We. Not I. What an Elder Taught Me About the Story We Keep Telling Ourselves

I was mid-sentence when she stopped me.

I was talking the way I always talked when I was fired up about something. What I was doing. What I was building. What I was going to change. The passionate monologue of someone who genuinely believes they are one of the good ones and wants you to know it.

He did not raise his voice. Elders rarely need to.

He just said: "Stop saying I. Say we. We do this. We do that. Are you making change for our community or are you still just making it for yours?"

I went quiet.

That quiet has never fully left me.

Biology Is Not Destiny

Your brain makes you the main character. Every single time. This is not ego. It is not narcissism. It is the architecture of human consciousness. You experience reality from exactly one vantage point, the inside of your own skull, and so the story your mind builds will always center you. You are the protagonist. Everyone else orbits.

Understanding that about yourself is not weakness. It is the beginning of something.

Because once you see the mechanism you can start to question the story.

What gets quietly edited out of the protagonist narrative is the part where you are simultaneously a supporting character in everyone else's life. Where your choices land in other bodies. Where your silence writes someone else's chapter just as surely as your words do. Where your certainty about your own truth is shaping a reality that other people have to live inside whether they agreed to it or not.

We are not just the author. We are also the plot.

The Cell and the Body

I keep coming back to this image because it is not metaphor. It is actual biology.

You are one cell in an entire body.

A healthy body coordinates. Communicates. Every cell contains the full genetic blueprint of the whole organism and still knows its specific function. Still shows up for its particular role without needing to be the whole thing.

When cells stop recognizing each other as part of the same system, when they start treating neighboring cells as foreign, as threat, as enemy, we call that disease. Autoimmune disorder. Cancer. The body consuming itself because it has lost the signal that says: this is us.

Look around.

What we are calling culture war, polarization, the collapse of civil discourse, that is not a communications problem or a social media problem or even a political problem at its deepest root. It is a recognition failure. Cells that have forgotten they share a body now spending every unit of available energy in combat rather than function.

The body is sick. We can feel it. Most of us can feel it even when we cannot name it.

The Stories We Forgot We Built

I came out at fifty. Two-Spirit, bisexual, autistic, Indigenous heritage, African American heritage, with no status, presenting as white, former homeless thug, single parent, truck driver, published author, community organizer. I tell you that not as credential but as context.

I have lived inside a lot of different stories that other people built about who I was supposed to be. I have also built plenty of my own that turned out to be more inherited than examined.

Here is what I have learned from that.

Most of what we call belief is actually architecture. Somebody built a structure a long time ago, a religion, a political identity, a cultural narrative, a family mythology, and we were born inside it. We did not choose the walls. We just learned to call them home. And then at some point we started defending the walls as if they were us, as if questioning the structure was an attack on our existence rather than an invitation to actually look around.

The wall is not you.

The story is not the truth. It is a story. There is a difference and that difference is everything.

Truth does not arrive. It uncovers. Slowly. Uncomfortably. Layer by layer. Every time you think you have reached the bottom you find another floor. Nobody gets to the end of that process. Not you. Not me. Not the person you are most certain has it wrong.

We are all mid-sentence.

The only question is whether we are still listening.

What Was Almost Erased

I want to be precise here because I am not speaking for Indigenous peoples broadly. I am speaking from relationship. From specific Elders who chose to share specific teachings with me across years of showing up, being corrected, and showing up again.

What I can say from that place is this.

The knowledge systems that center interconnection, reciprocity, and right relationship with the living world are not primitive. They are not quaint. They are not spiritual decoration for a Western framework that has already decided how reality works.

They are sophisticated, tested, multigenerational operating systems for how human beings stay whole, individually, communally, and in relationship to the land that sustains all of it.

Residential schools were not a misguided attempt at assimilation. They were a deliberate severing. If you can cut children off from the Elders who carry that knowledge, if you can make them ashamed of the language that encodes it, if you can replace it with a worldview built on hierarchy and extraction and the individual as the primary unit of meaning, then you have cleared the field.

That is not conspiracy. That is documented policy.

And we are living in the long aftermath of it. All of us. Not equally. Not in the same way. But none of us escaped the wound of a civilization that decided nature was a resource, community was a liability, and the self was the only thing that was finally real.

The Reorientation

I am not asking you to dissolve yourself.

You matter. Your experience matters. Your pain, your gifts, your particular way of seeing, none of that disappears inside a we framework. A cell does not stop being a cell because it recognizes it is part of a body. It becomes more itself. More functional. More alive.

What I am asking, what that Elder was asking of me, is a genuine reorientation of the question.

Not what am I doing for my community. But what are we doing for our community.

Not how do I make change. But who is missing from this room and what does their absence cost all of us.

Not is my belief true. But is this something I examined or something I inherited and never questioned.

These are not soft questions. They are the hardest questions. They will cost you certainty, which is the thing most of us guard most fiercely because certainty feels like ground and the alternative feels like falling.

But you do not fall.

You land in something larger.

We Are the Roots

The forest does not fight itself.

Individual trees. Individual root systems. Genuinely distinct organisms with their own needs and cycles and responses to the environment.

And underground, invisibly, silently, across distances we cannot see from the surface, those root systems are exchanging nutrients. Sending signals. The older trees feeding the younger ones through networks that science is only beginning to map and that Indigenous peoples described accurately for centuries before the microscopes arrived to confirm it.

The forest is not a collection of competing individuals.

It is a community that learned to look like individuals.

We came from that. We are that. We just forgot.

I am still remembering.

We. Not I.