09/23/2025
My grandma recently passed away and I’ve been thinking a lot about the stories she carried, the life she lived. It seems so strange, wrong even, that we have only 2 generations walking this Earth. The reality that I will be the one carrying on these stories has set in. I know I need to tell them to keep them alive.
My grandma was raised by her grandma. She told so many stories of her grandma, of her siblings, of her life. But this past year she told me a story I hadn’t heard before. She told it as if it were any story that she had told me a hundred times. But this one was different.
When my grandma was 4, her mother, Gertrude, died. Her father was off fighting in WW II so she and her siblings went to live with her Nokum, a woman many have known as Granny Cochrane. Granny Cochrane raised many children, she raised them with love, laughs, wisdom, and a firm hand. There was no pulling a fast one on Granny Cochrane.
I’d known all this ever since I can remember, but there was a part of that story that was never told, until very recently, when my grandma’s mind had begun to change and all she had were these stories.
My grandma told me about how she went to live with her Nokum and that shortly after, they received a visit from a social worker. The social worker wanted to take them away from Granny Cochrane because they said she was too old to be raising children. Grandma said that Granny Cochrane stood waiting for them on the porch with a shotgun. That when they pulled up and tried to take the kids, Granny Cochrane told them to leave and never come back or they wouldn’t be leaving.
I don’t know just how much truth there is to that story. I know stories tend to be embellished as they’re passed down. But I do know that Granny Cochrane took no s**t and would have done anything for those kids. This was a time, and quite honestly is still a time, when Indigenous children were being taken from their families with any excuse thrown out to ‘warrant’ it. I can’t imagine how different my life would be, my mom and grandma’s lives would be, if Granny Cochrane hadn’t stepped up and been everything those kids needed. I’m so grateful to come from a line of such strong Indigenous women. Women who show up, in the face of systems designed to break them, in spite of it all, for those they love. This is the legacy of my matriarchs and is a courage I strive for in everything I do.
This is the photo of Granny Cochrane that my grandma always kept in her room.
