End Notes
How Do I Help You Understand?
By Michelle Huyser
Author’s statement:
I grew up on the Navajo reservation in Window Rock, Arizona. I am half Navajo. I have participated in many discussions about racism and consistently have felt the same way after every one: lacking the words to express how I feel but not the passion. I tried to capture some of that sentiment as I wrote this poem after participating in cultural awareness activities as part of the Rural Medical Scholars course last year.
How do I help you understand that this conversation means more to me than it does to you? That the outcome of this conversation holds more weight for my people than it does for yours.
How do I help you understand that you can choose to have this conversation but I am automatically a spokesperson for all those like me?
That the words I choose in this conversation are the words I learned so that I can participate in the realm created for you.
How do I help you understand that every time you make a joke about this, it makes me feel uncomfortable in my own skin?
That by making that joke, you are exercising your power again without even realizing it.
How do I help you understand that the words I choose can be manipulated in every conversation I have, or you have, with another person about this topic?
I inherited that pressure; I did not choose it.
How do I help you understand that it does go both ways,
but when you say that to me it feels more like an excuse than an explanation?
For every one example you give me, I can give you a hundred.
How do I help you understand that I don’t have an answer,
but I want to be heard?
Michelle Huyser is a second-year medical student at the University of Minnesota-Duluth.