Embracing her roots
Patrick Springer, The Forum
Published Monday, February 18, 2008
Christy Goulet found a surprise waiting on her stove when she returned from a training run last year: a search warrant.
The police had come to her apartment near Fargo’s Jefferson West Park, apparently after a neighbor suspected marijuana. In fact, she had burned dried sage for an American Indian prayer.
The invasion of her privacy, which still rankles, is a small example of the challenges that confront urban American Indians who practice traditional religious and cultural ways.
Goulet, a 37-year-old grandmother and local community activist, embraced American Indian religion four years ago, after a series of dreams led her to seek out medicine men and traditional healers.
Nobody was more surprised by this turn of events than Goulet herself, an Ojibwe who grew up in Fargo and West Fargo in a family that had shunned traditional ways.
She was, in her view, a cultural illiterate, a wandering soul ignorant of her past and disconnected from her ancestry.
“It was almost totally extinct in my family,” she says. “It was so beaten out of them. My family, nobody wanted to acknowledge that we were Indian.”
Her parents, raised as Catholics, attended boarding schools as children, where speaking their Ojibwe language or practicing traditional religion were strictly forbidden.
She grew up in a household where alcoholism and poverty were a storm cloud that stayed. Her mother died when Goulet was 10. Life, already hard, turned bleak.
A few years later, along with her father and five brothers, she moved from the Golden Ridge neighborhood bordering Fargo’s old industrial park to West Fargo. Their house, with boarded windows, was so dilapidated that it was demolished after they moved out.
She was a single mother at the age of 13, a mother of four by the age of 17, an alcoholic by her early 20s.
“Everything around me was falling apart,” she says. “Something’s got to change, and you don’t really know the answer. I quit drinking, but it takes years to quit lying.”
Thirteen years ago she found the resolve to stay sober, and the fog that had darkened her early life began to lift.
Goulet will tell you all this in an offhandedly frank way. She offers herself as an example of how a person can combine deep spiritual belief and discipline to chart a different course in life.
Some of that discipline: Goulet rises in the predawn darkness of 3:30 a.m. and reports to work at a warehouse, where she loads the delivery vans.
Then, a bit before noon, she starts her second workday, in a spare office in the basement of a downtown building across the hall from a shop that sells used guitars.
She has drawn from her own life lessons to work as a cultural diversity consultant and a voice for religious freedom for urban American Indians in Fargo-Moorhead.
She began meeting with troubled youths last summer at the juvenile detention center in Moorhead. Her weekly visits blend talks about American Indian culture and beliefs about self-responsibility that were forged by her own experiences.
“Christy is making a difference,” says Donna Woods, a mentor who gave Goulet training in computer skills and basic business principles to help her start her consulting practice last fall. “The at-risk kids she’s working with, a lot of them don’t have a focus at school or at work. She also presents the Native American image in a positive light, and it seems to be working.”
Goulet’s approach emphasizes the need for setting goals, such as getting a General Education Diploma or applying for college, Woods says. Goulet earned a GED at Woodrow Wilson High School 10 years ago.
One of Goulet’s important messages to the kids she works with, according to Woods: “I’ve been there. I know what you’re thinking, and I know why you’re thinking it. She gets right to the heart of the problem, makes them see things as they really are.”
Barry Steen, who oversees the juvenile detention center in Moorhead, says he first agreed to Goulet’s talks as a learning activity, with her focus on traditional American Indian culture even though most of the residents are non-Indians.
“We tried it, and it’s working pretty good,” he says. “She has been pretty positive with the kids. She’s stern enough; she does demand that they pay attention.”
Stern, but also ready with an encouraging word, Steen says. “She believes in what she’s doing, that she can make a difference. It doesn’t have to be a native kid. It can be any kid.”
On occasion, Goulet has taken kids who have finished their sentences at the center on outings, including traditional sweat ceremonies at the White Earth Ojibwe Reservation or United Tribes Technical College in Bismarck.
Goulet, who speaks with the zeal of the convert, sometimes displays impatience with what she views as a lack of progress. But her strident approach has put her at odds with others in the Fargo-Moorhead native community. Some believe she sometimes presumes to speak for the community at large, and feel she should do more to work collaboratively.
“She’s not building those relationships,” says Prairie Rose, who is active in the diverse Fargo-Moorhead American Indian community. “We all see the need, but we’re all trying to do it together in a way that doesn’t offend our peers.”
“We need her in the Native American community,” Prairie Rose adds. “But there is a process here.”
On her calendar, Goulet has an appointment with the Fargo Police Department. She’s been invited to visit the department’s training academy next year, to talk to officers about American Indian culture. Among other things, she wants to help them distinguish the aroma of burning sage from that of marijuana.
Christy Goulet’s strange dreams ultimately led her to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in southwest South Dakota. She made the trek two summers ago to observe a Lakota sun dance, a demanding four-day ritual involving fasting and self-sacrifice.
She went with a group of older women to learn the old ways. While there, when she was going to her car to retrieve a blanket, she met the man who would be her partner in life, Anthony “Pogo” Arellano, who had returned to his native reservation after a long absence.
Arellano had completed his own spiritual odyssey, which had taken him as a child to the Denver area. There, he grew apart from the traditional culture he had known as a small boy at Pine Ridge, where native dances and visits with medicine men were fixtures of his youth.
He married and joined a fundamentalist Christian church, and came to see traditional native religion as devil worship. But he returned to his roots when a temporary visit a few years earlier turned into a permanent homecoming – until he met Goulet.
Six weeks after their first meeting, Arellano moved to Fargo and hasn’t left. He gave up lucrative work in oilfields, where he could earn six-figure yearly wages, to help Goulet establish a consulting business.
The pair decided to focus their efforts first on children, since they represent the future. But they’re also talking to social service providers, educators, law enforcement professionals, judges – anyone, it seems, who will listen to their talks on native culture and how to improve relations with the estimated 4,000 American Indians living in Fargo-Moorhead.
American Indians who want to practice traditional religious ceremonies face difficulties because of a lack of suitable settings, including sweat lodges. Ideally, Goulet says, a community sweat lodge someday will become available, allowing people greater access to ceremonies.
“The fight is still there for religious freedom and equal rights,” Goulet says. “We’ve been pretty lucky to have gotten this far.”
Readers can reach Forum reporter Patrick Springer at (701) 241-5522
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February 2008 News Reports
Last updated on February 23, 2008