311: What if you danced for those who couldn’t?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. I felt like I was living a double life. This one life where, you know, I'm flourishing as a person and on the other side I have my family that's really suffering. It always sort of felt like a weight that I was carrying around or that even maybe I was hiding.

It made me feel like I couldn't experience joy. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 311. What if you danced for those who couldn't?

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Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. National average 12-month savings of $744 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary. Discounts not available in all states and situations. My name is Erin Goodpipe. I am a Dakota, Anishinaabe, and Nehiyaw woman. Basically a mix of prairie indigenous nations.

I have status membership on Standing Buffalo Dakota Nation, which is a First Nation reserve about 45 minutes northeast of the city of Regina in Saskatchewan, which is where I partially grew up. I am a wife, a mother, and an eldest sister to six younger siblings, and I have many adopted relatives through Teochpe, or what we call our extended slash spiritual family.

I wanted to open up this way because it's a cultural practice. It's an ethic that we have. It's a spiritual practice. We want to announce to the spirit world around us that this is who we are. And we do that as an accountability measure so that when we speak, we speak with intent. We speak with honesty and with respect. But we also do this to introduce ourselves so that people know where we are coming from and where their knowledge is grounded in.

Dakota is a part of the Oceti Sakowin Oyate, and we are a First Nations Indigenous group that spans basically all of the Great Plains. So that's within Canada and the United States. My reserve is called Standing Buffalo Dakota Nation, and it's a small band that's here in Canada, but we actually have migratory roots from in the south, from north and south Dakota, and

Oftentimes my people are labeled as like refugees, having to do with European settlement and colonial forces, what we call the medicine line, which is the United States-Canada border. But my people have been here for thousands of years before that medicine line was created. And we actually followed the buffalo and they're a big part of our ceremonies.

Their pattern again goes as far as the Rocky Mountains and then eastwards, what we would call Ontario and then very south and very north. So again, my people had a large territory. And so we're not refugees. Just at that time in the 1800s, we were driven north and had to settle and pick reserve land. So that's where we ended up. And that's where my family comes from on my mother's side.

The other parts of my bloodline are Anishinaabe and Neheyo. Anishinaabe, you might also hear the word knockaway or Soto. Neheyo refers to the Plains Cree people. Those are all parts of my bloodline. My grandparents had gone to residential school, which is a schooling system that was a cultural genocidal policy that Canada had implemented and forced Indigenous people to be in.

Young kids, basically as young as like five years old, were forced to attend these boarding schools. If parents didn't want to put their kids in those schools, they would be jailed. The reason that they did this, and this is quoted even by Canadian government officials, was that they were trying to kill the Indian in the childs.

They didn't want Indians to be Indians, right? They wanted to assimilate them into so-called civilized society. So they wanted to cut them off from their languages. They thought their cultural practices were less than or even like devil worship. So they wanted them cut off from those things. So you couldn't even see your family at all or very limited. You weren't allowed to speak your language. There was a lot of abuse. You were forced to practice Christianity, right?

The students' curriculum wasn't about like math and sciences or helping them to get a job. It actually was a lot of like laborious work or doing chores or tending to like the maintenance of the residential schools.

These boarding schools were a partnership between the churches within Canada and the government to assimilate Indigenous people. So thousands upon thousands of Indigenous children were forced to be in these systems. And not only were they separated from their families, but they also endured immense abuses. They were emotional, they were physical, they were spiritual, there were sexual abuses.

And this was done by priests in those schools. This was done by faculty. These are people that were supposed to be people of God. These are people who are supposed to protect and be teaching children. Upon entering residential school, they had their hair cut, which is actually quite devastating to Indigenous people because we grow up knowing that our hair is tied to our spirit and

They were given different names. They weren't allowed to take anything from home. They weren't even allowed to talk to their own siblings. Little kids grew up with their indigenous mother tongue. And so when they were forced to go to these schools, they didn't know how to speak English, right? They weren't taught yet. And so how were they supposed to communicate? So I grew up hearing these stories repeatedly.

