A short kitchen-table-style talk by Sandi L Boucher about personal power being rooted in sharing one’s story. She argues people lose power when they stop speaking because past listeners ignored them, emphasizes the Ojibwe concept of debwewin (truth) and speaking only from lived experience, and urges listeners to reclaim power by sharing their experiences.
Chapters
Foreign, I have a question to ask you. Have you ever felt like you lost power? Now, I'd be willing to bet that some of you listening are thinking, I've never had power. But I don't believe that's true. Because if anyone's ever been in the room with a screaming baby, the baby gets attention. Or a toddler that's going to destroy things if you don't pay attention to them. But if you get around enough people or if you've experienced enough people that don't value your word and don't listen to you, you stop sharing. Now, what's important about that message is eventually you're losing power or you don't have power because you stopped sharing. One of the amazing teachings my mom passed on to me is to make sure that the people in my present don't pay for the sins of someone in my past. To not speak up now because someone in the past didn't listen to you is to make this new person pay for their sins. And you just can't do that because the only one that's getting hurt is you. In Ojibwe, we talk about Dubwe win, which is truth. But I'm from the Treaty 3 area, and we classify de Boiuyen as the idea of speaking only to the extent you have lived or experienced. Which is why I never speak about the native male experience. Because I. I wouldn't know that story. I couldn't do it. Justification. That's humility teaching. I can speak to domestic violence. I can speak to poverty. I can speak to many, many things. But I also identify the stories that are not mine to share. Why I'm sharing that is because your power is in your story. If you know what it's like to be disrespected, you can now speak to that. You can use all of those puzzle pieces you've gathered to put them together to be an incredibly powerful puzzle. Only if you remember to share your story.
