It's kind of hard to start out with a love poem
because you have to work up to it.
I'm going to read a story next.
I was prompted to read it.
I saw this advertised as Women and Remembrance.
And I guess if I think of remembrance,
I think about how much I'm charged with remembering now
that I have a granddaughter.
And my granddaughter was born almost three years ago
here in Tucson.
And I had thought--
you know, I remember stories of my birth, my mother's birth,
and I remember what I went through,
having my son and daughter.
And I thought, well, things have changed.
I hear all this great stuff about birthing
rooms and how everything had gotten so much better.
And when my granddaughter was born, I learned differently.
It was very odd.
It was as if I were watching my own birth happening
all over again, and was part of the same system of butchery.
And my granddaughter made it, but I was so angry,
I had to do something.
So I wrote this story to talk about this whole process.
So this is called "Warrior Road."
"I awakened in the early morning in the stuffed back room
of my mother-in-law's small rented house with what
felt like hard cramps.
At 17 years of age, I had read everything
I could from the Tahlequah Public Library about pregnancy
and giving birth.
But nothing prepared me for what was coming.
I awakened my child's father and then ironed him a shirt
before we walked the four blocks to the Indian hospital
because we had no car or no money for a taxi.
He had been working with another Cherokee artist, silk screening
signs for specials at the supermarket, making $5 a day,
and had to leave me alone at the hospital
because he had to go to work.
We didn't awaken his mother.
She had to get up soon enough to fix breakfast for her daughter
and granddaughter before leaving for her job
at the nursing home.
I knew my life was balanced at the edge
of great precarious change, and I felt rather alone
and cheated.
Where was this circle of women to acknowledge and honor
this birth?
It was still dark as we walked through the cold morning
under oaks that symbolize stubbornness and endurance
of the Cherokee people, who had made this town their capital
in the new lands.
I looked for handholds in the misty gray sky for a voice
announcing this impending miracle.
I wanted to change everything.
I wanted to go back to a place before childhood,
before our tribe's removal to Oklahoma.
What kind of life was I bringing this child into?
I was a poor mixed blood woman heavy with a child, who
would suffer the struggle of poverty, the legacy of loss
in this beautiful land.
For the second time in my life, I
felt the sharp tug of my own birth cord,
still connected to my mother.
I believe it never pulls away until death,
and even then, it becomes a streak in the sky,
symbolizing that most important Warrior Road.
In my teens, I had fought my mother's weaknesses
with all my might.
And here I was at 17, becoming as my mother, who was in Tulsa,
cooking breakfast and preparing for the lunch shift
at a factory cafeteria, as I walked to the hospital
to give birth.
I should be with her.
Instead, I was far from her house,
in the house of a mother-in-law, who
later would try to use witchcraft to destroy me.
After my son's father left me, I was prepped for birth.
This meant my pubic area was shaved completely,
and then I endured the humiliation of an enema, all
by the hands of strangers.
I was left alone in a room painted government green.
An overwhelming antiseptic smell emphasize
the sterility of the hospital--
a hospital built because of the US government's treaty
responsibility to provide health care to Indian peoples.
I intellectually understood the stages
of labor, the place of transition, birth.
But it was difficult to bear the actuality of it
and to bear it alone.
Yet in some ways, I wasn't alone,
for history, too, surrounded me.
It is with the birth of children that history
is given form and voice.
Birth is one of the most sacred acts of which we take
part and witness in our lives.
But sacredness seemed to be far from my lonely labor room
in the Indian hospital.
I heard a woman screaming in the next room with her pain
and wanted to comfort her.
The nurse used her as a bad example
to the rest of us, who were struggling
to keep our suffering silent.
The doctor was a military man, who signed on this watch--
not for the love of healing or out
of awe at the miracle of birth, but to fulfill the contract
for medical school payments.
I was another statistic to him, and he touched me
as if he were moving equipment from one place to another.
During my last visit, I was given
the option of being sterilized.
He explained to me that the moment of birth
was the best time to do it.