My grandpa would speak in his language and one of the nuns slash teachers would make him stick his tongue out and he'd have to leave it out for like hours and hours and hours. Or he would have to put his hands out and get whipped in front of the class for speaking his language.

You know, it's a really normal thing to grow up and hear those things. But only recently did people begin to pay attention because bodies were found around residential schools and that became a big media frenzy. However, for Indigenous people, again, we had known of these stories. There were stories of girls getting raped by priests even and being forced to get abortions.

girls being killed by faculty members for not listening. There was suicides in these places because obviously the children were enduring all of this abuse and not having any sort of supports or connectedness to their communities. But we knew about these things.

The light that was given in the media narrative around it and the attention it got was so needed. But again, it was like, why hadn't you listened to us when years and years and years we kept saying this? And even there was commission after commission by the government where our people were talking about these things and detailing these stories and yet nothing was being done. My grandparents, by the time they got out of school, they didn't really have a connectedness to their community.

You know, in Canadian society at those times, there's a lot of racism, right? So you didn't want to be speaking your language. And there's so many older people who didn't pass down the language because they didn't want their children to be made fun of. They didn't want them ridiculed. They didn't want them to face racism. So there was this big shame around being Indian.

Not only that, but like a concept of love wasn't even there. That's something we hear from the testimony of our elders is that you grow up from the ages of like five to 18 or 19 and you're not really nourished emotionally. You're not even allowed to be affectionate with people, right? Like you don't have role models. Now you're, you know, all of a sudden a young adult that's thrown out into the world, a racist world, a racist society, and you're expected to somehow thrive, right?

Now these are people who were also highly abused in these systems. So now you have people who begin to drink or drug as a way to cope with their traumas.

Many of them began to start having children and not knowing how to parent, not knowing how to have healthy relationship dynamics. And so it was this compounding issue of generations of young people who were having to deal with their traumas and starting families and being very ill-equipped on top of dealing with systemic racism.

We believe in something called blood memory, basically that your DNA carries generational memories. We carry the memories of our mothers and fathers and our grandparents and so on. And so when we talk about our story, I believe that those memories become activated. So of course, it's very hard and sad to recount the difficult stories of our family members, but also it's living in our veins.

And so it's activating and evoking an emotional response from us. That's what was going on with my grandparents. And, you know, they ended up dying really tragically, really violently.

So as a young person, my mother really struggled with not having her parents. She was surrounded by so many aunts and uncles who were fresh out of residential schools. And so my mom was in foster systems. She was living with her relatives and, you know, she didn't really have a healthy home life. Oftentimes there's a lot of drinking that was happening there and not a lot of food.

By the time she was 14, she herself was already engaging with some pretty negative behaviors, getting into violent fights. She was involved in hard drugs. There was a beginning of prostitution in those years. My dad's parents also grew up in Winnipeg on the reserve. My dad had a group of Native friends, so did my mom, and so they got connected.

My dad's aunts and uncles and his parents, they were also dealing with, you know, different addictions, whether that's alcohol or drug abuses. And by the time he was in his teenage years, was kind of getting involved with like gangs and, you know, he'd gone to jail for a stint. By the time my parents conceived me, they actually weren't together.

I was born in Vancouver. My parents were 18, 19 at the time. This is the time when my mom actually had tried to quit drugs and drinking because she was pregnant and was involved with a different man who stepped in to be my father for a bit. We moved constantly from Vancouver to Regina back and forth.

There were some times where I was in foster care systems because my mom was, you know, she was on welfare or she was even prostituting at times. And we also were evading social services at times. Like I remember my mom trying to abduct me from foster care system. By the time I was five, I had an understanding of a lot of different things maybe that children shouldn't know.

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I remember her giving birth to my sister and it was just me and her in the hospital room.

A practice that happens to Indigenous women is that social services will get involved, especially if they can see drugs or alcohol in your blood. And a social worker was coming to visit and my mom told me to hide under the hospital bed so that they didn't know I was there or that they couldn't just take me because that happens where they'll have, they'll even have like a social worker and a police officer or security come in and they'll actually apprehend your kid like right there.

