Serene Thin Elk: An invitation into collective, generational healing (Ep446)

Written By kamea chayne
“The greatest honor in my work is to be a witness and a presence to generational healing in real-time.”
— Serene Thin Elk

A lot of people seem to be struggling with our senses of belonging.

So many people have been uprooted and forcibly displaced. Many have chosen out of free will to relocate. Many are born into places where they don't have deep ancestral roots. And many don’t have the privilege of feeling like their families and communities with whom they grew up are safe spaces to call home and find healing within.

But if truly holistic medicine is tied to culture, to community, place, and the land, what does it mean to nurture collective healing and rebuild community in a vastly diasporic world?

In this episode, Green Dreamer’s kaméa is joined by Serene Thin Elk, who gently guides us to unravel “trauma” in historic, individual, community, and environmental contexts, while beckoning us towards collective, intergenerational healing.

We invite you to…

 

About our guest:

Serene Thin Elk, MA, LPC-MH, LAC is a L/Dakota clinical addiction and mental health therapist and mother to four beautiful children. She is from the Ihanktonwan and Sicangu Oyate in South Dakota, and her personal and professional passions focus primarily on Indigenous collective healing and educating others about historical traumas and how this translates to present day experiences of Native people.

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interview transcript

Note: Our transcripts are minimally edited for brevity and clarity as references only and do not have word-for-word accuracy. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored.

Serene Thin Elk: I grew up in South Dakota. I'm Ihanktonwan Nakota – known as the Yankton Sioux Tribe – on my mom's side. That's where I'm enrolled. And then on my dad's side, he's Sicangu Nakota. So he is Lakota. In South Dakota, there's something known as Oceti Sakowin, or the Seven Council Fires. And so within that, there's Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota.

All of those are just different language dialects. For example, to say “thank you” in Lakota, that's Pilamaya with the “L”, and in Dakota, it’s Pidamaya. There are some very close (words) in our language, but there are some differences in words and a little bit within our even our own cultures within that. 

I grew up in South Dakota, mostly in Vermillion, and our ways of life were very much ceremonial during the summer. We spent a lot of our time back on our reservation, the Yankton Sioux Reservation. My mom had a home out there. And then also what we call West River, South Dakota near Pine Ridge, I have family. So we would go out there for a ceremony as well. And we just had a very community-based experience, which informed my view of the world—my identity and how people can come together and help each other. 

As a child, I was unaware of some of the so-called “lateral violence” or some of the conflicts that were going on. That became clearer to me as I got older. So that's always something that I think for a lot of Native communities, there is that dynamic that can make community hard. 

Community has been a nourishing, connecting, healing space for me and, at times, a difficult, painful experience.

But even with those painful experiences, I feel like being in community, being in ceremony, is foundational to the way I was raised. And so I feel privileged to have that upbringing.

Kamea Chayne: Thank you for sharing this background. I’m curious to dive a lot deeper into this throughout our conversation today. “Trauma” is a word that I feel is used a lot these days, in part because there is a lot of trauma that an increasing number of people are experiencing, becoming aware of, and having to work through with our bodies.

But what do you see as the more dominant understanding of what trauma is—maybe at a more individualistic level? And then what do we know about what it means to recognize trauma across deeper time, like intergenerationally and across collectives of bodies, maybe also drawing upon this idea of soul wounds?

Serene Thin Elk: I like how you asked the question because trauma very much is an individual experience. You can have several people with different or very similar backgrounds go through the same thing, and not everyone is going to be traumatized or experience trauma from those events.

And so it's more about defining, what is our internal experience? How does our nervous system, brain, spirit and energy factor affect the way experiences become “traumatic”? In the DSM-5, trauma used to be defined as a life-threatening event. You had to have either witnessed or been through a life-threatening event. And what we know now is that’s true, and in addition to that, it's more about our internal responses to things. 

In working with individuals in therapy for several years, there are things that some people would look at and say, “How could that have been traumatic?” Certain people identify moments in their life when maybe they were experiencing panic attacks or deep grief and someone, probably in a very good-natured way, told them to “be quiet” or to “calm down”, in trying to console them.

But the message that they were taught at that moment was to freeze and to not be able to express it, even when it is uncomfortable for other people. And so our nervous systems are a really powerful thing, and if we don't have people who can help us co-regulate within that, then the trauma can sort of stay frozen.

