Craft a Commencement Speech

Speech 1: Megan Red Shirt-Shaw (2017)

Editor's Note: Megan Red Shirt-Shaw, a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe from Pine Ridge, South Dakota, earned her master's degree in Education from Harvard University in 2017. She delivered this speech at her graduation ceremony.

Mitakuye, le anpetu kin, cante wasteya nape ceyuzapi. Megan Red Shirt-Shaw emaciyab na ma Lakota, na Pine Ridge, South Dakota, hemaciyatahan ksto.

I'd like to acknowledge the land of the Wampanoag, Nimac and Massachusetts tribes on which this university rests. My name is Megan Red Shirt-Shaw. I am an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, and today - is a really good day. Congratulations to all of your beautiful minds and the families who encouraged you on our almost HGSE graduation. I greet each and every one of you with a good heart. My mother asked me if this was the first time Lakota has ever been spoken during a Harvard commencement, and for that, if it's true, we are very proud. Pila maya ye, thank you.

Almost one year ago, I packed three suitcases and moved 3,000 miles from the Bay Area to Cambridge to start at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. In perfect summer sunlight and on the first day of classes, I felt like I was carrying - beyond my mother, father, sister, brother and niece - every Native student I loved with me. Standing here on our convocation day, I continue to carry all of those first day voices, but now - I also carry all of you. I couldn't have imagined then how the Higher Education cohort would challenge me daily, that the Harvard University Native American program office would become like home to me, or that I would consume more than one hundred brownies from Gutman Cafe. I couldn't have known that everything in my personal and professional life was going to change. That I'd fall in and out of love with different spaces and people, that the conversations I'd have in class would sometimes leave me feeling completely confused about my life and my choices, or that I would dream out my future in an entirely different way. That exactly like the students we serve, our lives and their lives can complexly change because of years like the one we had at HGSE, or that we, as educators, will be called to courageously change because of times in America like the one we are currently experiencing.

We cannot begin to predict in the future what will be difficult, what will feel safe, who will be beautiful to us, and what will make us feel like we've come undone. I could not have known that the Dakota Access Pipeline movement would challenge me or my sisters in FIERCE for our entire academic year. I couldn't have known that I would be incapable of unseeing the people I love the most being hurt in North Dakota on the news in between classes and assignments, or that the call to action from the Oceti Sakowin would sometimes overwhelm a professor's call to read a case study. I knew through facing that pain that I was not going to learn patience or grit in a Longfellow classroom, nor would I learn about the depth of the human spirit on a Larsen whiteboard. What I did know was that I could lean on and learn from my classmates and professors carrying similar grief for the communities they love. I could be reminded by all of you, in your own personal and brave struggles, that we must root our classroom theory in reality, that we will forward and forever commit to recognizing the potential and human spirit in every student; and that we will always appreciate the dreamers, the light seekers, and the activists - because in them we see ourselves. They are strong, powerful, quick to recover, and often buoyant and loving, just like we are - either because we believe in that strength or because we as educators, have been called on by our communities, and by those who believed in us here at HGSE, to be strong.

The greatest lesson that I could not have known last summer was that, because of the Nation Building II course here at HGSE, I would travel to Canada over spring break to work on alternative education methods for young homeless First Nations women in a program called Moving the Mountain. That they, with faces like mine, would remind me, in my greatest lesson of the year, what resilience is. Unlike my own experiences, almost every person and every system in their life has let them down - and yet they persevere, rising like fire from the ashes, moving the mountains unleashed in their ways. I cried in anger for the entire flight back, because I knew what I was learning here in the classroom wasn't going to make the world better for them tomorrow. I couldn't easily dismantle and rebuild the systems that make education a challenge instead of a right for them. And yet, these young women also reminded me to remember that if they can show up to their classrooms, every day, by any means necessary, to learn and give back to the world in faith that things for them will someday be better, we can too. That even in our grief for their and our complicated circumstances, we as their educators and allies have to show up, carrying everything we learned and dreamed here at HGSE, knowing that each and every one of us as colleagues will push to change the world for the students who we love the most.

In the years ahead, we will learn compassion from a child who seeks to practice religious freedom because their faith is their greatest source of strength. We will learn resilience from a student harassed by police or immigration authorities on his way to school. We will learn from the kids who look and feel and experience the world exactly as we do, because hopefully this year prepared you for change and challenge in the same ways it did for me. And ultimately, that kindergartner you always said yes to will go on to middle school. She'll go to high school, she'll find her voice in college, and then someday, maybe, she'll end up here on Appian Way. She will have moved every mountain unleashed, she will have pushed back on every system that tried to tell her who she was, and she will live with fire seeking justice in a country that doesn't always remember she is still here. She'll open her heart to say, thank you Harvard for this opportunity, for all the people here, thank you to my family, my community, and the Oglala Sioux oyate, the people, for granting me and us this beautiful life. She'll tell you, as her teachers and professors and mentors who pushed to make the world better for her, thank you. Pila maya pi na wopila, thank you so much, for building and believing in me.

As we walk away from here, I want to share with you the best phrase my mother taught me in the Lakota language: _"Weksuye, Ciksuye, Miksuye"_ meaning "I remember, I remember you, please remember me." In these final moments of our HGSE time together, I want to remind you to remember. Remember the students and teachers and classmates who built you. Carry the people next to you every day, and honor this amazing opportunity that we were so privileged to be a part of. As we Lakota say, _cante mitawa ekta ocignake,_ to those whom they have been privileged to know - I have put you into my heart. And I will always remember you.