So my mom had just given birth and I was hiding and they actually ended up taking my little sister Cheyenne from the hospital right then and there.

But I have this clear memory of my mom going and phoning my grandpa, which is my dad's dad, who was in Vancouver and saying, I need you to come and get Erin. Social services is going to take her. And when Indigenous children end up in a system, it's really hard to get them out because there's a lot of hoops that the system will make you jump through to get your children back or even just to have your children in the same family.

My grandpa got on a bus right away and I remember him coming and it was such a fun thing. I was so excited. I remember being on the bus and just being so excited to see my grandparents. You know, they were people that I really looked up to and more like parents to me than my own parents.

My grandma was waiting there with her long hair and just being so excited that I was going to stay with them. And of course, missing my mom terribly. But this mixed emotion of, yeah, here I am. I get to be with my family. And at the same time, my mom is so far away from me. And I was concerned about my sister Cheyenne because I just loved her too. And, you know, I was there when she was born. So it felt like immediately we had this really powerful bond.

So I spent some years with my grandparents in Vancouver and this is where I began to get close with my dad and he had had another partner. Eventually I lived with my father and they were kind of getting their life together. You know, it was like a picture of home for once.

My dad was a steel stud framer, so he was working all day and my stepmom was also working. And my stepmom, Brooke, was really important in my life because she actually had such a maternal bone. Like she cooked meals and read books to you. And Brooke was probably an introduction to making family memories in a way that I hadn't before.

They ended up having two daughters, Jordan and Alyssa. And this time with my dad and my stepmom, Brooke, and, you know, my mom having another partner, this was some of the most beautiful memories that I can recall because it felt like, you know, we had moved around so much, but at least I had, you know, a few years of an intact family.

But eventually, my dad and my stepmom, they fell back into their addictions, basically, and parted ways. I believe I was about 11 years old when that happened. My mom came and picked me up on the weekend. And she just said, grab what you can.

Honestly, this is probably harder than living in poverty and not having any sort of experience of having something healthy and good, because it's like having something and then having it taken away from you and knowing that experience almost made it worse.

You know, when you're poor and you don't have a lot, the only thing you have is each other, right? And so when my mom would get into fights with her partners, we would lock ourselves into a room and we just sort of have a mattress on the floor and just be laying on the floor and just that feeling of like, hey, we're all together. It was the best feeling ever, actually, even though bad things were happening.

You know, I just wanted my family to be together. I wanted my mother to be healthy and whole. I wanted her to be addiction-free. That really set me up in a way to want to succeed in life, but also it created a situation for me where I felt like I had to take care of everybody and that maybe my life wasn't my own. I just so badly wanted to make them feel good. And I can remember these feelings as far back as being a three- and four-year-old, you know, and wondering, like, well, where is my mom, and is she okay?

Even though like I was a kid who was also experiencing my own emotional situations, like being in foster care system. It set me up as a young person to be sort of people pleaser or sort of parental young person. And by the time I was coming into adolescence is where I actually really stepped up to be a parent in my family life because I have six younger siblings.

And it felt like my life was defined by the troubles that my mom was facing. Something that's very prevalent in Indigenous people is grief and not having the healthy ways to cope with it or work through it or process it.

And what I saw in my family at a very young age, we had buried a lot of people. A lot of people died unnaturally or very tragically, either through violence. My reserve at one point had the highest rate of suicide in the entire country.

a lot of health complications because of drugs and alcohol. And so you normalize that people are going to die young. And I watched specifically my mom, but many other family members deal with that grief. And not only have you lost somebody, but you're dealing with the trauma of how they died. Very unnatural and traumatic ways that people are dying.

And as Indigenous people, I feel like we were born grieving right from the womb. If everything that you're seeing is this normalized idea of trauma and negativity, it becomes sort of a hopeless situation or it feels hopeless. And you can also internalize racism too, that, hey, I'm going to be a drunk Indian that's going to die young. And so beginning at the ages of four and five, I actually would start to imagine my mom dying.

I would imagine her funeral. I would imagine like what it feels like. And I would try to put myself in that situation so that I could prepare.

