auntie was on meth and thought her infant was the devil so she beat the baby, threw her in a suitcase, and then threw that in a dumpster.
I see this, I hear this, I FEEL this and I’m somehow supposed to let my neurodivergence diagnoses keep me from actively protesting for basic human rights for my people? Naw, dawg. We ain’t playin’ that game, colonizer. I will NOT pass go, and I will NOT be collecting two hundred dollars as if this shit is completely normal.
So I gear up. I go to frontline spaces. I take with me my AA sponsor who helps remind me I can’t fight for my people if I’m in a gutter blacked out from 7 Long Island ice teas. I take my primary and eating disorder therapist who helps me regulate my nervous system. Who tells me that it’s cortisol coursing through my veins and this is a trauma response but I can get through it. That the police violence, the outdoor living conditions of a frontline resistance space, the community backlash of daring to challenge the pipeline who threatens my people’s treaty rights, our sovereignty, and our contract to protect Mother Earth, and demand justice for MMIW2SG, that ALL of that is trauma and my body can’t help but have a response to it. She and my sponsor co-sign that CBD without THC is probably a helpful calming agent and that just because my 60 milligrams of Duloxetine SHOULD be enough anxiety relief – maybe I need that extra support after all.
I take with me my dietician who taught me how to eat food again. That even large bodies can be anorexic. That the colonizer wants me to shrink away, to starve myself, restrict joy and pleasure and sex and curiosity. That the only way I’ll be able to stand and fight is to eat the sugar, the carbs, the baguette, the pork chop, the mozzarella, the Lucky Charms, the paté, the tapenade, the peanut sauce and the mashed potatoes. And drink the fucking Dr. Pepper if that’s what I feel so inclined to do.
And I take with me my ancestors. Who taught me how to take that stand against the monsters Ken and Joe. To stand against Butch Otter when he wanted to bring nuclear waste into Idaho. To stand for the houseless sprawled throughout Seattle; the addicts and alcoholics in recovery rooms I’ve visited all over the world. To stand for the children I had a duty as a mandatory reporter as a witness to THEIR abuse to protect as their developmental therapist. To stand for the Brown and Black bodies shot down in the street by maladapted, racist, and violent police officers. To stand for the Indigenous matriarch who was refused care for over a month when her body was found riddled with tumors. To stand up for my values, my integrity, my personhood and sense of self when the lateral violence of other activists traveled the colonizer path of the carceral system meant to destroy and annihilate myself and the other banished, exiled, and throw aways of frontline campaigns because we dared to fuck up the balance of what they thought was their perfect morality ideals.
Ali, Amy, Ashley, The Ancestors. The rooms of AA. The Anarchists and the true Abolitionists. They bring the light, the levity, the humanity back to my person. Back to my trauma and fear riddled mind. They walk beside me as I tell a cop he’s complicit in genocide, that he’s not the hero he made himself out to be, and that it takes a coward to arrest non-violent protestors. They walk beside me when I tell the UN rapporteur that the United States is hiding the beaten, starved, and assaulted bodies of Native children all over the country on the grounds of residential schools. They walk beside me when I tell a white liberal how their denial of Indigenous genocide invalidates their credibility as they claim to fight for human rights. They walk beside me as I still fight for my rez dog, found on the side of the road in Rosebud Sioux territory and brought to me at a resistance camp, who the caregiver of refuses to return many months after agreeing to care for as I fought my way out of suicideation and a mental health crisis brought on by that lateral violence while she was hidden away outside of Cloquet, MN at a defunct resistance camp.
Creator didn’t say this work would be easy. Nor did I expect it to be. But I know other Native bodies share my similar experiences and find ways to continue to fight.
Our work looks very dissimilar to that of the white accomplice and ally. We know that poor whites have similar struggles in relation to scarcity, but our scars are etched in the earth from the Indian Wars during the 1800’s. We know our treaty rights are regularly violated. Our children made fun of for keeping their hair long. Our last names mocked because they sound funny. Our dances made fun of. Our women stolen because of the complete and utter dysfunction of the United States government concerning jurisdiction issues between sovereign, tribal, federal, county, and state laws.
But many of my white accomplices also struggle with neurodivergence and trauma. It is there that we find our common ground and unite in the fight against struggle and oppression.
We can fight, and we should. Just stay equipped, ready, and eager.
The ancestors will take care of the rest.
RRCC 