I was handed the form but chose not to sign it
and am amazed now that I didn't think too much of it
at the time.
Later, I would learn that many Indian women who
weren't fluent in English signed,
thinking it was a form for giving consent for the doctor
to deliver their babies.
Others were sterilized without the formality of signing.
My light skin had probably saved me from such a fate.
It wouldn't be the first time in my life.
When my son was finally born, I had been deadened
with a needle in my spine.
He was shown to me--
the incredible miracle nothing prepared me for,
then taken from me in the name of medical progress.
I fell asleep with the weight of chemicals
and awoke yearning for the child I had suffered for,
had anticipated in the months preceding
from his unexpected genesis, when
I was still 16 and a student at Indian School.
I was not allowed to sit up or walk because
of the possibility of paralysis, one of the drug's side effects.
And when I finally got to hold him,
the nurse stood guard as if I would hurt him.
I felt enmeshed in a system in which
the wisdom that had carried my people from generation
to generation was ignored.
In that place, I felt ashamed.
I was an Indian woman.
But I was also proud of what my body had
accomplished despite the rape of the machinery of bureaucracy.
And I got us out of there as soon as possible.
My son would flourish on beans and fry bread
and on the dreams and stories we fed him.
My daughter was born four years later,
while I was an art student at the University of New Mexico.
Since my son's birth, I had waitressed, cleaned hospital
rooms, filled cars with gas in a miniskirt,
and worked as a nursing assistant.
I knew I didn't want to cook and waitress
all my life, as my mother.
I had watched the varicose veins grow branches on her legs.
And as they grew her zest for dancing and sports dissolved
into utter tiredness.
She had been born with a caul over her face,
the sign of a gifted visionary.
My earliest memories are of my mother
writing songs on an ancient Underwood typewriter
after she washed and waxed the kitchen floor on her hands
and knees.
She wanted something different with her life.
She had left an impoverished existence
around 17 years old, bound for the big city of Tulsa.
She was shamed in a time in which
to be even part Indian was to be an outcast
in the great American system.
Half her relatives were Cherokees
from near Jay, Oklahoma, who, for the most part,
had nothing to do with white people.
The other half were musically inclined white trash
addicted to country Western music and Holy Roller fervor.
She could disappear in the city.
No one would know her family or where she came from.
She had dreams of singing and had once
been offered a job singing on the radio
but turned it down because of shyness.
Later, one of her songs would be stolen
before she could copyright it and would
make someone else rich.
She would quit writing songs.
She and my father would divorce, and she
would be forced to work for money to feed and clothe
four children, all born within two years of each other.
As a child growing up in Oklahoma,
I liked to be told the story of my birth.
I would beg for it while my mother cleaned and ironed.
You almost killed me, she would say.
We almost died.
That I could kill my mother filled me
with remorse and shame.
And I imagined the push-pull of my life, which
is a legacy I deal with even now,
when I am twice as old as my mother was at my birth.
I love to hear the story of my Warrior fight for my breath.
The way it was told, it had been my decision to live.
When I got older, I realized we were both nearly casualties
of the system, the same system flourishing
in the Indian hospital, where my son, Phil, was born.
My parents felt lucky to have insurance,
to be able to have their children in the hospital.
My father came from a fairly prominent Muskogee Creek
family.
His mother was a full-blood, who, in the early 1920s,
got her BFA in art.
She was a painter.
She gave birth to him in a private hospital
in Oklahoma City.
At least I think that's what he told me before he
died when he was 53 years old.
It was something of which they were proud.
This experience was much different
from my mother's own birth.
She and five of her six brothers were born at home
without any medical assistance.
The only time a doctor was called
was when someone was dying.
When she was born, her mother named her Wynema,
a Cherokee name my mother says means beautiful woman,
and Jewel, for a can of shortening stored
in the room where she was born.
I wanted something different with my life, for my life,
for my son and my daughter, who later born in a University
hospital in Albuquerque.
It was a bright summer morning when
she signaled she was ready to begin her journey.
I still had no car but had saved money for a taxi ride
to the hospital.
