I have been told a number of times that I should move to town where a woman is “safe.” I have spent my life, as many women have, trying to fit into the mold that society has designated I should fill. And yet we are the daughters of women whose ancestors crossed the Bering Sea 30,000 years ago, from Asia to North America, bearing their children and their courage with them.
We are the daughters of women whose ancestors migrated from poverty and discrimination to cross a frontier and build this country into a shining light of pride. We are the daughters of women whose ancestors fought in every war. Women who wore men’s clothes during the Revolutionary War to the Civil War, facing the enemy head-on, and the women who tended the wounded and dying.
From the couping stick to the battle axe, from cap and ball to repeater, we have stood beside, fought beside, and died beside our men.
Remember that when you stand at your kitchen sink, doing the dishes. You are the daughter of a woman who braved a bold land, not an easy land, to live within. But a rich existence stretching each of us to be more than we believed ourselves to be.
We are not hot-house flowers that must be sheltered indoors or dug at the first stirrings of the Taku winds. But rather we are wildflowers in a high mountain meadow, strong, beautiful and enduring.
Anney Shuder