If you've been reading my blog from the beginning, you know that I started this project when I was a stained glass artist. I gave that up for multiple reasons several years ago, but I still think like a glass artist often. Glass, its colors and textures, brings me breathtaking joy!This morning on my walk in the beautiful Jicarilla Apache Nation, I found a different sort of glass which brought a different sort of thoughts. It was curved upward and very sharp. I picked it up because I didn't want any barefoot children to step on it.
You see, underlying the entrenched problems with alcohol and drugs on the reservation is the trauma that drives people to drink. I've failed for years to express this adequately, but I think, today, I know how.
Like our entire world right now, the people here have an enormous amount of collective trauma. Like all of us in the COVID-19 crisis, they have watched death over and over. Like everyone on earth today, they have feared when (not if) it will be their turn to experience misery, loss, and terror.
We have lived with the coronavirus for a few months. The Jicarilla Apache and other Indigenous Americans have lived with trauma for centuries. I'm going to tell you some stories, told to me by people I personally know. I am changing some identifying information to protect the people I know and love, but each of these stories is absolutely true, to the best of my ability to verify.
I know a man who was told by his grandmother the story of the US Army chasing the Jicarilla Apache in the 1800s because the tribe had left the reservation to return to their homelands. When the army caught up with the tribe, the women and children (including the man's grandmother) had scrambled up on top of a huge boulder. They watched while the men of the tribe were slaughtered.
I know middle-aged men and women who tell about their childhoods in the boarding school. Some speak of the safety they felt there, and others remember being forcibly held down while their sacred braids were shorn or having their mouths cleaned with soap because they spoke their native language.
I know a woman who had her uterus removed after her third child, because it was US government policy to sterilize Indigenous women! She did not consent to this operation, as she was lied to about her condition because the government told doctors to lie.
I know a family who has buried every single one of their children. Every. One. Another family has held funerals for all but one of their children. This is not unusual here. Can you imagine the pain? Another family buried two young men, cousins, in less than a month. When we lost our granddaughter five years ago, we sat in a Bible study and talked, realizing that every single one of the adults in the study had buried a child or grandchild.
I know many children who are being raised by their grandparents because their parents are either dead or dysfunctional. I know grandparents who are raising grandchildren from multiple families for the same reasons. I know children who have lost both parents within a year from alcohol abuse or suicide. I know a woman whose daughter committed suicide and her ten-year-old grandson found his mother hanging from the rafters. The trauma is passed from generation to generation.
If I can feel overwhelmed and depressed about the climbing death toll (of people I don't even know) of a disease, how much more can a Native American feel overwhelmed and depressed about the climbing death toll in their own tribe, of their relatives and friends?! My husband has done more than 65 funerals in six and a half years. Only a few have been for people who died in old age of natural causes.
If we, as a nation, can suffer shock as we go through this pandemic, how much more shock can a tribe of 4,000 experience when scores of young people die from alcohol abuse, drug abuse, suicide, murder, and accidents over the course of six years?!
If we can be afraid of a disease that has a small chance of killing us or someone we love, how much more fear must a member of the Jicarilla Apache Nation have that their children, spouse, or grandchildren will succumb to the pandemic of grief and pain that surrounds them?
Take your weakest moment in this pandemic and multiply it by tens or hundreds...imagine if you knew or knew of half or more of the dead. Then, you might begin to comprehend the trauma here and elsewhere among Native peoples. I've been here more than six years, and I am only barely beginning to understand the depth of despair...and the depth of the joy among the Jicarilla Apache. For there is great joy here, also! Joy in family, joy in culture, joy in life, joy in community!
My purpose today was not to give a complete picture of the culture here, but to help outsiders understand the collective trauma here that so desperately needs the hope of Jesus Christ. Please know that there is deep joy here, a beauty beyond the landscape, fierce love for family and community and tribe, and much good.
Returning to the trauma...
Where is our hope when faced with trauma like COVID-19 or the collective traumas of indigenous peoples? Our hope is in the Lord (Psalm 39:7, among others). When we feel like we're sinking, we can reach out for Jesus' hand like Peter did and walk on the water (Matthew 14:22-33). When we see no way forward, we can pray for God to part the sea (Exodus 14). When we are afraid of what is coming for us or our families, we can lean into God's "Fear Not" (Isaiah 41:10).
And that is why we're here. To bring God's Word and Hope to this people. So, to those of you who support this ministry, I hope you understand a bit more of the work here. And to those of you who love us, I hope you understand a bit more of why we serve here. And to those of you who are Jicarilla Apache, I welcome your input into my understanding. I can only speak from a mongaanii point of view, and if I'm off-point, please let me know.
God is the great glass artist, taking broken pieces and putting them together in ways that are beautiful.
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