My Failure

When I look at these images all I see is my failure. Not as a photographer (I don’t think), but as a human being. I was so focused on looking at Maxine through my viewfinder, I completely failed to see her. I knew her last name was Thunderhawk. I knew she was Lakota. But which tribe? The End Village? The Without Bows? The Planters By Water? Was Madonna Thunderhawk, the great Native activist, her great grandmother? Was Chief Thunderhawk, a friend to Sitting Bull, her ancestor? Who of her elders fought at Little Bighorn? Who were massacred at Wounded Knee? Does she believe everything has a spirit? The trees? The rocks? The sky? The murmurations of the starlings? Is Thanksgiving a Grieving?

Why didn’t I ask Maxine these questions, and a thousand more? Was I afraid of the answers - what with me being a white man descendant from white men who made it their religion to disappear her world from the earth? No. Maybe. Yes. I don’t know. All I know is that Maxine unknowingly offered me the gift of a better way of being, and I failed to see it; a way of being that allows her to walk through life with enormous grace and dignity, regardless of the unfathomable wreckage she’s witnessed. She was a miracle I didn’t treasure.

“We were born to wander, to grieve lost lineage, what we did to one another, on a planet so wide open for doing.” - Naomi Shihad Nye