Thoughts on the Patricia Grant Speech

I’ve been thinking about the talk we went to on Thursday, the Cherokee Journey to Forgiveness and Healing. There’s this enormous tendency to intellectualize the talk that I’ve been trying to resist—I’m not sure if posting on my blog about this negates that effort, but I hope not.

Despite the mental acrobatics I’ve pushed myself through, though, the reason I’ve been so hesitant to write about it is fairly simple. Objectively as a presentation, is was amateurish and heavily flawed; yet on an emotional level, I connected more deeply with it than almost anything else this year. Patricia Grant, as a speaker, was often accusatory. She opened her speech, delivered to an all-white audience, with a polemic against the white race. The slides for her presentation were awkwardly designed and repeated information with an almost disturbing regularity. She rambled, and, for a speech titled “Forgiveness and Healing,” spent most of the time speaking about trauma and hurt. She had a stammer that reappeared every minute or so. By any standard of public speaking, she failed tremendously.

Yet still her words and her presentation were cutting, effective, and heartrending. She talked about how her mother would make medicine for them when they were sick because they couldn’t afford a trip to the pharmacy. At one point she began to weep. I found myself near tears myself, though I could say why. Perhaps that is the great achievement of the presentation. Someone with an awkward and alienating style of delivery, with origins that could not be further from my own, made me feel the pain she felt, and helped me realize my own capacity for destruction and hate.

When I learned about how Grant’s mother couldn’t spank her children when she was angry because she was afraid she would hit them to death, and then found out how that this uncontrolled emotion can be traced back to emotional trauma, often inflicted by the whites on the Indians, I felt a profound sense of injustice. That’s an understatement. I felt that I myself was guilty and finally, ultimately, realized how many things were still wrong in our country for American Indians. While the speech might have been a failure as a speech, in terms of emotional impact, it was a resounding success.