How We Go Home
Description
Hear from Jasilyn Charger, one of the first five people to set up camp at Standing Rock, which kickstarted a movement of Water Protectors that roused the world; Gladys Radek, a survivor of sexual violence whose niece disappeared along Canada's Highway of Tears, who became a family advocate for the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls; and Marian Naranjo, herself the subject of a secret radiation test while in high school, who went on to drive Santa Clara Pueblo toward compiling an environmental impact statement on the consequences of living next to Los Alamos National Laboratory. Theirs are stories among many of the ongoing contemporary struggles to preserve Native lands and lives-and of how we go home.
Download the corresponding lesson plans on the Voice of Witness website.
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Person
Content
CONTENTS
EDITOR’S NOTE
INTRODUCTION, by Sara Sinclair
EXECUTIVE EDITOR’S NOTE, by Mimi Lok
MAP
Gladys Radek, Terrace, Gitxsan / Wet’suwet’en First Nations
“When Tamara went missing, it took the breath out of me.”
Jasilyn Charger, Cheyenne River Sioux
“My son’s buried by the river. . . . I vowed to him that he’s going to be safe, that no oil was going to touch him.”
Wizipan Little Elk, Rosebud Lakota
“On the reservation, you have the beauty of the culture and our traditional knowledge contrasted with the reality of poverty.”
Geraldine Manson, Snuneymuxw First Nation
“The nurse was trying to get me to sign a paper to put our baby, Derrick, up for adoption.”
Robert Ornelas, New York City, Lipan Apache / Ysleta del Sur Pueblo
“A part of the soul sickness for me was being ashamed. . . . What we were being taught about Indians was so minimal and so negative.”
Ashley Hemmers, Fort Mojave Indian Tribe
“I didn’t work my ass off to get to Yale to be called a squaw.”
Ervin Chartrand, Selkirk, Métis/Salteaux
“They said I fit the description because I looked like six other kids with leather vests and long hair who looked Indian.”
James Favel, Winnipeg, Peguis First Nation
“You’re a stakeholder because you’ve got to walk these streets every day.”
Marian Naranjo, Santa Clara Pueblo
“Indigenous peoples’ reason for being is to be the caretakers of the air, the water, the land, and each other.”
Blaine Wilson, Tsartlip First Nation
“When I was twenty-five, thirty, there was more salmon and I was fishing every other day. Now I’m lucky to go once a week.”
Althea Guiboche, Winnipeg, Métis/Ojibwe/Salteaux
“I had three babies under three years old and I was homeless.”
Vera Styres, Six Nations of the Grand River, Mohawk/Tuscarora
“I was a ‘scabby, dirty little Indian.’”
GLOSSARY
HISTORICAL TIMELINE OF INDIGENOUS NORTH AMERICA
ESSAYS
- The Trail of Broken Promises: US and Canadian Treaties with First Nations
- “Indigenous Perspectives on Historical Trauma”: An Interview with Johnna James
- Indigenous Resurgence
TEN THINGS YOU CAN DO
FURTHER READING
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS