I'm typing this now while wrapped up in a Pendleton blanket to keep warm while sitting under my porch in a rain storm. A Pendleton blanket is, for American Indians, a traditional gift of highest honor, signifying reverence and gratitude for another. This blanket was given to me by my friend Billy, a Cheyenne man who often helps with ceremonies in his tribe. Billy had asked me to use my computer's hardware and software to transfer songs from an old cassette to a CD, while retouching the sound quality to enhance the recording. I did so, and returned the CD back to him. Billy then presented me with a Pendleton. I was dumbfounded, and could not imagine how recording an audio CD on my computer was in any way worthy of this gesture of highest honor! But then Billy explained it to me.

The cassette had been the last recording ever made of Billy's grandfather, singing ancient Cheyenne prayer hymns and recording dwindling legends. His grandfather had been the last Cheyenne to know some of those ways, and they would have become extinct if the cassette had not been found and preserved. For Billy, this was not merely the creation of a music CD, but the reclaiming of an ancient story passed down. Billy was saving the life of his family story. It was Cheyenne life itself that Billy was inheriting from his grandfather's struggles.

Think about what our entire life becomes on our gravestone: two dates with a dash in between. All our years of living, all our remarkable pain and joy, our laughter, our love, our work, all chiseled into a dash on a stone. There is no legacy in a dash, no record of our failures and successes, no recognition of our healing, no songs about our stories. For our life to vibrate across the edges of a dash, our stories have to be told and they have to matter.

Imagine if we treasured our own stories with the same urgency, the same desperate need for them to survive. Imagine if the narratives of our own lives, even with their painful chapters, were seen as sacred endowments, legends that should be told and passed down to teach future generations. If all our painful memories were seen as teachable heirlooms rather than secrets, perhaps our own grandchildren could look back at our survival and give profound thanks that we dared to survive, dared to preserve our stories, and dared to pass on our knowledge. Perhaps our grandchildren would see us like the Cheyenne people see their elders: as men and women dedicated to enduring their own painful circumstances to pass down profound knowledge and lifeways to future generations. Your wounds are not leftovers from stories of loss, defeat, and humiliation, they are the reminders that future generations need to understand what you have survived so they will value their own lives.