Black women are either stereotyped as terrible mothers or just bottomlessly maternal. And so I was really interrogating what does it mean to mother by choice? And what does it mean to mother not by choice?
As long as I don't need it, it doesn't rule me, doesn't own me. And so if I maintain my relationship with the natural world, my food sources, etc., then I am actively engaging in the relationships that I'm making.
I know that these things sound quite basic, like climbing a rooftop or hanging out with friends or staying up late. These are not like some big, crazy things. But to me, it felt like I was climbing a mountain, that this was something huge that I was doing in my life because I was making my own choices and I felt that nobody was watching me.
At a certain point, we have to hold ourselves accountable as women and say, "It's barely been 50 years that we can even have a credit card, that we can own property, that we can do things in our own name." to be so eager to give up all of that and to go back into this place of voluntary helplessness and voluntary ignorance in service of a very specific kind of love to me is we just can't allow ourselves to do that.
Because of this persistent migration pattern over a long period of time, if someone got too bossy or even just got too much influence, someone else was usually moving down the river and saying, "They're not my chief." So, Ojibwe culture tended to be very tolerant of cultural variation, but very intolerant of being told what to do.