So that’s the individual level. Then you move to familial trauma, which is inevitably connected to intergenerational trauma. And so intergenerational trauma is just like it sounds. It can happen through our environment and also through epigenetics, things that are within our DNA. 

The experiences of my grandmother and great-grandmother are still alive within me because that has been handed down through that blood memory.

And there’s also the beautiful, powerful, wise things that come from that. I always like to discuss how intergenerational trauma is different but deeply intertwined with historical trauma. Historical trauma are events usually by an oppressive entity—like the government—who come up with policies of genocide, relocation, and other oppressive systems in place.

So for our people in more recent history, it was referred to as the “boarding school era”. This was whole generations of Native children being taken away from families and displaced into these Christian boarding schools—where very pronounced, intense, abusive things happened to children starting at the ages of five up to the time that they would graduate from these institutions.

A lot of people in our community, myself included, called them “prison camps” because they weren't schools, and they weren't being taught things. The religion that they used to justify the means of abuse was also spiritual abuse and nothing like our culture. That historical event over generations is also intergenerational because of the way that it affected people. There are different lenses on it and certain nuanced things, especially within our Indigenous people's story, here within the United States.

Kamea Chayne: And on this note, you've pointed out before that people who don't know Native American histories might take a snapshot of where we are today and ask questions like, “Why do so many Native people struggle with disproportionate levels of alcoholism, suicide rates, economic poverty, and so forth?” And you share that knowing the contextual history behind that is important, not to lay blame, but to educate and connect so that we can move forward. 

Something that stuck with me from working through some of my relational traumas is this idea that an apology without change is, in a sense, manipulation. And so, something I'm cautious about is this question of whether awareness is enough and whether even issuing apologies and acknowledgments is enough to move forward if they don't lead to reparations or meaningful change in some way. If these injustices worsen or if they’re even ongoing genocides happening elsewhere that end up being experienced as vicarious trauma—a perpetuation of the same existing power structures. 

So, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on how we can confront these difficult histories, not to lay blame but with that of collective healing.

Serene Thin Elk: That’s very insightful. Looking globally, I think about how one thing can be addressed historically while genocide is happening actively in another place but can seemingly ignore the genocide that's happening while issuing an apology. 

For example, Biden's apology for the U.S. boarding schools, which was a very mixed experience for our people and the survivors that I work with on the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition. It's a deep, deep honor to work with our relatives who have survived those schools. These elders have stories that they speak about that are unimaginable.

The things that the priests and the staff that work there did are unimaginable—not only taking away culture, language, cutting hair, stealing them from their families, but also sexual abuse and other horrid things. Just to get straight to it, I think the apology that was issued brought up, obviously, various emotions within people because people had different experiences within the boarding schools and had different responses. 

So some people maybe had a lot of suppression, to repress things to survive. I always tell people, those automatic responses that we have to trauma, please do not carry shame about them. The fight response can look like lashing out, yelling, and fighting. And shutting down and freezing can be repression. And we don't get to choose how we respond. 

So I was able to hold space and observe and witness some of our elders who are survivors during the boarding school apology. We were on-site in Salt Lake City and doing some of these interviews with survivors. We were doing some healing work to hold space for them. The apology happened during that time. And so it brought up so many hard things for people. It brought up rage and anger.

What is an apology from the U.S. government without action items, actual things that are being promised and not just talked about?

For others who had been just waiting for some sort of acknowledgement, it was very healing and very powerful for some of them. Some of their family members were probably living in denial because it was too painful to admit what had happened to their children or their siblings. They wouldn't listen to the survivors or didn't believe them that those things happened to them. And so, having the president of the United States acknowledge the depths of the pain was very healing for them.

I think that it has to be both things that we can look at and say, “this is progress”. This is progress for a president to come forth, acknowledge, and bring in, at the very least, awareness to some folks who are willing and open to hearing that. Because some people don't believe it's a big deal even after they hear it. At this point in my life, I don’t give too much energy to those folks because we have to be focused on what our community needs. What are the things that we need to do to move forward?

And so, working with different organizations like NDN Collective and other various organizations that are very good at standing on the front lines and demanding justice. If we don't use our voices, if we don't march, if we don't say very specifically, “These are the things that need to be done for us to repair and work on things and move forward”, then those things would never even be acknowledged by most of America. 

