by David Treuer
Sarah began running with other Indian women. “There was this one girl I started running with. She lost over a hundred pounds. Diet and exercise. And together we are like: We can do this. We have to show other people.” She met a serious runner who encouraged her to run a half marathon. “At that point I’d run two miles, maybe three, up and down my road in my sweats. No gear. No nothing. And I was like, ‘You think?’” Her friend paid for her registration and trained with her. “The first time I ran on a trail with a group of Indian women I was like, ‘What is happening right now? I’m out here running in the woods with a bunch of Anishinaabekwe. All these Indian women running through the woods? It hasn’t happened in a hundred years around here!’ And it was one of those clear moments in life. One of those moments you know: This is exactly what I’m supposed to be doing right now. This is exactly perfect.”
From there, Sarah started organizing the group—“like herding cats a little bit”—but at least three and as many as seven of them have run together, long runs of ten miles or so, at least once a week, kids and jobs notwithstanding. She started a private group on Facebook called Kwe Pack. She’d rope in any woman who had ever even thought of running through the sheer power of her enthusiasm. “I became that person. I was like, ‘Hey, if you can run three you can run six. If you can run six you can run twelve. I am the Run Stalker.’” She does it without formal tribal support or grant money or program funds—“Nothing but the will for Indian women to gather and run through the woods towards better health, towards strength and camaraderie.” She keeps it exclusive to women. “We need our own spaces, it’s important we learn how to support each other as Anishinaabekwe.” She does it because it’s important, that’s all. “And I like it like that. I like that it’s just us in the woods—no grants, no supervisors, no paid employees. It’s so important for these women to support each other, to do this together.” It might seem like a small thing Sarah is doing, gathering a dozen or so women to run in the woods, but in Indian country, perhaps the most radical mode of resistance is to choose to be healthy.
Not content with her weekly runs and short races, Sarah has begun training for and running ultra-distance races. Marathons. Ultramarathons. Trail races. “We’re trying to change it back: we’re trying to make it normal to be healthy.” When she first moved back to the reservation, passing cars would slow down to get a look at her, wondering if she’d escaped from the nearby treatment center. “Or they’d ask me if I got a DWI, because I wasn’t driving. It was so abnormal to see Indians out running.” Now, everyone knows who they are. “‘That’s them girls that run,’ they say. Everybody knows us. I try to run in the community so people see us. And we’re making a difference. It’s becoming normal. I feel that shift.” It amuses me to imagine that while the archaeological record from five thousand years ago in Florida and coastal California consists of large shell middens, five thousand years from now, on Sarah’s reservation, the record will likely consist of running shoes, earbuds, computer parts, and vegetables.
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CHELSEY LUGER IS ALSO PART of the force that’s creating the shift toward health. We met in Grand Forks, North Dakota, at Urban Stampede Coffee. Chelsey is short, lean, and muscular. Her mother is Ojibwe from the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota, and her father is Lakota from Standing Rock Reservation, also in North Dakota. Being Indian in Grand Forks meant having white friends. She was a hockey and basketball cheerleader, but also “always the girl in class that they couldn’t joke around with. They couldn’t joke about Native people or black people or gay people. I’d speak up.” Her friends would say, “Yeah but you’re different, your parents have good jobs.” It was true that Chelsey’s upbringing defied the stereotypes about Indians and Indian life. Her parents not only had college degrees and solid achievements but also were deeply invested in their children’s education. Working on her undergraduate degree, her mother had taken her to class as an infant (her mother went on to earn her master’s and her doctorate). “I took my first Indian studies course when I was six months old! I just cannot imagine at my age the responsibilities she had when she was my age.” But, as Chelsey did not hesitate to point out to her classmates, many Indians’ lives defy the stereotypes.
Despite being viewed as an exception, Chelsey didn’t have it easy. Racism and exclusion run deep in places like Grand Forks. “By the time I was in high school I was really a spitfire. I was just pissed off all the time. I was so angry.” She got in physical fights, verbal fights, both in Grand Forks and on the rez. “On the rez I was White Girl, and here in Grand Forks I was that Indian girl. It was constant. I felt like I couldn’t win. I’m grateful for it now. It turned me into a chameleon. I can go anywhere. I can do anything.” Where she wanted to go was out. Two cousins had gone to Brown University. One “put the bug in my head to aim high.” He helped her study for the ACT, and she got into Dartmouth. The college was home to the oldest program serving Indian students in the country and had made recruiting them something of a mission, resulting in the largest and most robust Native student organization of any elite college in the country. Chelsey took advantage of the school’s Native fly-in program to get an introduction. But even at Dartmouth, prejudice followed her. “When I first got in, people always asked, ‘How did you get into that school?’ They thought I got in because I was Native. I mean, I had great ACTs and straight A’s. How the hell do you think I got in? And I wrote a really good essay and I have experiences and I have something to contribute.”