Despite all of her faults and the traumas that she was embroiled in, my mom did a really important thing, which was that she was very proud of who she was as an Indigenous woman. She wasn't necessarily like the most ceremonial traditional, but we'd always go back to attend the powwow on my reserve, which happens in August.

When I was 11, we went back and my auntie Glenda was living on the reserve with her sons and we stayed with them.

One thing that I really appreciated about my time there was being with somebody who was clean and sober. Like my auntie, Glenda, was the only one out of her family that decided to get clean and sober when she was 23 and really set an example for me. And I was introduced to elders there who were involved in ceremony, who were living healthy. And here I was, all of a sudden, I had a sense of belonging and people who were proud to be Indigenous people.

You know, I was going to ceremony weekly. We do things like sweats and, you know, we smudge all the time. We pick medicines. You know, we went hunting. We had like all these different healthy practices that I had never seen growing up. My mom, she would often say to me, like, I don't know how to be a parent to you. I'm a fuck up and I don't know how to parent you, but I love you and I'm trying my best. But here now in the res, it's like I could see Indigenous people who weren't just the stereotype.

I was on this journey now to learning about and revitalizing those traditions. And alongside that, I had these amazing advocates, these elders and knowledge keepers protecting the environment. They were advocates in the child welfare system. They were speaking up against the injustices that we were facing. So as a young person, I started to go with them. Honestly, it's the most revolutionary thing just to sit down and to listen.

I was understanding where my parents had come from and why they had certain traumas. It was healing to me. It was healing to have that understanding and to have a way to move forward, which is through our traditions. You know, I love my mom, but there's a lot of emotional manipulation that can happen when you're in that sort of relationship with somebody who has addictions.

You know, there was a lot of violence in the home between my mom and her partners and needing to be basically like a referee or shield my siblings from what was going on in the home. Like it wasn't uncommon that I would see violent, violent situations like knife fights and knocking people downstairs and running people over. And it's a really hard thing for a child to have to negotiate constantly in their head, like these moral dilemmas.

I'm trying to figure out as a young person, like what's right and what's wrong. How do I intervene? How do I help a situation? And it really caused a lot of what I call confusion fatigue. Essentially, I was just confused about how to navigate a situation, how to pick what was right and wrong. My heart intuitively wants to support my mom. She's the person I love the most, but I could see that she was doing things that were really wrong.

It was turmoil. I sometimes would equate this to feeling like I'm in a war zone. I feel like I don't own my life. As a 14, 15-year-old, I just had realized I can't live in this situation anymore. There's too much confusion, fatigue. There's too much violence. There's a sense of hopelessness here. I'm internalizing that I'm nothing. And I decided to leave home.

The thing that was the most hurtful about it was that I would be leaving my younger siblings. You know, like who's going to step in for them? So, you know, I had moved away from home, but I always went back home to go and visit. I just remember my mom, her sadness would become so much that she would want to take off. She'd like leave us for days or weeks and she'd go to like Vancouver, what we would call like Skid Row.

Growing up, we would go and look for her down there. She'd even be high on drugs and she would evade us because she didn't want us to see her like that. I had this specific moment where I remember coming home. I think I was 16 at this time and my mom asked to borrow money. I was just getting to a point where it was like, I can't be putting her drugs and alcohol first.

And I don't make a lot of money, you know, like I'm working as a waitress and trying to go to school. And I honestly was living check to check. I was in this place within myself where I was like, well, it's my survival or it's your drugs. You know, she was getting really upset at me. And finally, I took my money out of my wallet. And I said, if you love your drugs and your alcohol more than you love me, then take it and just leave. And she took the money.

I walked to the bus stop and I remember just sitting on the bus and I just remember a waterfall of tears coming out. Actually letting myself feel pity for the first time for myself, feeling so terrible for myself and actually seeing the situation. But out of that sadness, I realized I have to have a boundary with my mom. I'm also not going to succeed in life if I'm continually siphoning money to my mom or to other relatives who are embroiled in addictions.

