Bobbie C - age 68 - Kathleen Cosgrove

I am 68 years on the planet. I come from a very long line of amazing
women and never looked far for role models. Our mother was a
single head-of-household from 23 to 86 and during that span, she
was full-time employee for more than 40 years. From pea harvest
to P.E. teacher to librarian to youth culture leader, she gave her all
to every job and cared about every student. She returned to college
with us kids in tow and garnered three degrees, BS, MS, BFA. She
painted, sketched, organized, kept us in line and pushed us, even
when we balked and bucked. Her mother was the best grandmother—
fierce, practical, strict, demonstrative. Raised in our traditional
ways, she was baptized so she could marry grandpa (son of a
Nez Perce ordained Presbyterian minister). Along with raising
four handsome, athletic sons (who were all combat vets) and three
gorgeous, smart daughters (two of whom graduated from college),
she was a church and civic activist and a founding member of the only
all-Indian federated women’s clubs in the U.S. In the late 1800s,
both great-grandmothers, legally divorced their first husbands,
and were allotted their own lands when few Indian women
achieved this except widows, and remarried their next husbands
as landowners.
They lived by their own rules. Each defined their own path. Mom cut
her hair so short in the 1950’s, her mother made her wear a scarf
to town. Grandma never wore pants or cut her hair and as a child,
living the seasonal food gathering cycle on horseback, she had a
domestic cat in a bag around her saddle horn. Grandma’s mother
never wore shoes, only moccasins, loved watermelon and Caruso.
Grandpa’s Mom was orphaned, gave birth to nine children,
and died of TB in her 40s. They didn’t accept the world as it was;
they worked hard to get what they needed, made it better, and
didn’t give up. There were many scary times in these women’s
lives: chased by US soldiers on the Columbia River, orphaned
when father died in battle with the US Army in Montana, having
two sons in WWII overseas with a third in the National Guard, and
making ends meet on very, very limited incomes because they were
disciplined, savvy, and devoted to family. They weren’t fearless
but they didn’t bow to fear. When I start to feel pitiful because
my health is no longer vigorous compared to my pre-COVID self,
I am reminded that it is nothing compared to what my ancestors
survived. I relish my horses, nieces, nephews, and their children—
especially when we’re sharing our Tribal culture in the outdoors
of our homeland. I have a dozen important Tribal projects to
engage in the balance of my life; about half on the job and half
after I retire. I have learned the meanings of the most important
lessons the women before me taught: Love is not painful. Always
own land. Don’t leave a trail a mile wide when you’re in danger.
Children are sacred.