Sandi L Boucher explains why she does activist work: to create the safe, Indigenous-centered spaces her mother never had. Her mother faced delayed schooling, poverty, and sexual assault. Boucher channels that history into protecting her community and building places where people can learn with respect.
Chapters
I have a crazy question for you today. Do you ever sit down and ask yourself why you do what you do, why you behave the way you do, why you do the work you do, why you value the things you do, whatever the case may be? Do you ever ask yourself that question? I do all the time. I think for activists or change agents or whatever you want to call us, influencers, that's something that comes up all the time because we put in a lot of emotional labor into our work. It is not easy work. We get challenged all the time, as the Truman quote says. We are most definitely in the arena, as Brene Brown loves to point out, so we get the shots from the cheap seats. I've had a pretty good idea of why I do my work over the years, and it's changed every now and then. Recently, I discovered yet another reason why I do my work. And it's incredibly personal. And if you followed my channel for any length of time, the fact that I share an incredibly personal story on here should not surprise you. So I'm going to do it again. This is why I do the work I do, especially here on YouTube. Let's talk about it. Foreign. Hi, everybody. My name is Sandy Boucher. I'm Red Thunderbolt, woman of the Loon clan, a proud member of Seine River First Nation in Treaty 3 Territory in Northern Ontario. And as I said in the opening, I really wanted to talk about the why behind my work. So if you're a Simon Sinek fan, he always his book is it starts with why. Why do you want to do this? Why do you want to have this meeting? What is your intent? My friend, Chief Tony Alexis of the Nakota Sioux Nation out in Alberta, what is your intent that you need to know that before the phone call, before the text message, before the meeting, before the event, before the relationship, before the date, before the conversation. So as I mentioned in the opening, this comes up a lot. If you're in the arena and fighting the good fight to try to invoke change every now and then, you can't help but think, why am I doing this? And I do have my handy dandy index card because as I mentioned, this is like incredibly personal, which means, of course, it has to do with my mom. My mom, who was quote unquote, stereotypical indigenous, had the dark hair, have the or the dark skin and the long black hair. And, and everyone knew on site that she was indigenous. And what I realized recently and anyone, if you're watching this for the first time, if this is my first video you're watching. You should probably watch the YouTube channel video, the main video, because this is most definitely indigenous centered space. And here we look at things through indigenous ey so that indigenous can be proud of how they feel about things and non indigenous can learn not to challenge, not to question, not to compare, but just to listen and learn. And I work really hard to create safe spaces for indigenous people in real life in my seminars and in my keynote speeches and online, on my YouTube channel, on my Facebook page, on my LinkedIn profile, on my Instagram. Whatever the case may be, attacks is not going to happen. Attacks are not going to happen no matter who you're attacking. Just because you're not attacking indigenous doesn't mean that would make me a really lousy anti racism advocate. If I was okay with racism against another group, that makes zero sense. But recently when the question came up for me, why do I do this? And you know, I just smiled from the heart when the answer came to me. The answer. I create the spaces that I wish my mom had found. I create the spaces that I wish my mom had found. I create the spaces. Not gonna cry in another video. I create the spaces that I wish she could have lived in, that she could have enjoyed because she so deserved those spaces. My mom was such a beautiful, caring, compassionate, loving woman that knowing her, you would never think think that her story is the story that it is. My grandfather didn't believe that women needed to be educated. So he sent my uncle to school and he kept my mom and her sisters at home until the truant officer showed up at the door and informed my grandpa that if you don't send those girls to school, they're going to be taken. My mom got sent to school at 14, which might be challenging enough, except my mom got sent to kindergarten and she rarely talked about it. And when she did, there was only two things she would mention. That she was taller than her teacher and that she didn't fit in the desks. The fact that any education system would do that to any child is, was absolutely ridiculous. And I'm certain they would blame my grandfather for that. I wish my mom had a better space to get educated in. And eventually she did. She chose to self educate. She belonged to four different book clubs and she had her book in her dictionary next to her chair and she read every single night. And the living room of the home I grew up in had floor to ceiling bookcases on two walls filled with the books she read. So she found a safe space to be educated. I hope A lot more Indigenous youth take that initiative. I create the safe spaces I wish my mom had found. Because as a young woman, my mom endured an assault sa in the middle of a house party as her partner, her boyfriend at the time, announced that he could do whatever he wanted to her because she was Indigenous. That was my mom's reality. That was the spaces she existed in. My mom married, had a child. Her partner was lost to his alcohol addiction, so she ended up leaving with her son, my eldest brother. And she'd often tell stories of how they were living in Winnipeg in their tiny apartment and they couldn't afford heat. So she would take my brother and go to the matinees at the movie theaters because the movies had heat. And she would get lost in the stories of the movies and escape from her reality. And he just loved sitting there and watching this really big tv. And what I love is, even though that was such a hard time for her, her face would light up as she described my brother and his reaction and how much she loved watching those movies. My mom raised me to be strong because, in her words, she knew there would be times I would have to be strong. My mom gave me everything I needed to go on without her because, as she would often say, there was going to be a time that I would have to. And she was right. But what maybe she didn't realize was that she raised a daughter strong enough, strong willed enough, determined enough, persistent enough, stubborn enough to create the spaces that she deserved to exist in. So if you wonder why I delete comments, and if you wonder why, you know, people get offended when I do that and why I don't pay a lot of attention to that. That's why. Because I'm busy building the spaces that my mom deserved to exist in that every indigenous person deserves to exist in. And right now, they're still far too rare. But I love that we have this space, and I love that you're here with me, respecting this space so that we can learn and share together. So, again, you know, keep your comments. Don't go off on a tangent. Don't compare. Don't, you know, just listen, learn and observe. Say you appreciated it. Say you needed to hear it. But don't focus on commenting. Focus on listening and learning. And I will see you tomorrow. I love you. Take care. Bye. Bye.
