Final Part 🌸🫶🤍 This is me… a Mad Apache Woman

Final Reflection

I have a lot to say, and I have the freedom to say it. To the men and women who gave their lives so I could live with that freedom: Thank you. I hold your sacrifices close. I honor your spirit. I pray for your families. Also, to those who returned from war and still carry things no one else can see, your struggles are in my prayers.

I won’t lie. I’m angry. I started writing this because I was mad at myself for feeling numb. For becoming desensitized to the news of war. For scrolling past conflict like it didn’t matter. For watching people of my generation make jokes about World War III like blood had never been spilled for us. It made me feel like the sacrifices made before… weren’t enough. Like no one remembered, like it didn’t matter, and then that anger grew. The guiltiness ate inside of me, knowing I don’t stand for the something’s as them and probably not the same as anyone else but my own understanding.

“My own ideas and expressions”

I became angry with the federal government, again, for drafting our people into wars when, not long before, they were trying to erase us entirely. Angry that our tribe, Dził Łigai Si’án Ndee, was never offered sanctuary. That we still don’t have a treaty, and then I asked myself: Do we even want one? our sovereignty wasn’t granted. It was fought for, we never gave up. We kept running. We kept hiding. We kept fighting smart, for five (5) years after Geronimo surrendered. Until the government had no choice but to recognize this land as ours. Not as a gift, but as a last resort. Even then, they gave us a system, a colonized system, that tries to silence women like me. That still upholds patriarchy in a matriarchal society. Until now, I never thought of myself as a strong woman. I never called myself a warrior, but writing this? Sitting with my anger, my grief, my fire? Now I know. I come from fighters. From survivors. From matriarchs who stood their ground so I could be here. I am here to teach my son to be a good man. To lead a health program with the lives of my Apache people in my hands. To wake up every day thinking of them and how I can do better. I don’t need my staff to give 100% every day. I just need effort. I need presence. I need those with fire in their hearts to stand with me. To rise with me. I lead a program of frontline workers, overworked and underpaid, who still show up. They speak the language of their mothers; they teach health and healing on land that was once soaked in resistance. They are warriors too.

I Pray for my community, I Pray for my family, that whatever fear or doubt lives in their hearts is met with reassurance, and if not from me, then from someone they trust. Writing and reflecting… now I know who I am. I live in the White Mountains of Arizona, in a home filled with love and prayer. Sometimes I must step back, that sometimes, I must let go, and this this is how I let go. I write.

I am Nicole, From the connecting Pinetree People of Carrizo, Arizona... If someday my son reads this, I hope he knows his mother walked with spirit, not shame, and he comes from the kind of love that even hardship couldn’t destroy.

If you’ve read this far, I thank you.

I hope somewhere in these words of rage and prayer, of ceremony and truth, I’ve planted a seed in your heart.

A seed of awareness, if you’ve never seen the world this way. compassion, if you’ve never carried these kinds of burdens. Most of all, Hope, the kind that grows wild in the mountains, that survives fire and returns in the spring.

From one mad Apache woman to you… may that seed take root make you braver with your truth, more awake to the world, and that you realize your voice holds much power when you choose to use it.

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