Decolonizing Love
Focusing on what we don’t have is a sure way to despair, focusing on what we have in different ways has saved me for years
On this Valentine’s Day, in the midst of the damage of the first month of Donald Trump’s second presidential term, it’s important to remember why the act of decolonizing love is how some of us make it through these times.
I began this process of decolonizing love when I turned 35 years-old. Until then, I had this pre-programmed idea of what love was in my head. Love meant I had to be in an exclusive, monogamous relationship with a husband who was “my equal” or “better than me.” Then, we would adopt or I would have my biological children by surrogate. No shade to anyone who has that plan, but for the life I actually wanted to live, that would have been a nightmare. Seriously, I’m just grateful the deprogramming took while I still had time.
The decision I did make was rooted in my recovery practice of letting go of my self-will, stop trying to “be successful” and actually live into and enjoy the success I had.
This process of decolonizing my concepts of love is how I approach my life in the here and now. In addition to amazing work that I read like Herrera Words on how Queer identity only adds to the freedom and liberation of what love is, deconstructing my colonized views on love have helped me to get clear on my values and why I do what I do.
ROMANCE is not the only kind of love.
With all due deference and respect for my life-givers, I am in this phase of my life of separating what they gave me and deciding how much of it I get to keep and what goes onto the altar to be remembered but not used every day. This part of my life is also forgiving my parents for being messy human beings and accepting that, with one monumental exception, they did not actively intend to harm me. They loved me, they loved my siblings (adopted and biological), and they loved their grandchildren with every fiber of their being, and they did the best they could with the information they had at the time.
All that being said, they were great role models on how to express love outside of romance.
In the family I grew up in, words of affection were for the children. When my nephew came along, I remembered that my father stopped being affectionate with me and told me I was growing up now, so it was time to start caring for my nephew. As a child, I was confused by this but when I saw that his routine—hugging and tickling until laughter erupted as he said, “my precious, sweet little baby”—was transferred from me to my nephew as a toddler, I understood that children, our sacred little ones, needed that affirmation to be happy.
So as an adult, I learned how to express how I feel outside words of affection.
In 2011, an ex-boyfriend I had been in contact with began telling me about his circumstances in rural Iowa. Over the next few weeks, his situation grew more dire until one night, he said that he needed to leave where he was living with his friend soon, before she could evict him. I drove about 300 miles from Rosebud to where he was living to pick him up, bring him to my home on the reservation until he could get back on his feet. Predictably, it did not end well for us.
But so much of how I demonstrate my love for others is to, well, demonstrate my love for others.
Why colonization and Catholicism fit in my culture is because we were sold on the idea that faith without works is dead. In fact, the promise of words is something that I, as an actively decolonizing Indigenous person living outside of my community, am mindful of whenever others expect me to say or write things. It is one thing to express a sentiment in the ephemera of desire and emotionalism, but until that sentiment is used to motivate and move action, they are just words. And like the treaties our ancestors signed, words are meaningless unless they’re backed up with demonstrable action.
Rather than talk about what I would do to prove my love for the people I care about, I generally think it’s best just to do what they ask rather than make a speech about it.
MONOGAMY is not the only kind of relationship.
Among Indigenous people of Turtle Island, large families are not unusual. So many memes center around the idea that we have more cousins than most people have in their entire family trees, or that we don’t have such things as grand-uncles, second cousins, or half-siblings. But the way we got to that place goes back to the days before colonization.
Many Indigenous people were polygamists.
In my family, my older cousins are quite scandalized by the reality that Iron Shell had several wives, at the same time. The Catholic cousins explain it away by saying they were more elderly women who were taken pity upon and brought into the family. The misogynist cousins think it was nonstop debauchery that we should bring back. The truth, as with most things, is somewhere in between.
Iron Shell had anywhere from 3 to 12 wives in his lifetime.
But unlike the colonized perspective, he was no great patriarch ordering them to his bidding. The older wives usually decided who the next wive would be based on her family, her values, and her ethics. They were not concubines, but managers of an entire extended family, providing childcare, cooking, producing products, looking after the horses and allocating resources within our large, extended family.
Not all marriages are about sex.
My older cousins do have a point in that not all Iron Shell’s wives were married for purposes of procreation. Some may have been adopted as a humanitarian manner. An old story in our family tells us that Iron Shell met an elderly woman sitting on a large boulder while they were traveling with the camp. He asked why she was there and she told him that her family couldn’t care for her anymore, so they left her there. He put her on the travois and she was cared for in his family for the rest of her days. Again, romance is not the only kind of love.
Acts of such devotion ensured that my family wasn’t just my family, but an extended family where no one is ever alone.
When my parents died, I had cousins that I leaned on for years for support. They were there for me and I for them. They are my siblings in the truest sense. I think about them often and while I regret that time and space separate us at times, I know we are all here for each other because our ancestors made the same commitments to each other.
CAPITALISM is not the only expression of affection
In our culture, acquisition is part and parcel of how we express our love for one another. Not just in terms of the price of things, but in terms of the forethought and research, or in the searching and patience. How many of us grew up with expectations of a perfect engagement ring, or an ostentatious proposal, or even how we tell the world what sex organs our children in utero will be born with? In these times, asking someone to the homecoming dance is a social media event that grooms children to believe that ostentation and show will lead to an acquisition: a date for the dance.
We are trained to believe that the harder we work, the more of a person we are entitled to be a part of or, in extreme cases, to own.
When my parents wanted to demonstrate their affection to one another, my mother would make my father’s favorite foods. When my father wanted to show affection, he’d make her something with his hands, be it a rebuilt car engine or a new winter coat. They made things for each other, like their parents and grandparents did.
When a proposal for marriage was made, it wasn’t just about horses presented to the family of the bride, it was about the dresses adorned with the finest elks’ teeth or best quill work.
One Christmas in my early recovery, I had little money and a lot of friends, not an ideal situation. But I could sew and I had access to free burlap and felt. So I made everyone I knew pillows. While the initial novelty of receiving something homemade subsided, I would notice where these pillows would be put in their homes, always in a place of prominence. These things we give to express our love are more than just tokens, they serve as active reminders of how love is a reciprocal and mutual condition.
In these days of Trump attacking everything we hold dear; it might seem quibbling to be thinking about how we think about love today. But as the road that helped us make progress on QTIBIPOC issues illustrates, love for our people is what sustains and drives us, over the fear of the unknown. And as we continue to wrestle with different points of view in our own communities, it’s important to be flexible and understand how different people in our movements view concepts so fundamental as love.
And like the book says, love wins.