She defines her own path.

I am 68 years on the planet. I come from a very long line of amazing women and never looked far for role models. Our mother was a single head of household from 23 to 86 and during that span, she was a full-time employee for more than 40 years. From pea harvest to P.E. teacher to librarian to youth culture leader, she gave her all to every job and cared about every student. She returned to college with us kids in tow and garnered three degrees, BS, MS, and BFA. She painted, sketched, organized, kept us in line, and pushed us, even when we balked and bucked. Her mother was the best grandmother—fierce, practical, strict, demonstrative. Raised in our traditional ways, she was baptized so she could marry grandpa (son of a Nez Perce ordained Presbyterian minister). Along with raising four handsome, athletic sons (who were all combat vets) and three gorgeous, smart daughters (two of whom graduated from college), she was a church and civic activist and a founding member of the only all-Indian federated women’s clubs in the U.S. In the late 1800s, both great-grandmothers, legally divorced their first husbands, were allotted their own lands when few Indian women achieved this except widows and remarried their next husbands as landowners.

They lived by their own rules. Each defined their own path. Mom cut her hair so short in the 1950s, her mother made her wear a scarf to town. Grandma never wore pants or cut her hair and as a child, living the seasonal food gathering cycle on horseback, she had a domestic cat in a bag around her saddle horn. Grandma’s mother never wore shoes, only moccasins, loved watermelon and Caruso. Grandpa’s Mom was orphaned, gave birth to nine children, and died of TB in her 40s. They didn’t accept the world as it was; they worked hard to get what they needed, made it better, and didn’t give up. There were many scary times in these women’s lives: chased by US soldiers on the Columbia River, orphaned when father died in battle with the U.S. Army in Montana, having two sons in WWII overseas with a third in the National Guard, and making ends meet on very, very limited incomes because they were disciplined, savvy, and devoted to family. They weren’t fearless but they didn’t bow to fear. When I start to feel pitiful because my health is no longer vigorous compared to my pre-COVID self, I am reminded that it is nothing compared to what my ancestors survived. I relish my horses, nieces, nephews, and their children--especially when we’re sharing our Tribal culture in the outdoors of our homeland. I have a dozen important Tribal projects to engage in the balance of my life; about half on the job and half after I retire. I have learned the meanings of the most important lessons the women before me taught: Love is not painful. Always own land. Don’t leave a trail a mile wide when you’re in danger. Children are sacred.