And so it has to be that kind of balance of healing work and sitting with people individually in their emotions and then rising and saying, “These are the things that we will no longer allow to happen to our people.”

Kamea Chayne: I resonate with and appreciate your all-of-the-above approach. I think given a lot of the systemic injustices, it's easy to hyper-focus on the material aspects of things and be like, “No, there hasn't been much material change in terms of people being economically and environmentally supported by things that are more quote-on-quote tangible”.

But at the same time, just like how people experience trauma differently, people heal differently as well. And so a lot of the more surface-level changes that are taking place are still very impactful for a lot of people. And I think it's important to hold spaciousness to acknowledge that as well. 

Serene Thin Elk: I agree.

Kamea Chayne: When it comes to healing, you talk about how Native American sacred rituals and traditional practices weren't allowed until the passing of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978. 

What do you feel is important to highlight about this history in terms of the impacts of this oppression and also the resistance despite the suppression? And maybe, on a similar note, what does this tell us in terms of our inability to separate culture from medicine?

Serene Thin Elk: I think it's a very well-known part of our story as Indigenous people. It feels like there's this vast divide between people of color and their experience and the vast majority of white America who, because of the way systemically things are attempted to create this collective amnesia or collective gaslighting of us—to say these things didn’t happen. These are the things that we are demanding for equal rights today. I’m not just talking about history. 

And then you have people saying, “What are you talking about?” “We've never heard about any of that stuff” “What's the big deal?” We are not even able to practice our spirituality and our religion intertribally. Some people call their ways of life “religion”, and other Native people say spirituality or culture. And so we have vast differences across all of the tribes across the country, but we weren't allowed to practice those (ways of life). 

There are no words to describe how that affects your personhood. I think back to when my grandparents were alive and they had to practice in secret. They had to hide. But there’s power in the inherent resistance and the spirit of our people. Through all of the genocide that happened, and knowing that if they were to practice they could go to prisoner jail, they were going to continue in our life ways. 

Active resistance is beautiful because it shows up in spirit, in connection to the creator, and our everyday lives.

If you look at a lot of people who are on the front lines fighting for environmental protections, I'm so grateful that it shows up in our everyday lives. It can come in the form of spiritual guidance in instances when people can’t understand that what they’re saying is racist.

Coming close to their spirits so they can align with this is what I feel called to do. Because there are people who are plant medicine people who are revitalizing that. Some people are focused on language. I just love and understand mental health and wellness and how we can heal in small and big ways. All of us need each other in these paths so we can create resistance against the oppressive systems.

Kamea Chayne: Thank you for bringing this to light. Earlier, we started talking about trauma as it might be experienced at the individual level, at the intergenerational level, and the collective level. With all this in mind, I'm also curious what you might have thought through in terms of trauma being experienced by the extension of the more-than-human community. Because we also know that we can't separate culture from environment, and culture from place and the land. I’m interested in hearing what you have to share on that as well.

Serene Thin Elk: And I think everything is energy.

Everything is energy, we’re all made from the same source but just different entities and embodiments of it.

I've heard so many stories from elders, especially survivors that I've worked with, and a lot of them will tell stories, old stories. And some of them talk about that if you're walking through the forest on a path and you feel called to a certain rock, stone or waterway, stop, listen. That's your spirit responding to something in the path. Talk to that plant. 

And in fact, there's certain songs that I heard the old ones (sing) and I've read about this in the book called Walking in a Sacred Manner. I read that book when I was young, and it's about women who can connect to the plant medicines and bring medicinal healing mechanisms out of that plant because of that song and that relationship and understanding. We don't view them as human, we view them as something very sacred that has an energy and a power that we must honor. And the same way that we try to honor ourselves and one another, we look at that with respect and relation.

And so I think it's about that interconnectedness that can help the Earth to heal, which helps us. Then, instead of just thinking that “We're separate humans, and we have this trauma”, we know that it's the plant medicines. I have cedar, all these things, sage, to smudge. Every time before you light those, you acknowledge them, and you take care of them. 

And some people would see that as being weird in mainstream culture, but to us, it's just what it is. And so I think it is an energy exchange. Some of those old stories where they talk about coming to a stone and seeing and feeling that stone needed to be acknowledged or felt in some way. I listen to those stories, and I think I can feel in my heart that that's real. And so that's why those stories are important to continue as well.

