Ten Things I Learned from Writing my Memoir

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7. I am not a first-generation college student.  I thought that I was the first to finish high school. And I thought that I was a first-generation college student.  As it turns out, my grandfather had a formal education at Fort Shaw Residential School.  And he went on to attend Haskell Indian Nation University in Lawrence, Kansas.

   He did not have the right to live the life of an educated man.  America wouldn’t allow it.

   It is up to us to live a life that our anscestors could never dream of living.

8. It was okay for me to attend college. I was never called into the counselor’s office my senior year at high school.  A line of students visited her for advice on universities. Not realizing that it was up to me to make the appointment with her, I mistook it that I was not college material.  It verified that I wasn’t smart enough, old enough, or cool enough.

   I attended Texas A&M when I was in my 50s even though I felt a twinge of guilt while sitting at a classroom desk.  I still waited for permission from someone else. 

   It was always okay.  Now I get to tell that to myself.

9.  I am a descendant of the residential schools.  Lots of people don’t know what a residential school is. Children were kidnapped by the American government and forced into overcrowded schools to erase their identity.  They were beaten, raped, and killed.

   
   

   My grandfather was one of them. And residential schools played a major role in how my family operates.  It helped me realize that some of our choices were written for us before we were born.

Unspoken past is a shadow that affects our heritage.

10. I could have been illiterate, but instead I became an adult who reads the dictionary for fun.

    
    

    My father’s girlfriend, Clara, spent time with me at our kitchen table to teach me the alphabet and letters when she discovered that I couldn’t read.

    
    

    Her patience changed my life.  I don’t know what I would have become without her.

    
    

    One moment can rewrite an entire life.