I just realized how lost she was in that moment, that that wasn't my mom. This is addiction speaking. It was an important turning moment for me where I had realized that I had put my own needs away as a young person. When I decided to have boundaries and to leave home, I struggled so much with a sense of guilt that I wasn't there, especially to protect my siblings or my mom. I actually had some of my siblings come and stay with me as a teenager.

I was living on my own and going to school and working and I also was being a parent/guardian to some of my younger siblings. You know, I had so much guilt that somehow I couldn't fix this or that I wasn't good enough for my parents to put away their addictions and choose us.

At this point in my life, I'm 18 years old and it's been a few years since I have left home and I'm on my own. And I've gone from couch surfing to having my own place and then I'm trying to finish school and I don't have a lot of support.

It feels very isolating. You know, I just remember working shifts like waitressing and coming home, taking the bus and being home at around, you know, 11 o'clock, sometimes later, trying to do homework in that time frame or trying to help my sister. And, you know, I just wanted to be like my peers. But I knew I couldn't be like my peers because so many of them were just going to school and they were partying on the weekends and could just have normal friend relationships. But by the time I was in grade 12, I knew I didn't have time for that.

I was a parent or guardian. And so I isolated myself from even making friends because I knew I couldn't sustain them. There was times where I couldn't even make class. Like I remember choosing to take shifts for work. And so I had some teachers pull me aside and really question what was going on. And I had this really great guidance counselor. He's a native man and he could relate to what I was saying. And he decided to see beyond that I'm missing class.

I also had these other teachers who stepped in and were like, you know what, we're going to go beyond even our own policies and we're going to make accommodations for you. So, for example, I had a science teacher say, if you can take this test and pass it, then you're fine to miss some class. I remember the principal pulling me in one day and I was freaked out. I just remember sitting in his chair and I'm like, oh, I'm going to get expelled. And him just asking what's going on.

I was actually kind of embarrassed. It's funny how there's a shame for the things that were going on that were very much out of my control. But I felt sort of like this dirtiness around being in poverty. He said, you know what? I believe in you. I think you're going to go on to do brilliant things, but you need to get this out of the way first. And so we're going to support you. Then I learned that I wasn't going to graduate on time. I think I was a few classes short.

So I had to take some summer classes and I had no idea how I was going to pay for them because they're like $300 a pop. One day I went to talk to the people and try and make a payment plan. And they said it's already paid. Someone came and paid it. And I said, well, who was it? And so they looked up the name and it was one of my high school teachers. She had paid, I think like six or $800 at the time that was like rent and food for, you know, like the whole month.

They weren't supposed to give diplomas early, but the principal called me down to the office and he had gathered all of my teachers. And he gave my high school diploma to my guidance counselor. And he said, I think you deserve to give this to her. There was like five or six people there because I wasn't going to get like a normal graduation. And so they came here and they just said how proud they were of me. And, you know, that really fueled me.

Even though my life was really difficult and I had circumstances that were really hard, there was always somebody that took a moment to say that, like, I believe in you. And that goes a long way. I went into university, you know, as a feeling of like, wow, I've made it here. And I really blossomed as a person. I attended University of Regina and First Nations University of Canada, which is an institution that is rooted in Indigenous knowledges, essentially, and rooted in community knowledge.

Now I was surrounded by people who wanted to do better in their lives, who came from places that I came from. I was also learning from Indigenous professors who literally could like academically show me the research about why my family was the way that they were. And I remember phoning my mom and trying to reiterate these things to her and, you know, kind of going over her head a little bit because she's not maybe in a place to receive that and feeling really sad about that and almost like I was leaving her behind.

You know, we have this phenomenon that happens in our communities. We call it acting too good. We'll label someone like, hey, you're acting too good, like you're too good for us, basically, because you're wanting to be better in your life or do better. Sometimes there's some truth to it, but most times it's people who are caught up in their own cycles wanting to put some blame.

I could feel that that was happening with my family, that because I was separating myself from those unhealthy lifestyles and trying to live a different lifestyle, I felt sort of isolated and lonely. At this time in my life, you know, I'm 18, 19, 20, 21. I'm going to school. I'm getting lots of opportunities, things that I couldn't even dream up or think of.