Kamea Chayne: Everything is interconnected and entangled. And I think on this note, the term “holistic” in terms of healing is also used a lot, in part because I think a lot of people are realizing that mainstream approaches to healing can feel very limiting. But the medicine wheel is one of the tools that you use.

On this, you share, “We are all living medicine wheels. We have all of the components within us, and need to feel balanced, to feel whole, and to remember who we are." So, I'd be keen on hearing your take on the word “holistic” as it pertains to medicine and healing and how you'd like to expand on the concept of the medicine wheel.

Serene Thin Elk: I think I can speak more from the Lakota perspective. I think in the modern medicine world, it's an attempt to move from just a linear path, a linear thinking of, “Here's your symptoms”, “Here's your diagnosis and here's the medicine or treatment”. And those things are needed, right? I mean, we need those things at different moments, but it's just one part of it. 

So when people say “holistically” in modern medicine, I think some of them are thinking about including alternative things like Reiki or maybe you should go see a therapist as well.

Looking at things “holistically” in the Lakota worldview is all-encompassing.

Starting with the individual and seeing how we embody all of those things. As humans, I think it's helpful for us to break down that medicine wheel. It has the four quadrants and all the different parts of who we are: Spirit, mind, emotion, and physical. We need to break it down because there are times where you need to be able to say, “I'm doing pretty good in some areas”. We must ask a self-assessment, right? “But physically, I haven't been taking care of myself. “What am I eating?” “Am I exercising?” It's a really easy way to look at us as sacred beings because the medicine wheel is sacred and it's whole at all times. 

I’m going like this [gestures circular motion] because it’s the circle, but we're whole at all times. It's about learning to integrate and be aware of those energies. And I think once you do become aware of some areas that you have an imbalance in, you start to realize, when I take care of my mental health, I physically have more energy. They feel separate, but it's the same thing within your body. Whether you're looking at it through the lens of the autonomic nervous system—the brain—you can zoom in and say, “This is why I have anxiety.” Or “I need to do these exercises because of my brain.”

Or whether this spiritual person might look at you and say, you have to call your spirit back. You've been through something hard. You're grieving something traumatic in those four directions, so you call your Indian name, you say your Indian name, you call yourself back into your body so that you can be whole again.

And the interesting thing is that in the mental health world, we're learning a lot about trauma and bilateral stimulation. And so you'll see on some apps for anxiety, you put headphones in, and they'll move the music back and forth. There are different things you can do to try to calm your body. Even with the polyvagal theory and trying to work with the vagus nerve, sometimes you're sitting there and looking to the left with your eyes, and then you go there for a while. And it's this bilateral stimulation to try to regulate yourself. 

And I'm sharing this because that's one lens. But when you go into the ceremony, nobody talks about it through that lens. We don’t just have the rhythms with the drum, we have certain dances where it's bilateral, with your feet coming up and down.

The vagus nerve is activated and regulated when you hum or gargle. So think about what singing can do to that nerve to calm it…

And so it's the same thing happening regardless of what lens you are looking at it through. Mental wellness on that medicine wheel also directly impacts your heart rate, which is your physical well-being. So then you can feel your emotions again if you've been shut down and numb.

I just love talking about the medicine wheel because it's so much more than what I just said. There are the four directions, and then there are the sixth and seventh directions. The fifth and sixth directions are the sky and the Earth. And the seventh direction is yourself, which is something so sacred that it's a mystery, but we know it's here. So we're the seventh direction.

There are so many directions and so many teachings within that, and I'm a novice in that. Many more people have a lot more awareness culturally about that, but I do know that I've heard a lot of those teachings, and they helped me to navigate the mental health world.

Kamea Chayne: I feel very inspired by everything that you just offered. And I think, again, it reiterates this message that everything is interconnected within and beyond our bodies. Something that stands out for me as a theme in your work is the vital role of community and belonging in a community in support of our healing. 

I want to stay with this for a bit here because it feels like the world is probably more diasporic as a whole than it's ever been before within the recent history or more recent histories that we know. And a lot of people, I think, are struggling with our sense of belonging.

So many people have been uprooted and forcibly displaced. Many have chosen out of free will to relocate. A lot of people are also born into places where they don't necessarily have deep ancestral roots. And then also, a lot of people don't have the privilege of feeling like their families and communities where they grew up are safe spaces to call home and to find healing within. 

