Beginning in 2013, Agnes Woodward often awakened in the middle of the night to check that all doors in her house were locked and her five children were safe. Her fears, she later realized, thanks to knowledge about the science of adverse childhood experiences, were symptoms of trauma related to her childhood and to her parents’ childhood traumas as well.
Woodward experienced domestic violence and outright racism growing up as a Plains Cree from Kawacatoose First Nation, in Saskatchewan, Canada. She also was the child of generational trauma as she later discovered her parents’ histories as survivors of the Canadian government’s brutal assimilation actions.
A 17-year resident of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in central North Dakota, Woodward says that trauma balanced by activism to promote Indigenous rights was in her blood. Her father, born in 1944, was removed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police from his home when he was just seven years old. He was kept in residential schools until he was able to leave at the age of 15. Only in recent years has he begun to share the traumatic experiences of his time at the school and his many escape attempts.
Her mother, born in 1959, was a “Sixties Scoop” survivor—a program that placed Indigenous children in foster homes with the intention of making them forget their language and their culture. Families didn’t even know where their children were placed.
“My mother and her three siblings were taken for no good reason,” she says. “My grandmother worked on a farm and had to leave for work two weeks at a time.”
Her mother was adopted by the Woodward family along with her younger sister. Her older sister, Laney, often ran away to search for their mother, so the authorities placed Laney in a different foster home, which traumatized her younger sister, Woodward’s mother. Laney, like too many Indigenous women, was later murdered.
“An MMIW in our family,” says Woodward.
MMIW, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, is a movement to create attention to and prevent violence against Indigenous women and girls. The U.S. Department of Justice has documented that Indigenous women face murder rates 10 times the national average, and the CDC cites homicide as the fifth leading cause of death of Indigenous women between the ages of 25 and 34.
Both of Woodward’s parents became activists, both have traveled across North America to support Indigenous movements for justice. Woodward’s parents separated when she was young, and when she was 14, her mother married a man from Standing Rock, South Dakota, the scene in 2016 of a global protest movement to prevent the transport of crude oil through the reservation. The protest brought together more than 200 tribes that had not united for more than 150 years.
It also brought the young Woodward to South Dakota from Canada.
“Being surrounded by people who were so like-minded, shared the same beliefs, and took action, ignited that flame” she’d nurtured since childhood, she says. Adding fuel to her fire was the Canadian government’s launch of an investigation into the murder of Indigenous peoples, including her aunt Laney. That investigation and its ongoing revelations of mass graves of Indigenous children continues to this day.
The significant part of her healing journey began in 2017 when she moved to Indiana for three years, far from her Indigenous community. When exchanging childhood stories with friends, she thought her friends shared normal childhood experiences. “I could only remember the trauma…my own trauma and that made me feel like I didn’t belong,” she says.
That’s when the sleepless nights began, “when I was jumping out of bed in the middle of the night ready to fight.” She started to google PTSD, and while sewing clothes, listened to audio books. When she listened to The Body Keeps the Score, a seminal book by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk (which has been on the New York Times paperback bestseller list for 162 weeks) on how childhood trauma affects the adult body, her response was immediate.
“I was floored,” she says. “I felt understood. I felt heard. I felt acknowledged. It was confirmation that I wasn’t crazy. That what I was going through was actually normal.”
She started reading other books, including The Deepest Well, by Dr. Nadine Burke-Harris, California’s Surgeon General. Understanding ACEs helped her healing along with sewing ribbon skirts—the skirts worn by Indigenous women that she had been ashamed to wear as a young girl.
“It helped me understand what my parents went through, and I was able to forgive them and let go of the animosity,” she says.
She’s gone even further by encouraging her father to talk about his past. On Seeding Sovereignty, a grassroots Indigenous activist organization, her father shares stories.
“Last week, he said things I had never heard, how the residential school affected his ability to be a parent to me,” she says. “I can’t explain what that gives me on a healing, spiritual level. I never wanted or expected that.”
Besides giving talks as a guest speaker and participating as a grassroots organizer and activist to support Indigenous movements for justice, Woodward officially started a sewing business, ReeCreeations, in 2017. She sews traditional ribbon skirts, custom made, including one for U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, who requested a skirt with cornstalks representing her Pueblo roots, rainbow colors to represent all people, and butterflies, because she likes them. Woodward added stars, which she adds to all her designs.
In 2017—even before Haaland’s initiative to investigate MMIW—Woodward designed a MMIW ribbon skirt, with 300 orders already delivered.
If there’s a message for Haaland and her bureau, Woodward says, it’s that the Indigenous communities need the resources for healing from the trauma and violence they have suffered and continue to suffer from the residual effects. This means financial support for mental health awareness and services, education, cultural and language revitalization and more.
“It’s a dream of mine and my husband,” she says, “to use the understanding of ACEs alongside the tools and teachings in our culture to help our people heal from our traumas and self-identify as an Indigenous people.”
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