I started to do arts-based research within Indigenous communities around the suicide epidemic that was happening within our reserves. Then I began to get theatre training. All of a sudden, I had a community and a family. We were challenging the system while also being on the front lines and listening to communities as far as the needs that they had. I switched my program into Indigenous education.

This is a real time of growth for me. And I'm also trying to maintain my relationship to my mother. It sort of seems like a faraway world. My mom is having a very hard time. Shit really hits the fan. One day she phones me and she's crying her eyes out and she goes...

Your siblings were taken from school, right from school. I had no idea. We went to go pick them up and they weren't there. And the principal basically said that social workers came and took them. So they had actually been working in partnership to apprehend my siblings.

So my siblings are in foster care and my mom's health is deteriorating. She's dipping into addictions in a really heavy way. And her mental health is declining a lot. You know, she gets diagnosed with different mental disorders. She's losing her mind, like a mother who's lost her kids and can't have contact with them. For her, it was the end of the world. Like she was stripped of the one thing that gave her a sense of purpose.

I felt like I was living a double life. This one life where, you know, I'm flourishing as a person. And on the other side, I have my family that's really suffering. It always sort of felt like a weight that I was carrying around or that even maybe I was hiding. It made me feel like I couldn't experience joy. And so I actually felt like I wasn't experiencing my own life that I was sort of watching it as much as it felt good.

At this time, I'm 21 years old and I'm going on a trip with my friend. We're actually going to Standing Rock Reserve. They're fighting a pipeline that's illegally being built on their reserve and on their lands. And they're protesting because they believe that the water could be contaminated.

We're gearing up to go there and be with relatives at this big camp. And there's many nations coming from all over the place. So I was very excited. You know, I remember leaving the city with this friend and my mom phones and she's upset. She's sort of erratic. But I feel like oppositely, I'm like riding a high right now. I'm excited. I'm on a trip, feeling invigorated to go defend our rights at this camp and meet new relatives.

You know, I'm trying to listen to her respectfully. But then I say, hey, mom, I have to go. Like, we're going to this camp and I'm really sorry, but I'll talk to you later about this. And I said, I love you. And she understood. She said, yeah, okay. My friend and I went to this camp

And we get there kind of late and it's, you know, it's really beautiful. There's so many nations that are there. And I've heard that these are where my relatives come from, actually. So there's like this deepening feeling of like lineage here. And again, like we're fighting for water and for the generations to come.

We've had some relatives from Mexico, actually, who have a teepee in a camp and they're willing to let us be there. And I'm so cold that I can't even sleep. And, you know, I'm kind of tossing and turning and trying to get warm and I'm drifting off. And I feel this buzz of my phone. It's my sister, Cheyenne, and she wrote, she's gone. And I just remember time stopped.

Like it feels like it's outside of life almost. I just remember the feeling of air coming into my lungs and then breathing it out. And I actually felt this like intense release and it felt good. Actually, it felt reassuring. The feeling that I got was that my mom is at peace.

I remember just like staring up and I could see the teepee poles together. And it was a weird mix of this is intense. Like I'm outside of life right now. And I'm here in my homelands technically. And my mom has just passed on. Oh, and that's tough. Yeah, it's a strange moment. And then I just remember like one single tear coming.

falling from my face. I remember it because it was warm and I was so cold. I didn't cry that whole time that I was in Standing Rock. I think it was actually because I felt sort of like the ancestors were there for me or responding to me and that the timing of that was correct for some reason, that it was perhaps Creator's way of aiding me in a situation where

After that, I obviously texted my sister and, you know, she told me that she suffered an overdose, a fentanyl overdose on Hastings Street, which is where my uncle lived. I knew that would be hard for him and...

I was thinking about my siblings and thinking about what needs to happen next. You know, I immediately also started praying about like create or protect my family during this process, because again, I had watched so many of my family members pass on and then we couldn't cope with it. Right. I was like, please don't let this destroy me as a person. Give me healthy ways to cope with this for my family too. That was my prayer at that moment was like, please protect us in this grieving state.