So if culture is tied to medicine, tied to community, place, and the land as well, what does it mean to nurture collective healing and rebuild community in a vastly diasporic world? Because I don't think a lot of the ways that “community” is defined these days are necessarily really rooted. And that's another word that maybe is worth deepening into as well.

Serene Thin Elk: These are such insightful observations of the world, and I appreciate the question. So thank you for the way you phrased it. I just feel like at the end of your question saying, “yes, I agree” [laughs].

Kamea Chayne: My questions are prompted by your work, so it comes back to you!

Serene Thin Elk: Yes! I feel like there's something major happening right now in our world and our experience at this time in history as human beings. It's very divisive. As much as people say we're making progress, there's also so much resistance against that. There’s a lot of fear against the acceptance of the basics of letting people be who they are. Letting someone love who they want to love.

It baffles me because culturally, we were taught that everyone is in a circle. If we think of it that way, everyone in the human race is in a circle, and every single person belongs in that circle. Everyone has a gift, a place, and a reason why their spirit chose to come here and to experience life. And so, it's mind-boggling to me to know that this is a truth that's happening out there. 

Finding a sense of belonging in community is complex because some people’s trauma comes from being in community.

I think that's something that needs to be acknowledged, especially when we have lateral violence because of historical trauma. It can be very hard and disheartening to trust people again.

My sister passed away a couple of months ago, and there are no words to describe the pain of losing a sibling. It's my second sibling. My older brother passed before her, and then she passed. And I think it brought up a lot within me that was repressed. I didn't know that it was a protective mechanism, a way for me to function in my life. I repressed and pushed the trauma down. And it was a way for me to keep living my life, to not feel the pain continuously. So, I have a lot of compassion for myself. That’s how I automatically self-soothe. 

However, I learned a great deal after she passed because what happened is that all of it came out at once. I began to have flashbacks, nightmares, and panic attacks, living in terror for weeks at a time, not being able to sleep. And I knew even as I was going through it, I kept getting this message, whether it be from myself, my ancestors, or Creator, that “you need other people, Serene.”

This is the basic stuff that I say to other people and that I wholeheartedly believe. Yet, I realized in the deepest core of who I was that I felt unsafe in the world and with even some of the closest people around me. People would want to come to me and comfort me. I wouldn't be answering my phone. They would say, “What is going on?" And I wouldn't respond because I was so scared to let anyone in. And I know that it's related to my trauma. But I didn't know until it all came out and was looking at me in the face. What I was experiencing was embodying this pain of being frozen and scared from the time when I was younger. It was the embodiment of it.

And the wisdom of that, of my body going through that, was that I was in prayer every day. I was smudging and making offerings to the Creator and to the ancestors to help me come out of that space so I could start to learn to trust myself. We talk about roots. Well, that is truly the root of being in a community and finding a sense of belonging. Otherwise, everyone is always at arm's length for me because I didn't know how to truly let someone nurture me. 

I was great at nurturing others and stepping in and identifying needs, but in some ways, that was a distraction from doing my own work.

And so I learned a lot about needing people that we truly need in our most vulnerable moments. Not just when you need to vent and ask, “Can I talk to you?” Those are important too, but in sessions. But in the times in our life when we're grieving and just going through it, we can say, “I am so far from being okay, and I need someone to help me.” Those are the real moments when you start to break down the fear of connection because people can hurt you.

And so, after having gone through community traumas, traumas with friends, losing people, and always being scared someone I love is gonna pass away early because of addiction—you live your life in a constant state of fear. You realize that one day, and for me, it was after my sister passed, that it all comes out at one time. It was scary, but it was a blessing because I had no choice but to let people take care of me.

After all, I couldn't do it alone. And so that was a sacred teaching that came for me. Being vulnerable and saying, you know what? I'm not okay. I can't do this alone. And that sacred trust within myself to open up to people who I feel like I could trust. 

I mean, even my mother, who is everything to me, had said, “I know you don't always want people around.” And yet I want to break that pattern. So now my sense of belonging and community is transforming. I'm more informed about what my limits are with people and my boundaries.

Healthy relationships, community and building active resistance can be easily broken down if people aren’t aware of their triggers and pain. 

