Anger As Inheritance
Letting go of anger is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself and those around you.
If you’re Indigenous and if you breathe air, you wake up every day before your feet even touch the ground with enough reasons to be angry.
I’m not talking about being mildly annoyed.
Not slightly perturbed.
I’m talking about burning it all down, righteous fucking anger.
We grow up being taught to laugh and smile through the hard stuff. Laughter is medicine, after all.
We grow up and grapple with Angry Indian tropes from lazy mainstream media sources and the Hollywood blockbuster system that still uses them.
We grow up not knowing what we’re even angry about.
We grow up knowing something is wrong and that the heartsick rage that follows us like our shadow does on a sunny day, no matter what we do to shake it, will be there until the light leaves. And when the light leaves, the rage doesn’t.
Some grow up on the front lines of protestations and conflict.
Some grow up in a swirling cycle of intergenerational traumas that may never leave them.
When you close your eyes to sleep at night you might remember hearing the fights, the parties, the yelling. You might remember feeling the hunger and confusion of not having enough. You might remember wishing you were anywhere else.
And. If you’re lucky, you grow up not knowing any of these things.
Colonization leaves us Indians brokenhearted before we even have the language to articulate what it is we’re feeling.
We’re born with it, a broken heart. It’s our inheritance.
The hole in our hearts gets filled with booze, sex, food, drugs, gambling, bad relationships, and whatever other self-limiting, self-harming thing we can find to fill the hole for reprieve from every cell in our body, trembling in fear that we might feel that anger again.
You learn to live with it, eventually.
It limits you, but you grow a hardness that leads you into the stumbles and falls you’ll undoubtedly face in your life.
But eventually, the anger makes you tired.
Then, eventually, you grow tired of being tired from being angry.
This is where I’ve been for a couple of years now. I’m tired of being tired from being angry.
I want to live. I want to be free. I want to enjoy every small, forgettable moment the day offers me because I’m alive and living in a place of love.
I’m still angry at times. But I recognize it now, it’s a bad spirit that comes to visit. It sits on the edge of my desk and taunts my self-pity and doubt about myself.
Anger finds me when I read news of the continued dehumanization of Indigenous Peoples in our homelands.
Sometimes, the anger comes to remind me of the hurt and ashamed little boy inside me.
If you ever come to my house and smell the leftover linger of sage and sweetgrass, you’ll know that anger spirit was around and that I needed help.
I’m essentially an atheist in my mind, but in my spirit, these medicines wash the anger away when it finds me. The medicines tend to my spirit, and rather than kill myself slowly with booze, food, or drugs, I let the burning medicines fill the hole in my heart, and I ask the medicine to be patient with me because I will need to use them again soon.
After I smudge, I have to choose how the rest of the day will go.
I have to choose to write through the anger and hope that wherever the words take me is a place that is kinder, gentler, and more open to the Anishinaabe worlds my words aim to (re)build for my children.
I allow my words to feel the pain and the anger because this feeling is temporary.
My spirit, your spirit, is stronger than you or I know.
Let your spirit do its work while the burning medicine smell lingers.
Then you will be free.
Medicine smells in the air.
Truth, truth, truth, truth, truth.
Well said.