And again, it just felt so meant to be. Like this was the moment that I had prepared for my entire life. And here it was now. And now I had to walk it out and somehow be there for my family and for myself and set an example also.

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I remember waking up and having to sit in the truck and say, hey, I found out that my mom died yesterday. And I just asked him, I don't want this to be a big sad day. We're here. I want to celebrate life. I want to celebrate why we're here. And he supported that. It was such a great day, actually. Beautiful, amazing day. And death has that power, I guess.

My people believe that those who are grieving are in a sacred space and that we should actually surround ourselves with those who are grieving because of that sacred space. When people are grieving, they're more alive. They're alive to life and death.

So we want to feed off of some of that energy because they open our eyes to the positionality that we are actually in as human beings. And it makes us live in a different way, which is why we're supposed to love and support and be surrounded by those who are grieving.

She wanted to be buried on our reserve with our family. She really valued her identity as a Dakota woman. So I knew she wanted a traditional burial. And we have our own ways of mourning and processing and actually sending off somebody spiritually. There's certain ceremonies and rites that we have to perform. And I knew I had to honor her that way as well.

Essentially, we have community members come and we pray together and we speak to our relative who is on their spirit journey. And so we have this opportunity to pray for them as they keep going. And we tell them not to look back actually, too. Like we say, you know what, we're OK, keep going.

So you learn a lot about love and grief in that process. And my people, again, we have this way of viewing grief as very sacred and necessary to recognize how much grief has to do with love, because a great grief is actually born from love. My mom, she was suffering a lot.

She was a broken and hurt person who truthfully she would even use with her own words that I can't do this anymore. And I knew that it wasn't that she was like walking out on us, that she didn't love us. And of course, it's sad when somebody can't heal. You know what? Like that's some of my deepest regrets for her is that she in this lifetime couldn't get to a place herself where she could be a flourishing person.

But I was reassured for her to move on, for her suffering to end. And even selfishly, the weight being lifted off of our family because she was a lot to deal with too. Her suffering became our suffering. And that's something that's not talked about a lot in grief and dealing with people who have family members or loved ones who are addicted to

I've grown now to realize that two things can be true at once, which is that I loved my mom and also that she was the hard person to live alongside. You know what? The two can coexist just as grief and love can coexist too. I once heard a very prominent Indigenous elder say that as Indigenous people, we carry our ancestors with us wherever we go and that's what separates us from non-Indigenous people.

And I think that's really true. I think we walk with a sense of lineage in a way that's really present for us. You know, I was thinking about my mom and she didn't pass on from natural causes. So you have to unpack the trauma around how she died and how she lived. And it feels like actually that I had to rectify or live for her.

And that's a huge burden, actually. It's a huge expectation to always want to do the best, want to be the best, want to be perfect. Those qualities in me are born out of my mom not being able to heal or maybe live the life that she imagined.

There are times where I feel like I'm not doing enough. Even if I've like reached a great accolade, you know, or something that like nobody's done in my family or just in general, like I've been the first Indigenous person to do something, right? And I still feel like it's not enough or I haven't done it correctly or something. And I know that that's born out of this expectation to live out a great life for my family, for all of the relatives who couldn't.

We say that in some of our communities, dance for the people who can't dance. Blood memory says that I'm carrying my mom's memories in me. And it's my job to either rectify it, whether that means living my own life in the best way that I can, or if it actually means breaking specific generational cycles.

The truth is, is that as Indigenous people, we live in hard realities. We're up against a lot. And within us, we have a lot of healing to do based off of the memories that we carry, those experiential memories that we carry in our blood. However, the other side of that, which is a deep part of our healing, actually, is that we also carry the blood memory of resilience and strength. And we carry that enduring spirit of our peoples.

I'm enriched by my trauma in a way. I know that sounds strange, but it gives me a depth of understanding around life that other people can't have. You can't go to school and learn about it. You can't read a book. We say this oftentimes in ceremony, actually. Nobody can teach you this. It's the experience itself and the way that you process and internalize and live out that experience that eventually shape how you walk.

