I was raised to understand our ancestors are always w us and that is normal (tho they aren't GHOSTS, they are just w us) but a completely different thing was spirits and you make dang sure you don't mess with them. Natives don't do scary Halloween basically.

It's really common for remote Northern communities to have a lot of stories and beliefs around the idea of spirits and I grew up w all of those. Long ago shamans helped manage them but now it is more like prayer and best behavior does.

A lot of the stories actually point to a way of understanding how to stay safe - be alert, don't go out in a storm, do certain things at night if you have to go out, or just stay in, be good to your mom, your mom better listen to her grandma, don't eat food the wrong time of year

Some of our traditional markings and even our clothes were a way of managing some of these things too. A lot of the spirits we heard stories about came from some prior unresolved trauma in the community. Women had specific markings that helped transform trauma or released It.

There has been a reinvigoration of traditional markings among Inuit women in the last 10+ years and much of that is motivated not just by a reclaiming of our own heritage but also of seeing how our markings are about healing community pain and that our communities need that.

Women were recognized as the great healers in this way who have the power to transform the hardship, pain, and trauma of a community into the very resources that give it strength and life. Men are to protect and provide. (Tho this was not biological it was a community role.)

I grew up commercial fishing, for example, and learned how to build the fire and how to hunt. A person's role was not given by their gender but by their ability and the community need. Though admittedly it was often cis-men that were the hunters or cis-women who sewed.

As my parents age and their health has been poor I have been reflecting a lot on how I support my daughter. As an Indigenous person there is the realization that I am being pushed into the role of Elder, I am meant to lead by example for the sake of my community.

It is incredibly humbling to feel myself being pulled into this position simply by circumstance and to feel the ways I have failed in my preparations for it, and to know too that accepting my own failures is actually integral to preparing for this change in role.

My role is to serve the needs of my daughter, my nieces, and my nephew as they age into becoming adults themselves and to be a resource for them in understanding our most important values and what it means to live with integrity in them. To live our culture in the broader world.

But our Elders also understand that when we say our role is to serve our community we do not mean only Native peoples but instead the community in which we live more broadly whoever is part of it. And so I have been reflecting on that idea too - what it means to lead by example.

Our wine community is in a lot of pain right now. Something I hope we gain in all of this is a fundamental ability to see how much we have failed to prepare for our current need, and that the humility of recognizing that failure is what we must accept to prepare for what is next.

If any of our work is to matter it has to come from serving not only what will take care of our own very real needs, but from always also serving what will build and serve community. How do we align our work to ensure our own health within the health of our people.

Mainstream culture often treats community service as self sacrifice but it is that view that inadvertently fosters sacrifice by encouraging the notion that hard work or generous giving means you've earned something. That creates a culture of entitlement instead of service.

By recognizing our work must align our needs with those of the broader community we can channel our work as service that is at the same time balanced with self care. It changes how power operates and what it means to deserve. The more we accomplish, the more we must gain humility

Accomplishment is actually increased experience and so increased perspective, and that means we must share our understanding with those around us. We must lead by example. The hard pill to swallow is that this increased perspective depends on greater awareness of our limits too.

If we seek leadership roles in our communities, or we are pushed into them, we must recognize our failures and admit to them. This is not about groveling or believing we are incapable. It is about recognizing we can only do justly and serve by seeing where we have failed.

The failures we are seeing in the wine community right now strike to the very core of our institutions, of what we have valued, who we have held up, what we have deemed desirable, who have believed themselves entitled to benefits that serve themselves and harm others.

Part of accepting our ancestors are always w us, and that you don't mess w the wrong kind of spirits actually is a lesson in the idea that these harms we have done to each other do not go away. We have failed each other and we have done harm. We have to face that to heal that.

The role of the shaman was to guide the community in lessons of accountability and planning for the future. The spiritual journey is one of facing our own bad choices - our demons - to see how to repair the harms we have caused. The spirits are our own failures that haunt us.

The spiritual journey is also about facing how we have been harmed and accepting that we cannot control our surrounding well enough to always be safe. That sometimes we just end up in a bad situation and are not to blame. That is terrifying. It is part of accepting our own limits

The harms we have learned about recently do not go away, and there are many more we do not know. And the grief in that is hard to bare as much as it is hard to bear.

My hope is that our leaders will be honest in this, will accept these failures, will use this as an opportunity to transform our institutions, who we hold up as example, what values we encourage, what we reward, how we build our community.