"Bright Light In The Sky Woman"
Waasegiizhigikwe| “Bright Light In The Sky Woman”
My name is Dorothy Marie Trepanier Crust. I am an addictions counselor by trade currently working in Administrations in the Healing and Wellness Court.
I was raised away from my family, but I do remember my grandma, and I remember hiding behind her skirts. And she’d speak Ojibwe, but she often would not do it in front of us kids because she was punished for it when she was at the boarding school. She was five when she was in the boarding school and my grandpa was seven, and ironically they got married years later. They were … not expressive because of the boarding school experience, so … hugs and kisses were not normal.
I think that my mom took us away from my culture because she was not Native. Being away from the culture, I didn’t come back to it until I was in recovery. … I met my dad again when I was 32 … prior to that I was five.
It was normal for our family to drink together, so then drinking and drugging went hand in hand … I got sober when I was 40. And when I got sober, I knew that I needed something more to keep me immersed in that life. And I struggled with my Christian side because … I just had so much hurt from the Christian side, cause that was my mom’s side. So I had to work through some of that hurt. … I learned that they used to tell us, “You couldn’t walk in both worlds. If you had one leg in each world, you were pissing on your present.” And what I found out was that I had both DNA in me, and I am now able to be proud of my Native culture and proud of my non-Native culture. They both have their struggles—not nearly to the extent that my grandpa and grandma did—but I learned a lot from that. So I decided to get my name.
My Native name is Waasegiizhigikwe, and it means “Bright Light In The Sky Woman”. And they say my grandma named me when I was a baby. Waaban or Waabooz—they can’t remember. That was probably because I ran around like a rabbit, so I was constantly on the go. Getting my name was probably the most significant thing that happened to me culturally. And it helped me to know that it was OK to be who I was—that I didn’t have to pretend to be half this or half that, I could be exactly who I am. I was knit together to be this. So that was very helpful.
And the other significant experience in my culture was a Shaking Tent Ceremony. So it’s like a ceremony where you work with a spiritual guy, and he’s inside the tent, and you’re outside the tent. We kind of touched hands underneath that tent structure. And he opened me up to sexual abuse that had happened that I didn’t even know about … And I still don’t recall a lot of it, and that’s OK, you don’t have to. … He said, “You have to go to the north shore,”—so I’m assuming that was Lake Superior—“and you have to scream your name as loud as you can because you have to call your spirit back into you because it has left you from the time you were a small child.” And so that was another big event for me that assured me I needed to be who I was. And I didn’t have to try to escape from that anymore. So I guess that would be probably the most significant from my culture of my experiences.
Every single one of us are meant to be precisely who we are. Whatever parents we had—you know, we probably didn’t understand it at the time, but you weren’t supposed to be anybody else but you. And I think that when we’re chasing that social media post or we’re chasing … what we think is the perfect relationship or perfect parent plan, we lose what the Creator gave to us unconditionally. So I think that it’s OK for me to talk about God and Jesus because that’s part of my belief system as is the Creator. And that’s OK. I don’t have to justify it to anybody, because people who truly love you understand that you need to be you. That would be my life lesson, out of anything else—to learn how to trust your instincts. But first, you got to figure out how to feel them, because when you’re so busy numbing it with alcohol, drugs, food, social media, all those things that take you out of your head and heart, then you can’t feel what your intuition is trying to tell you. And it takes practice.
My hopes for LCO probably mimics a lot of people’s. … I think that there’s an old prophecy that says that we’re going to come to a time when we have to decide whether to go with the money and all that kind of stuff or go with saving our planet for our children. And I think that, for LCO, we wouldn’t have to compete in that anymore, that we could work in a system that would allow us to exchange what we’re talented at to be able to do that … like someone who was good at mechanic work would work on a car, and you could shoot them a deer. And, you know, we could work together in that kind of a system. Right now, we’re just very controlled by money, so that’s hard to do. But I think that seeing the value in no matter what your clan or your job is here on this earth, that you find value. An artist … when did we quit making it a big deal for artists? You know, it’s like … football players—they’re the ones that we watch every Sunday, but when was the last time we went to a class and just watched somebody bead or do artwork or, you know, gather? You know, just go out berry picking? I remember berry picking with both grandmas, and it was so good. And that’s what I wish—I wish we could find our way away from the noise.