And so with my grief walk, I understand that my mom was a beautiful person. I understand that she went through some hard things. I understand also that she had a choice and that, you know, she screwed up at times. There's a lot of pain in the world. Life is painful. And it's our responsibility to do something about it. And in the midst of that responsibility and how we act is what defines our life.

So grief is a beautiful thing. My life is a beautiful thing. Trauma even can be a beautiful thing. And that's the power of choice. We're all living out a story and we have stories within us. We're surrounded by stories. We adopt stories into our narrative and we also have the power to change stories. So I know that I have that power to change the story. And even though I've gone through trauma, how I rectify that is changing the way that I view it and then trying to walk in that a different way.

Over the last seven years, since my mom has made her journey onwards, there have been a lot of changes. You know, my siblings are becoming adults. Bo, Arrow, Lily, my sister Cheyenne, my sisters Jordan and Alyssa. I want to celebrate the incredible work that they're doing just by being alive because all of our parents are essentially are on the streets dealing with drugs and alcohol and have sort of abandoned their children.

So they're doing a lot of work as young people to try to live healthy lives. And I just really commend them for that work. And I'm grateful to be a sister to them.

Over the years, I've taken on trying to be this parent role to them. You know, I've always wished for and hope for the time when we can be just siblings, where we can enjoy things together, enjoy life together, have a friendship, right? And I think we're getting to that place. So I'm happy that we can depend on each other. I'm looking forward to a sibling relationship of respect and friendship where we can heal together.

Growing up, I had a great sense of conditionality around love and I'm learning to undo some of that conditionality. So I'm really deepening the sense of like, I don't have to strive to be acceptable. Like I actually have inherent value. Like with my husband,

He grew up in a totally different way where there wasn't conditions around love. It was like people just love each other and gestures or actions are born out of that. And there's no like having to give back or there's no catch to it. And so I'm trying to work and undoing that in my marriage where it doesn't feel like I have to strive for somebody's love that this person actually values me without having to do something.

It's honestly refreshing, really difficult and completely revolutionary to accept love and receive it, to know that this person sees me and that I can give that too. I hope that I can carve out a life that honors my mom and in extension, my relatives, but also that I can carve out my own life so that it can honor generations to come. Specifically, I think about my son and I think about giving him unconditional love and

and creating a situation for him to grow up in that's not traumatic and that he is equipped with the tools to survive life and thrive in it also. Even though each generation is becoming healthier, there's a duality here around the reality of Indigenous peoples that so many of us are still living in harsh reality.

But it takes generations. And there are a lot of us who are healing, who are revitalizing, who are rising up. Now that I'm in a state where I can be free to unpack what my dreams might be, it's an amazing gift. And I hope to be able to do that for my son and other young people, Indigenous people especially, so that they can unpack their gifts and serve others with their gifts.

Today's episode featured Erin Goodpipe. To learn more about Erin and her work, you can find her on Instagram at e underscore goodpipe. Erin is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and researcher involved in a number of media projects, including as a co-host of Treaty Road, a television documentary series exploring the history and present-day state of the numbered treaties in Canada between the Crown and Indigenous peoples. You can find out more about the project at treatyroad.ca.

Aaron's story came to us by way of Todd Rennebaum. Aaron was originally featured on Todd's podcast, Bunny Hugs and Mental Health, which focuses on conversations with survivors, professionals, and families of those who have lost someone to mental illness and addictions. So please check out Bunny Hugs and Mental Health. And a special thanks to Todd for referring today's guest.

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Hey, it's Guy Raz here, host of How I Built This, a podcast that gives you a front row seat to how some of the best known companies in the world were built.

In a new weekly series we've launched called Advice Line, I'm joined by some legendary founders and together we talk to entrepreneurs in every industry to help tackle their roadblocks in real time. Everybody buys on feeling, Guy, like everybody. So if you don't give them the feeling that they're looking for, they're not going to buy. A lot of times founders will go outside of themselves to build a story. And

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