July 23, 2024
Written by Colleen Roan, Coordinator of the McKinley County Early Childhood Coalition
Sometimes I don't feel like an advocate. I wonder if I am effective and advocating in the right way. What I do know is that I am passionate about the well-being of our children and communities and this is where my advocacy begins. I believe I'm headed in the right direction because of spaces I choose to occupy, such as the Peer Learning Cluster with Vital Village which I joined as a learning opportunity.
Through active participation in the Peer Learning Cluster, I've learned from others on their own journeys. Writing this blog has also been a learning experience, pushing me to reflect and share my thoughts. By reading and researching more, I'm developing a clearer idea of what I want to achieve in advocacy. In this piece, I want to share how incorporating new information has evolved and clarified my stance and helped me understand my advocacy.
My advocacy involves generating and defining power by rethinking what it means to me. We're so accustomed to living someone else's dream. We're so accustomed to living within the white supremacy culture and its ways of generating power. Many of us don’t realize the impact it has on our lives since we are born into the culture.
Living in someone else's dream. It's really a big disconnect and the root of many traumas. My dream, what could have been my dream, my people's dream was erased. So on my advocacy journey I acknowledge that I'm living in someone else's dream. How do I get my own dream back? How do I advocate to retrieve what could have been mine?
To reclaim my dream, I feel a need to adopt a different mindset about power. What kind of power do I envision? How can we use it to benefit our communities, and not be driven by profits, capitalism and individualism?
My vision of advocacy begins by connecting with like-minded people that seek to use power to benefit everyone in the community. It begins with reflecting inwardly, and understanding wants and needs with a holistic perspective.
What I would like to see is collective healing. Learning how to heal ourselves. Indigenous/native people have been living within someone else's dream, a dream that systematically enculturated indigenous people and engineered language loss. What could our dreams have been if indigenous cultures and languages were allowed to remain intact post-colonialism? One principle I’ve encountered for collective healing is to be a “good relative.” This concept can be painful for some due to personal experiences of abuse. Understanding where our trauma stems from and recognizing that it doesn't have to be this way is important. I feel the need to explore alternative ways of seeing ourselves, our relationships, and the world.
My mom always said that learning to have good relationships within our own family, with my brothers and sisters, teaches you how to build relationships outside the family. Relationships are the glue that binds people together and helps them survive. It's all about building and maintaining these relationships within our communities and for our people.
Being a good relative emphasizes maintenance and valuing of relationships and our purpose, especially in times of conflict. It involves rethinking our actions and holding onto teachings that prioritize relationships. My journey in advocacy focuses on understanding these values and applying them to foster change and awareness in our community.
Healing begins with self-awareness but extends to the community. Together, we can advocate for a better future for our children and families, by actively healing and dreaming of a different way forward. Advocacy can start at a personal level and expand to local and community levels, eventually influencing policies and legislation. Relationships are everything and it takes time to develop and maintain them. From my experience, that’s a big part of healing. Relationship building is a guide to healing.
Our Grandmothers Would Weave
We’ve been listening to many young moms throughout the county, we ask them, "What do you need? What would you like to see? What would you like to experience to support your wellbeing?" Many of them mentioned weaving. This might be seen as just a skill or an activity offered in the community, but it’s about much more than learning how to weave.
Our grandmothers would weave, and there are many cultural teachings behind weaving. The young moms wanted to learn about it because they didn’t have grandmothers to teach them. They didn’t have others in the community who would provide that opportunity at no cost. So, we brought this experience to the community. Individuals with the specific traditional cultural teachings, songs, and awareness of ceremonies were sought and those individuals shared their unique cultural stories and songs in unison with instruction to put a weaving loom together and place the warp on the loom and weave. Young moms experienced the historical cultural significance of the act of weaving and its impact on a woman’s power to envision, create and weave individual expressions of beauty. When others look at the act of weaving and loom building, they might see it as an activity, just something to do, but it was an act of healing for some. The experience is related to finding who we are, finding comfort and strength in hearing the native language as it conveys teachings and concepts of how to be in the world from a particular cultural perspective.
I’m on this journey, discovering who I am. Part of that journey involves reclaiming original identity, which was stolen. Historically, there was an attempt to "kill the Indian and save the man." When we consider the historical policies of the earliest boarding school era, when removing children from their homes and prohibiting use of a child’s native language was imposed, then examine those experiences and how they impact child development and formation of self identity, there is a profound impact which resonates today. We know this as historical trauma. Young children and youth were taken from their homes and systematically had their identities suppressed and erased. What does that do to people? Understanding this and seeing the impacts on our people is crucial.
I know the need to reclaim my native language as a part of my identity, and to feel whole. What does it mean for others to have a strong sense of identity, and how does it hurt us if we don’t have that?
To Be In Harmony
In Native culture, there is a concept and a word for maintaining balance. This is the way to be in the world: to be in harmony with everything around you, including the environment. Everything is based on maintaining this harmony. It determines how you walk through life and where you want to be. Achieving this balance is a lifelong journey, and maintaining harmony is a central teaching and takes work through meditations, prayers, ceremonies. Yet how do you maintain harmony throughout your lifetime with everything happening around you? This guidance in the form of cultural songs, prayer, cultural teachings and ceremony is crucial, as it is a unique cultural way of being that is transmitted through the language. Language acquisition and maintenance is essential to understand the intent and thought process behind the songs, stories and prayers during a ceremony. Understanding the language offers a different way of thinking and understanding the world.
This guidance is helping me throughout my lifetime and will take me into old age. For example, understanding my responsibilities as a grandmother encourages me to make improvements toward a healthy lifestyle to maintain my health and harmony. I want to be present for my children and grandchildren as long as possible. This is one way to bring culture forward, by thinking and planning for the next generation.
Today, we see a lot of cultural appropriation, a byproduct of the roots of American individualism, which continues to cause conflicts for Native people. The concept continues to permeate and allow people to feel privileged to take and claim what they assume they have a right to. When individuals take something, believing they have the right to it, because they have the right to heal, it’s time to pause and reconsider the premise of the act. If you want to heal, how can you appropriate or take someone else's spiritual practices and cultural knowledge without consent to do so in the name of healing? Healing should look different, engagement could be relational in our journey to heal.
Personally, developing a lens to be an informed advocate is crucial. It's significant for me not to act as an advocate through a white supremacy culture lens. There's a conflict there that will be navigated thoughtfully. Developing good relationships, being a good relative, and maintaining balance and harmony are the strategies I want to cultivate to navigate the path to advocacy without furthering conflict.
Colleen Roan, M.Ed. is a member of the Navajo Nation, residing in Window Rock, Arizona. Her maternal clan is Naneesht’ezhi T1baaha (Zuni Waters Edge People Clan), paternal clan is Kin[ichii’nii, (Red House Clan), maternal grandfathers are Tohtsohnii
(Big Water Clan), and paternal grandfathers are Kinya’11nii (Towering House).Her interest and focus have been in the field of early intervention and special needs services. Her current position as the McKinley County Early Childhood Coalition Coordinator entails partnering with stakeholders and creating a more cohesive, equitable and effective early childhood system and coordinating a continuum of family driven, community based, high quality prenatal to five programs and services that are available and accessible to all families in the county.
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