Over and Underreacting

My grandmother had insomnia. She would clean her house around me, while I would ask her questions, too excited to sleep. She was always so quick to laugh! She loved my curiosity, and as a natural storyteller, loved an audience. She said I had healing hands, but I think that’s just because she loved getting foot rubs.

My grandmother caught me admiring someone’s tattoo when I was little, and told me that the women of our tribe would tattoo themselves: three lines down the chin, from the corners of the mouth and down the center.

“Why grandma? Didn’t it hurt?” I asked, excited and appalled at the idea. “The women would do it when they were getting to a marriageable age. The straighter and finer the lines, the more attractive the woman would be considered. She would have proven her ability to do delicate work.” And I understood that being attractive was subjective, and someone’s ability and actions could make them more attractive, which was a very different idea than what I had seen in magazines and in the movies.

My grandmother never even started high school. She had dropped out in 8^th grade. She also was sent to a boarding school. Her hair was cut and she was punished for speaking her parent’s language. However, I remember her swearing, probably in the choicest curses of our ancestors, because it wasn’t any I recognized. I have started taking language classes at my local tribal office. The last person who spoke our language as a first language passed in 2003. I want to learn the words my grandmother forgot.

Grandmother told my sister that she knew some people in AIM and she would have liked to have joined them out there, but she had too many kids to care for. Last summer, I found out that her marriage to my grandfather was an arranged one. She already had one son, and my grandfather was a terrible misogynist, so I imagine the marriage was for property and to have a good “squaw” wife who could give him more children. It wasn’t just our land that was colonized.

Then, I think about the math of genocide. Blood quantum. My grandmother’s father was full-blood Siletz, and her mother was half Grand Ronde. Grandmother was ¾ Native American, my father 3/8, and I’m 3/16. However, the only part that counts is the tribe I’m enrolled with. So I’m listed at 1/8, even though I’m closer to ¼. However, I have a strong Italian cultural identity from my mother’s side, and Native American from dad. Does that make me half and half? Or when I’m speaking the language of my indigenous ancestors and learning the traditions, does that make me fully Native?

Days ago, a man at a party told me that I didn’t look Native American. I told him that I don’t always wear my headdress and warpaint and turquoise and silver. I had asked him not to use the phrase “spirit animal,” since it was disrespectful to Native American culture. He argued, saying it was a phrase, a joke. I told him I was Native American and I didn’t think it was funny. He said my skin tone was wrong, and I was angry. I look like my tribe. My tribe is a small one, about 5000 people. If you don't expect Germans to look like Italians, though they are all European, why would you expect all Indigenous people of the current US to look the same? My skin tone is a direct result of over 500 years of ongoing genocide. And then I told him he was being racist. He was not sorry for what he said, just that he had said it around the minority who would be offended. There was a scuffle as my boyfriend escorted him out of the door, and some of my friends thought my boyfriend and I had overreacted. I think they underreacted. Sometimes, I don’t think I can be angry enough.

It is frustrating to be part of such an invisible minority. People don’t think we exist anymore. Maybe it’s easier to think of us that way, when living on stolen land. We are costumes, or stereotypes, or mascots, or some monolithic culture at best. I wish I knew offhand what year the land that is now Portland was stolen from my people, so I could cite the treaty when white folks want to assume anything about my ancestors. I am angry when I hear white folks talk about “spirit animals” or “ceremonies” or “smudging” without carrying or even truly acknowledging the weight of history, without knowing that we weren’t even allowed to practice our own religion in our own country until 1978. Or white girls who think warbonnets/warpaint/fringe/feathers is a cute thing to wear because they are so free-spirited and sexy and fierce or some bullshit, while Native American women are sexually assaulted at a rate almost double any other ethnic group. White folks making “Indian” crafts are taking business away from the people who traditionally made these, people who suffer from some of the highest poverty in the nation. White people think they are appreciating our culture, and entitled to take this or that to play with, when I’m trying so hard to participate in what’s left.  

New Year's Revolutions

"Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created or recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books.”

