In Ojibwe culture, women are believed to have great power. We are taught, for instance, that our duty is to care for the water, the most important and essential element of life. Our ability to carry our young in our wombs encircled by water influences all human life and bestows us with powers to heal.

The spirit of the jingle dress reflects women’s healing power over life; recognizing this great responsibility, the dancer conducts herself with dignity and humility and the knowledge that she is a symbol of this power.

Today, Native women from many tribes make and dance the jingle dress. Although, women from other tribes may include elements unique to their cultures in the design, the spirit of the jingle dress reflects women’s healing power over life; recognizing this great responsibility, the dancer conducts herself with dignity and humility and the knowledge that she is a symbol of this power.

In contemporary Native communities, women are utilizing this traditional tool of empowerment to draw attention to environmental concerns about water, high rates of missing and murdered Indigenous women, and other issues. Scores of women dressed in jingle dresses danced for the water protectors opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline camped near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota.

I’ve written several articles about these issues as well as the role that the jingle dress is playing in centering Native women’s concern and resistance to challenges faced by their communities. My role as a journalist requires me to stay emotionally removed from the events and issues I cover. Admittedly, this role of objective observer, focused on uncovering and laying bare all nuance is also part of my personality.

However, I am also a Shinnob-ikwe, an Ojibwe women. In the Ojibwe worldview we are a part of, rather than apart from, the earth and its physical and spiritual forces. Sometimes these forces, like the inexorable flow of a river, reach out and encompass us in an unknown mission. We step into the flow, confident that we have an important part to play.

As the daughter of an Ojibwe woman and a White father, however, I am often torn by paradoxical desires to, at once, order and classify life while accepting and celebrating its great mystery. For instance, weary of my probing questions about her history and youth in an American Indian boarding school, my mother often expressed exasperation over my White man’s logic.

“Why do you always have to go poking?!” she would ask.

Why indeed. Although it maddened my inner journalist, I continued building my jingle dress, soothed by the faith that more details would make themselves known.

Sometimes I streamed old movies, like those my mother and I watched together, during my hours at the sewing machine. We loved films with dark and inscrutable themes and characters as well as those featuring triumph of underdogs or of villainous greed and injustice receiving its comeuppance. In the safety of our darkened living room seated before the altar of the television, she would often describe her own underdog story of surviving life at the Sister School, Saint Mary’s Catholic Indian Boarding school on the Bad River Reservation in Wisconsin.

Forced attendance at boarding schools was once part of the federal government’s final solution to the United States’ Indian problem. Cheaper than outright extermination, boarding schools provided a means to assimilate Native children into the great American mass of poor people of color destined to serve White leaders in the new society. At the boarding schools, children were separated from their parents and taught that all things Native including, culture, language, spirituality, and traditions were inferior and should be eradicated. These lessons were often enforced by brutal tactics including physical and mental abuse.

Like many Native people from her generation, my mother was traumatized by her years at boarding school. She was too busy surviving during her lifetime to fully acknowledge, let alone heal her trauma. Her only ally was the chip she carried firmly on her shoulder and the fierce insistence that she wasn’t a “dirty Indian” as the nuns called the children. Her pride in being a Shinnob-ikwe, however, was forever tainted by the shameful lessons of the Sister School.

The dress’s meaning was coming into focus. I was sewing our story as well as our salvation into its seams.

We bonded over her resentment and injustice. Part of my motivation for entering journalism has been motivated by a craving for justice or at least public acknowledgement of what she and others like her endured. In addition to my other reporting, I continue to work on investigating and exposing the history of Indian boarding schools and their contribution to colonial policies designed to eradicate Native Americans.

In addition to her resentment and old movies, we also bonded over bouts of incapacitating laughter and a deep appreciation for the absurd. Once we began laughing over an idiotic remark while carrying a heavy couch up a flight of stairs. My dad found us prostrate, still laughing while the couch rested on our laps.