This is Sheri’s response to Sarah’s Substack article from last week, “I Lost My Little Sister Last Week.”
When Sarah sent me her last Substack essay, written in the early aftermath of our dear Bizzy’s death, she asked me if it was too intense, too harsh. I said no. I told her: “It’s very real. And I think it's actually a gift to White people, to try to get us to understand.”
Sarah writes at the beginning of her essay, “It is difficult for me to express how dehumanizing it is to be an Indigenous child in this country. I will try.” And then she goes on to tell us. I read and re-read what she writes, and every time I feel so sad and angry that someone as beautiful and strong and brilliant as my sisters could be made to feel this way, that colonization and white supremacy do this to a person — twist them into complex internal knots that take years, decades to untie, if ever. In John 8:44, Jesus speaks of Satan as “a liar and the father of lies.” You don’t have to believe in a literal being named Satan to know that white supremacy’s distortions are satanic.
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