–Rudine Sims Bishop from “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors”

Last year I had made a New Year's Resolution to read 52 books that I had not read before. I tend to re-read books, so I wanted to challenge myself to not just pick up Harry Potter or Jane Eyre when the weather is yucky, or some other favorite, to just pass the time.

I made it through 33 total. I'm not disappointed in myself, but glad that I pushed myself to read that many new books in a year. I surprised myself by reading a lot of nonfiction, as well as diving into some new comics series (I counted trade papers as a book.)

This year, I'm going to read 30 books by People of Color (POC) that I have not read before.

On the last day of Banned Books Week last year, I attended an event at a local library branch from a group called We Need Diverse Books. The event explored the reasons books were challenged and found that they were usually written by a member of a minority group: LGBTQIA, people with disabilities, members of ethnic, cultural, and religious minorities. Books that explore what it's like to not be the default: a straight white Christian male. These books give us opportunities to read about characters who go through similar struggles, and also allows us to peer into lives of those who are so different, and recognize the humanity, beauty, and strength of others.

As a mixed race person, I had not read any books about people like me until after I was out of high school. Any books about Native Americans I read, treated us in the past tense. I had been to pow-wows! I exist! So, historical figures became my heros. When I was in 2nd grade, we studied the Oregon Trail and I became fascinated with Sacajawea. She guided these white men who had no idea what they were doing or where they were going to the other side of the nation. We did a field trip that year, where we were supposed to dress up as pioneers to go for a 7 mile walk with our class to a nearby campground where we learned about the things that pioneers did. I asked my parents if I could wear my regalia so I could be Sacajawea. I think they were tickled by the idea, so they let me. Have I mentioned that I was kind of a weird kid at school? This didn't help me socially, but I knew that I had to do it, to emulate one of the only Native American ladies that I had ever read about.

I was talking about this to a coworker, and he confessed that he honestly didn't think that Native Americans still existed until he met one! We get so little representation that mascots are most of our representation in pop culture. My dad supports that terribly named football team who refuses to change their name, and even has a hat to support the team. And who am I to tell my father, who has suffered more racism than I that his choice of supporting that team is racist? I'm not even sure how to approach it.

When I first read Sherman Alexie, I laughed so hard at some of the things that I recognized in my father and grandmother and cousins acted out by the characters in his stories. I was brought to tears when I read about the pains of growing up with so much alcoholism, poverty, violence, and addiction. His books were the first that I had read which had Native American characters in a modern context, struggling with the troubles of colonialism, the preservation of culture and identity, and reservation and urban life. It was so amazing to know that there were others who are facing similar struggles, reconciling our lives with our losses, and how hard we're fighting to keep our culture alive.

On the other side of it, I think the first books I read that gave me a view into what it's like to have a very different kind of life were the books by Lurlene McDaniel. One of my childhood friends has Cystic Fibrosis, a genetic disorder which causes an overproduction of mucus in the lungs, pancreas, and other organs. From the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation: "Breakthrough treatments have added years to the lives of people with cystic fibrosis. Today the median predicted survival age is close to 40. This is a dramatic improvement from the 1950s, when a child with CF rarely lived long enough to attend elementary school." (https://www.cff.org/What-is-CF/About-Cystic-Fibrosis/) We met when we were 6, and it was so strange to go with her at lunch so she could get her medicine & inhaler at the nurse's office every day at lunch, or when I'd sleepover at her house, watch her use some sort of a breathing machine every morning to help clear her lungs. When she found this book “A Time to Die,” by Lurlene McDaniel, I imagine it was incredible, to read something that is written about a similar experience to what she has to live with every day. She lent the book to me, and it was so interesting to read a book that illustrated her experience in a way that she maybe hadn't had the vocabulary to express. I had only witnessed what she shared with me, not the internal thoughts and struggles of a childhood shadowed by impending mortality. How differently shaped would your life be if you already knew that you have a limited amount of time on this world?

This year, I want to find new books to broaden my perspective and to share with others. Most of what I ever see is from the perspective of white people. I want to find mirrors into my own culture. I want to find windows to show me what it's like to grow up and live with a different cultural background, with different skin color. Because brown skin is actually the majority, in spite of what pop culture shows us.