Cherokee MC Litefoot Shares Wisdom on Becoming 'Good Enough'

Cherokee rapper, actor, activist and mentor Litefoot has been influencing people on Turtle island for close to two decades with his music, movies and community work.

He recently shared some words of wisdom with Indian Country Today writing about the ways we perceive ourselves as Indigenous people rising out of the struggle, attaining our own destiny through the acceptance of our own path and healing as a collective conscience.

From Becoming 'Good Enough':

Each piece of the journey builds upon the next phase of it. Those phases become the chapters that are recorded, collected and assembled chronologically into the book we call our lives. The hope in looking back at all of the moments throughout our journey is that we find we were good students. That we were able to be calm and find the solutions to the problems—no matter how loud the rain and thunder happened to be at that moment in our journey. We would hope to find ample times where we kept our head up on the journey to look around and see the things that we were passing by. That we were accessible to help others “stuck in the mud” in their journey by sharing with them how we had previously “unstuck” ourselves. That we cherished the journey in as much as, we could have easily become frustrated with all the unplanned moments that arose during it. The point is that all the moments of the journey are important and define who we were, who we are and who and what we are remembered as having been. The moments at the start of the journey might be compared to the “edged” pieces of a puzzle. They are the pieces that are most easy to assemble. They lay the framework for the image that begins to come together with each piece that is laid. Several different oddly shaped pieces that we slowly put together throughout our journey that one by one start to form the picture that the Creator painted of us before our birth. Every piece is important. No part of the picture is greater than any other; the sum is a total of its parts.

It's an inspiring, thought-provoking read on Indigenous identity. Read Litefoot's article in its entirety on ICMTN: "Becoming Good Enough".