Gratitude

President Ronald Reagan was quoted as saying, “Enjoy life, it’s ungrateful not to.”  And this month since the topic is cultural revitalization, let me offer my paraphrase/spin on this quote . . . “Embrace your Indian-ness and your Indian culture, it’s ungrateful not to.”  Too many people have sacrificed too much and so many others continue to fight the good fight so that you may enjoy this choice.

I am an Indian professional.  I get to choose being an Indian and being a professional. And I am well aware that I am lucky. I know that for folks like my father, as a young man trying to provide for his family in bigoted and segregated Southeast Alaska, this was not a choice he believed he had. As well, he did not think he got to choose to be Indian and choose to have a job at the local mill that allowed him to provide life’s comforts for his family.  I have written before about how that I believe that my father’s willingness to fold his Indian-ness and place it safely away in a drawer each day before he went to work, was a sacrifice he made so that I can wear mine so casually and effortlessly each day.

If you would like we can have that side conversation again, about courage and bravery, and how I believe that these are virtues more afforded by some given time, social context and economics.  I will continue to argue that we as Indian professionals today can more easily obtain these virtues, mainly because of the sacrifices and bravery of those who came before us.

So since it is January and I am preparing to write my thank you notes to all those wonderful folks who have reached into their pockets and made the personal financial sacrifice to support the work we do here at First Nations.  Let me also take the time to express my everlasting gratitude to some of the folks who have come before me and whose past and current bravery allows me daily to embrace and own my Indian-ness.  To my Indian hero’s – Jim Thorpe, Vine Deloria Jr., and Elizabeth Peratrovich, Gunalchéesh (Thank you).  To my mentors, Tom Vigil, Rebecca Adamson, David Lester, Rick Williams, John Echohawk, Marguerite Smith, Lucille Echohawk, and many other mentors and colleagues too many to mention, Gunalchéesh (Thank you).

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