We, the people.

Even if you don’t have the words, trust that they are there.

I haven’t been very vocal lately, at least not here. Every time I return, I tell you how much I’ve missed you. And it’s true; this newsletter is the one place where I have direct contact with the people who read my work. There is no middle-man, no publisher or editor, no enterprise. It’s just me. And it has become the one place where I can be myself.

So if I’ve been a little quiet, it’s because I’ve been working full-time as a photojournalist. My camera sometimes feels like an albatross around my neck, this weight of documenting the way things are changing.

It’s also been freeing, this capacity I have to tell stories through images. Most of my work has been with words, so picking up a camera again has been a return to my first professional love: taking photos.

The face I make when talking about the newspaper industry 😆 … 📷 by Dave Labelle from the Northern Exposure photojournalism conference at University of Minnesota's Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication. I was asked to speak about my role as photo editor to students studying journalism.

But what have I been doing as a human being? Not as a person with a job working in media and a code of conduct and a set of standards and expectations and deadlines and editors and publishers and enterprises around me. What have I been doing as a person with a beating heart and a set of pipes?

What do we do we’re caught between these two worlds? Take vacations? I did take a week off to return to Montana, and while I was there, I took part in a poetry open mic at Kirks’ Grocery. It was the first time sharing new work aloud since moving to North Dakota. I nearly forgot that part of me that needs open mics, needs that place to hear my words spoken, to see how they feel leaving my body. How they land on others.

I shared this one, made from a recent argument. Isn’t that how they all start? 😆

Love letter to my partner

If we end up in another Great Depression, I got you, boo.

I come from a long line of newspaper-under-bed hoarders,

egg carton stackers,

The ones who kept butter wrappers in freezers,

Cut away mold and picked the chickens clean, then cooked the bones — it’s not witchcraft, but it’s close.

Toil and boil,

Guard the hearth,

Fix the suppers, have the babies to raise by cauldrons and asphyxiate slowly,

Ladle by ladle —

The dirt and worms of our cellars calling us home.

If I don’t make it in this world of DoorDash and weekly meal kits delivered in styrofoam,

Put on my tombstone: She died doing what she loved.

Don’t forget: you’re here forever.

The Mother shall have the body when oceans run the world.

And all this time we didn’t even know that heaven grows within.

***

It was a gift to be back in Montana, to be with the people I know the best. As I was running around trying to soak up everything I loved about my life in Billings, I realized that I put a lot of expectations on myself to be ever-present. To be the arts booster, the documentarian, the public voice.

But there are so many voices that need to be heard. I’ve been learning the ways of getting out of the way, to listen more than I talk, to observe more than I shoot.

Moderating a panel discussion with some of the most brilliant women I know, Linda and Janine Pease of the Apsáalooke Tribe. 📷 Talena Peterson

When I moved, I began to remove the parts of me that I felt obligated toward, and it’s allowed space for new work and projects that are of the most urgency to me. I returned to Montana to moderate a panel discussion with some incredible women — Linda Pease, Janine Pease, Bethany Yellowtail and Lucy Real Bird — who came together to discuss Voices of Women, a project launched by Thresh founder Preeti Vasudevan. I first met Preeti on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, where she was working with others from Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Collective. I am still sitting and processing the knowledge shared, but it was freeing to come home for such an event and return to the space I’ve carved out for myself in North Dakota.

It’s quieter up here, but I haven’t been sitting in stillness. I have been furious and writing daily.

I asked my friend Chris La Tray how much anger is too much anger, and being someone who runs a newsletter called “An Irritable Métis,” I figured he was a good authority on the subject.

“I’d say let it rip. We need more righteous female anger,” Chris told me.

Yet, female rage is a different kind of beast. When women are angry, we are overreacting. Shrill. But our anger tells a story, one of deeply simmering rage that lives in our bodies, has been passed down from seven generations of mothers. It can also eat us from the inside.

Storytelling is survival. And if that story is rage, it needs to be let out.

It’s such a great gift when somebody gives you their story to share. I know we need more storytellers than ever before, and if you’re a storyteller — even if you aren’t able to share what you write publicly — your story is valid. So is your anger.

Even if you don’t have the words, trust that they are there.

PS: If your actions seek to harm others, you should rethink the side of history that you’re on. We are born of this earth and we will return to her, and we deserve dignity and respect and housing and a say in how our tax dollars are spent and a free press that reports on the doings of elected officials that we put in power. We, the people, deserve this. We, the people, should never settle for less.

It is we, the people, who have the loudest voice.