I could look out the hospital window
while I was in labor at the bluest sky in the world.
She was born naturally, without drugs.
I had support.
A few days later, Rainy Dawn was presented
to the sun at her father's Pueblo
and given a name that she will always
be recognized as part of the people, as a child of the sun.
That's not to say my experience at the hospital reached
perfection.
The clang of metal against metal in the delivery room
had the effect of a tuning fork, reverberating fear
in my pelvis.
After giving birth, I held my daughter,
but they took her from me for processing.
I refused to lie down to be wheeled to my room
after giving birth.
I wanted to walk out of there and find my daughter.
We argued a compromise, and I rode in a wheelchair.
When we reached the room, I stood up,
and walked to the nursery, and demanded my daughter.
I knew she needed me.
That began my war with the nursery staff,
who deemed me unknowledgeable.
Once again, I felt the brush fire of shame,
but I learned to put it out much more quickly
and demanded early release so I could take care of my daughter
without the judgment of strangers.
I wanted something different for my daughter, Rainy.
And as she grew up, I worked hard to prove that I could
make something of my life.
I obtained two degrees as a single mother.
I wrote poetry, screenplays, became a professor,
and tried to live a life that would be a positive influence
for both of my children.
My work in this life has to do with reclaiming
the memory stolen from our peoples
when we were dispossessed from the lands east
of the Mississippi.
It has to do with restoring us.
I am proud of our history--
a history so powerful that it both destroyed my father
and guarded him.
It's a history that claims my mother,
as she lives not far from the place of her mother was born,
names her as she cooks in the cafeteria of a small college
in Oklahoma.
When my daughter told me she was pregnant, I wasn't surprised.
I had known it before she did, or at least
before she would admit it to me.
I felt despair, as if nothing had changed, as if nothing ever
would.
She had run away from Indian School with her boyfriend,
and they had been living in the streets of Gallup,
a border town notorious for suicides
and deaths of Indian peoples.
I brought her and her boyfriend home with me
because it was the only way I could bring her home to Tucson.
At age 16, she was fighting me, as I had so fiercely fought
my mother.
She was making the same mistakes.
I felt as if everything I had accomplished had been in vain.
Yet I felt strangely empowered, too,
at this repetition of history, at this continuance
by a new possibility of life and love,
and steadfastly stood by my daughter.
I had a University job, so I had insurance
that covered my daughter.
She saw an obstetrician here in this town,
who was reported to be one of the best.
She had the choice of a breathing room.
She had the finest care.
Despite this, I once again battled
with the system, in which physicians
are taught the art of healing by dissecting cadavers.
My daughter went into labor a month early.
We both knew intuitively the baby was ready.
But how to explain that to a system
in which numbers and statistics provide
the base of understanding?
My daughter would have her labor interrupted.
Her blood pressure would rise because of a drug
given to her to stop the labor.
She would be given an unneeded amniocentesis
and would have her labor induced after having
it artificially stopped.
I was warned that if I took her out of the hospital
so her labor could occur naturally,
my insurance would cover nothing.
My daughter's induced labor was unnatural and difficult,
monitored by machines, not by touch.
I was shocked, for I felt as if I come full circle,
as if I were watching my mother's labor and the struggle
of my own birth.
But I was there in the hospital with her,
as neither my mother had been for me or her mother for her.
My daughter and I went through the labor and birth together.
And when Christa Ray was born, she was born to her family.
Her father was there for her, as were
both her grandmothers and my friend
who had flown in to be with us.
Her paternal great grandparents, and aunts,
and uncles had also arrived from the Navajo reservation
to honor her.
Something had changed.
Four days later, I took my granddaughter to the Saguaro
forest before dawn and gave her the name
I had dreamed for her just before her birth.
Her name looks like clouds of mist
settling around a sacred mountain as it begins to speak.
A female ancestor approaches on a horse.
We are all together.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
It's important for all of us to tell these stories
because this isn't just my story.
If I asked for a show of hands.
A lot of people have gone through this.
It needs to stop.