Hannah and I have been working that past week on doing a needs assessment of sorts in the hospital to try to understand perceptions of staff (nurses, MDs, MSAs, schedulers, radiology techs, etc.) surrounding pediatric care. The time has flown by, and we're rapidly approaching our fourth and final week here.
I've been thinking really hard about the values I bring to this community. Ever since our lesson from Damon and starting to review teachings on settler colonialism, I have been working through reconciling my own beliefs, habits, and values with that of the community.
Weirdly-- or perhaps not-- this culminated yesterday at the small grocery store in town. A few things to know about the reservation:
1) There's no recycling facility here.
2) It's a food desert. In 2014, >38% of residents of Todd County had a BMI > 30.
3) To get subspecialty services (cardiology, GI, general surgery, ob/gyn), patients have to be transferred to either Rapid City (three hours away) or Sioux Falls (four hours).
Clearly, the recycling thing is lowest on that list of issues to discuss or tackle.
Yet, here I exist in all of my urban privilege, and my cognitive dissonance for the past three weeks includes the fact that we've been sticking aluminum cans in the trash and cardboard glove boxes in the dumpster. It's certainly not my biggest source of distress while working with the community, but it would be disingenuous of me to say that it doesn't bother me, me this guest in the sacred, hard-won homeland of my hosts.
Anyway, we went to the grocery store yesterday, and Hannah and I brought some reusable grocery bags with us-- the ones that live in my car and that I got from Whole Foods (I know, I know) on Selby and Snelling. As I stood there bagging, I had this weird mix of... knowing that I do want to do what I can to mitigate environmental waste and wondering what kind of person I am that I'm thinking about these lofty eco-topics when literally, the morning discussion in the hospital was, "How do we avoid discharging these patients to homelessness?"
I want to be a "good person," and I have a fairly good sense of what that means for me: sticking up for the bullied, recognizing my biases (and working to mitigate them), trying to treat others with respect.
Also: recycling, challenging ideas of fixed gender and sexuality, bringing my own grocery bags, volunteering my time, educating myself on others' perceptions.
So yes, I'm going to continue to try to recycle and bring my reusable grocery bags... but I'm not trying to do it in a way that makes me seem more "woke" or better or worse or... a million things that would be products of the luck I've had in life, starting with being born with lighter skin.
Or, when a community member described to me the sacred and culturally rooted sweat lodge ceremonies, where men and women sit in separate areas of the lodge and my question was: well, how do you include and respect the feelings of people who aren't cis-gender? I didn't verbalize this, of course, but what does it say about me that I was very much distracted by that mind space while being educated on a culture that has suffered the ravages of an unrelenting sort of settler colonialism?
I feel like we're falling down a mine shaft reaching terminal velocity, and here I am fussing that I've forgotten to bring my canary.
Till next time,
Sharon (I beat Hannah to a post....)