Take accountability and work through it. Otherwise, it's a narrative of “that's your fault. You did this to me.” It's the finger pointing. 

So I'm looking at it through a lens of the deep work that we all have to face at some point, even when it's painful, that is really at the root of creating collective change. Because then you're able to connect to people in healthy ways and share your story. And maybe someone else who hasn't been there yet will remember when so-and-so talked about being not okay and asking for help.

And we rise from that in a whole new way. We're shedding something. And then we come forth to be in community in a new way, a healthier way.

Kamea Chayne: [Sighs] This is so powerful. I have goosebumps running up and down after hearing you share your story and experience, and this reminder that it starts with us, no matter where we currently are. As we start to wind down our conversation I would love to hear about how we’ve translated these ideas and theories into practise, and yeah, what has been some of the most fulfilling aspects of this work, to interrupt these cycles of harm, and possible internalised oppression as well that you’re open to sharing.

Serene thin Elk: My relationship to the work after going through what I just talked about has changed. You have to look very deeply at yourself and what brings you to the work and how much your pain is tied to the collective. How we could at different times be triggered by the stories that we hear and the pain that we hear.

And so, if someone is out there being a helper, whether it's day after day fighting in the front lines of activism or listening to traumatic story after story, we have to take care of ourselves. And in that same vein, what simultaneously happens is this thing that is just a mystery. Sitting with someone and listening with an open heart and mind, with prayer and smudging, something powerful happens. And it's not me—I just happen to be present with them. 

I would say that that is the most powerful part of my work. I get to see it in real time. And working with families where some of the survivors will have their children with them and be able to say, “Now I understand why I couldn't be loving with you.” And their children are there crying and saying, “Well, now we understand why you couldn't be loving with us. And it wasn't your fault. It's because of what happened in the boarding schools.”

To be able to sit with families and to facilitate that space of safety in that container and to see, in real time, generations of pain being spoken about for the first time. Because before, everything had to be a secret. People couldn't talk about those things. You don't talk about sexual abuse. And that was all fear-based because of the boarding schools. 

I would have to say the greatest honor and most profound thing that I get to do in this work is to see, in real time, generational healing. And you almost see some of that darkness or that pain being lifted and smudged away. This lightness that people carry.

The greatest honor in my work is to be a witness and a presence to generational healing in real-time.

And then it’s like, “Wow, we're waking up to how all the shame has kept us as a family quiet and not talking about this our entire lives and now having the courage to do it.”

[Musical intermission]

Kamea Chayne: What has been one of the most impactful books you've read or publications you follow?

Serene Thin Elk: I think that Eduardo Duran's Healing the Soul Wound is a good book. He's someone that I used to be in a ceremony with when I was a little girl, and he's just an amazing Indigenous psychologist.

Kamea Chayne: What is a motto, mantra, or practice you engage with to stay grounded?

Serene Thin Elk: A practice is just loving myself in the moment and telling myself that when I'm happy, it's okay and safe to feel happy. Instead of saying, “Now what?”, “But what's next?” To say you're feeling sad. It seems so simple, but allowing myself to be exactly where I'm at without judgment.

Kamea Chayne: And what is one of your greatest sources of inspiration at the moment?

Serene Thin Elk: My babies, my children. I have four of them. And being an Ina, in our language, being a mother is the greatest joy of my life. And they inspire me every day to get up and to keep going even when things are hard. They make me laugh, they challenge me, and they're fun. They inspire me to try to be better every day.

Kamea Chayne: Beautiful. Well, we're coming to a close here, but where can people go to follow along or further support your work? And what are some final words of wisdom you'd like to leave us with?

Serene Thin Elk: In terms of following, if you go to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition website, we have so much information there about the work that's being done nationally to help facilitate intergenerational change and healing. I'm also on Instagram @serenetherapy7. 

And words of wisdom, I would say, be gentle with yourself, especially in these changing times. It's going to be okay because we have so much wisdom and strength that we have demonstrated as a people and as people of color, with all of the wisdom that we come from in our different lineages. We've been through so much shit already. 

We've been through so much, and I'm scared for what's coming because of all of the hate that's out there openly. But we have warriors, we have matriarchs, and we have people and stories to guide us. So it's gonna be okay. We just have to keep following our path.

 
kamea chayne

Kamea Chayne is a creative, writer, and the host of Green Dreamer Podcast.

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