Despite its efforts toward Indians, Dartmouth had a tradition-bound, conservative, privileged student body. It also had a heavy binge-drinking culture. As in high school, Chelsey was accepted, but she’d never partied as she did at Dartmouth. And she was still angry. Yes, she was with people from all around the world, but she couldn’t find her niche. “I couldn’t find a Lakota/Ojibwe/German/French girl there at all! Just me.” She laughs. “I used to get into a lot of verbal altercations.” Once in the dining hall she confronted a fellow student wearing a T-shirt with an Indian head on it. “I’m like, ‘Hey what’s up with that? You know there’s some controversy about that, right?’ He says, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘You know I’m Indian, right?’ He says, ‘Yeah, now I do.’ We get into that whole discussion. He’s getting really uncomfortable. And he’s squirming and I am so happy because he’s so uncomfortable.” He paid for his food and took his tray. “I was behind him. And I’m like, ‘Hey, I’m not done talking to you yet.’ And then I said, ‘You want to say it?’ There’s this stupid chant or cheer: Wahoo, wahoo wa, wahoo wa. I said, ‘You want to say it now? Wahoo WA, motherfucker!’ I said it right when he got to his table full of all his frat brothers. His buddies were laughing at him.” Eventually she realized that her anger was driving her. “I hit rock bottom,” she recalls. “I realized my temper wasn’t doing me any good. I saw that I wasn’t getting through to people that way.” She recognized that she wanted “to carry myself with a certain sense of dignity. And I didn’t want to allow people to make me angry. I realized that anger was a weakness.” Now she thinks that it’s “good to be passionate but not so good to be angry. It’s not productive.”
Her sophomore year, she got involved with the Native community. She had no intention of majoring in Native American studies. “I go to ceremonies. I know my culture. Why would I study it?” she thought. But then an older student told her to take a course with a particular professor and, she says, “My eyes were opened.” She took another course, and another. “Eventually I learned there was all this stuff I never knew I needed to learn but I really needed to learn it.” She became deeply involved in Native American studies, stopped partying, and did well in her classes.
After Chelsey graduated from Dartmouth, she moved to New York and began working in the sex crimes unit of the DA’s office. She had always wanted to be a lawyer, but her work in the sex crimes unit cured her of that. The work felt right, but life didn’t so much. “I was disco
nnected from home. My head wasn’t there. I was avoiding it, I think. I didn’t go to ceremonies for years.” Her parents flew her home for a visit every few months, “but if you’re only there for a week you’re not really there. I didn’t realize it, but I was becoming very unwell. I was so wrapped up in my life in New York.” She was becoming increasingly materialistic and fixated on finding a way to make money and become powerful and make a name for herself. “I was lost. So, so lost. I gained weight. I wasn’t looking like myself.”
She started working out again, harder than ever before, and started serious weight training for the first time. “I’d done a lot of sports but I’d never done that. And I loved it. I got really into it. I started eating better. But still: fitness was about image. About looking a certain way. Get a certain outfit. Get dressed up. Go to the club.” Still, she recognized she didn’t want to be a lawyer, so she decided to go to journalism school. “I was a broadcast concentrator. I didn’t want to be a writer yet. I was, ‘I’m gonna be on TV!’” But exposure to network executives made her realize that “they don’t care about diversity of opinion. They already have their opinions. They liked me because I had that ethnically ambiguous face. Those were terms they used! They wanted me because I could represent Asians and Mexicans and other ethnicities.”
Other changes occurred, too. She stopped drinking entirely. “I woke up one morning and said, ‘I just don’t want to do this anymore.’ I was feeling like: ‘Damn, it’s time to realize, it’s time to know this substance has a spirit. It’s dangerous. It’s out to get me. It’s out to get my people. And it’s doing its job. I’m going to reject this.’ It didn’t matter that I wasn’t an alcoholic. What mattered was that my history, my genetics, my ancestry, is not in line with that substance. My body does not like alcohol. It was a blessing I got that sign before it could really control me. Ever since then, I’ve not drunk. No drinks. Goodbye.”
Bit by bit, Chelsey got control over her life. Like Sarah, she realized that her poor health and poor choices were related to her distance from her culture, religion, and ancestral self. But then, over social media, she met Thosh, a photographer who worked for the Native Wellness Institute. On the way to a photo shoot with him, Chelsey got a call. “Something with my dad was going down in North Dakota and it broke my heart. I started crying.” When she apologized for her outburst, Thosh told her a similar story from his own family. It helped. “And since then, we’ve been close. He was born and raised on the rez, Pima from Salt River, Arizona. We really connected. And the photos turned out great! If you look at those photos, no one would guess I was bawling my eyes out just before. But that was the day: the day we started talking about indigenous fitness. About warrior strength.”
Becoming healthy physically and mentally, Chelsey found, enabled her to relate differently to other Native people, too. “I could better address those I disagree with if I approached them with compassion. I had to swallow my pride and say, ‘I don’t always have to be this angry Native girl. I can channel that anger into productivity.’ It takes a lot to condition yourself, to tell yourself that’s not who you necessarily have to be. To drop that mentality was really challenging. But I still work on it all the time.” Returning to culture, to her Indian self, to an Indian self separate from all the hurt her people have felt, changed her. “All of it instilled in me an incredible sense of pride. I was better able to articulate my thoughts and feelings and better able to understand why my people were in the condition they were in. When you’re able to defend yourself with thought, when you have those tools, you become less angry. Anger is one of the lower entries on the emotional scale. Anger is easy. Jealousy is easy. It’s more difficult to feel compassion. It’s easier to yell at someone than it is to sit across from them and tell them you’re upset. It became easier for me to talk to people.”
As with Sarah, it was social media—being a digital Indian—that enabled Chelsey to extend her reach: out to other Native people and back to the very best parts of being Native. “I realized I had allies across Indian country. It’s crazy I found that through social media because it can be such an unhealthy resource.” Eventually Thosh and Chelsey put their heads together and formed Well for Culture (WFC), an organization that put into practice what they and others had been feeling. WFC is a hybrid beast: part indigenous knowledge clearinghouse, part lifestyle and fitness resource, part political exhortation for Indians to think about their health, and part a platform for Thosh and Chelsey to work with tribes and schools on issues affecting Indian youth. “We’d been chatting back and forth. Maybe make a website. Or do something. We weren’t really doing anything together. Thosh was a photographer. We had common interests, but that was it. We communicated and talked about wellness and fitness.” Thosh was already into the indigenous perspective on it—ancestral diet, Mother Earth gym. Chelsey was still “doing fitness out of insecurity. I wasn’t in a place where I was feeling very confident. Two years later I’m learning more and more about indigenous fitness, ancestral diet.”
But while there are a lot of people around Indian country working on these things, Chelsey knew from experience that there wasn’t a distinct movement, a particular place where people could connect it all. “So I said to Thosh, ‘We should do this: form a website, gather resources for us and for other people.’” They weren’t just focused on weight loss; they were about claiming an indigenous life, bringing ancestral knowledge to bear on health and fitness. “Our people have been healthy for centuries, and it’s only a short while we’ve been unhealthy.”
When they work with kids, they make fitness look cool—by showing how it makes people appear strong and fierce and dignified. “I tell the kids I work with, ‘I used to have all those pictures—holding up drinks, partying.’ But I tell them, ‘You could look like this. And I show them what Thosh and I do. I show them pics of Native people doing cool things.”
They talk to Natives of all ages about how being well for themselves and their families is also a way of being well for the culture. “Because without wellness we can’t have our culture. You can’t go to a ceremony if you’re drunk. You can’t do that stuff if your body doesn’t function properly. You can’t hear stories and get teachings from elders if you’re not well. You can’t sustain your family or teach your children. So if you’re not well, there goes your culture. And it goes the other way, too. I was fit but we weren’t doing well. And it was my culture that brought me to real fitness. And that sense of pride I was able to feel from finally associating all those things back to my heritage, and being able to look at the fitness and wellness movement as ancestral knowledge—that made me so proud and so excited. That’s my culture.” With colonization had come barriers between what had been elements of a holistic culture. “Health over here, education over there. It’s not natural for us. Our Native economies were nonexistent. You couldn’t have an economy without a spirituality. You couldn’t have a harvest without physical health. Everything was intertwined. What we’re trying to do is to re-indigenize fitness. We acknowledge that we can’t turn back the clock. We have jobs. Some of us work nine to five. We are not ‘traditionalists.’ We don’t think we’re going to go back to the way we were before. Our people have always evolved and adapted, and WFC is continuing that path.” Ancestral knowledge, they believe, is a way to move forward, not back.
Fitness can be re-indigenized. Go for a run. Work out outside when you can—Mother Earth gym. “At my dad’s, for example,” says Chelsey, “we are on a ranch and there’s this big yard behind a hayfield full of broken-down cars and tractors and we flip tires and jump on hay bales and pick up a pipe and do squats with that. In Navajo country, you’re not going to drive two hours to the gym but you could hunt or fish—that’s a path to fitness, too.” So is incorporating ancestral foods into one’s diet.
Chelsey is quick to remind me that she and WFC are part of a movement. “We’re not the leaders. We’re not the authorities. We’re not gurus. We’re not the
authors of this. We’re just facilitating this digital space, we are bringing people together.” They see themselves as ambassadors rather than purveyors. “We always tell the kids we talk to, ‘I grew up eating Pop-Tarts and frozen pizzas. I didn’t start eating veggies until college. My mom didn’t make me eat vegetables. My mom was incredible but she didn’t have the time or energy to force me to eat things I didn’t want to eat.’” They counsel people that it takes a little time for the body to adjust to new foods, but all of a sudden “these sweets and plastic foods don’t taste good.” They don’t pressure or guilt-trip, but they do encourage people to change. “These Native kids pay attention. They hear things and they pick up on it and take pride in that. They have answers and they take pride in knowing.” When the kids bring up frybread, they explain that it’s not actually a traditional indigenous food, it’s something Natives had to make do with. “Sometimes people get defensive, but we are able to make the conversation positive. We say we grew up with it and like it and we say frybread is not power. We say frybread kills our people. It’s that serious. It causes diabetes and heart disease. We have to look at those colonial foods as a kind of enemy.” There are other ways for people to claim their heritage. And they see that new sense of direction manifesting in the next generation. “These new kids, something is changing, something is shifting, you can feel it.”
