“Are you Indian?”

One by one, my at risk high school students asked me—in private—if my high cheekbones meant anything. I would answer no and launch into the history of my childhood Chippewa friend whose large extended family became mine, calling myself a “back door adopted Chippewa”. Then I would ask the right question:

“Are you?”

More often than not, the answer was yes. They had a grandmother or grandfather who was full-blooded Cherokee or Cheyenne. When I further quizzed them about what they put down for ethnicity on their school paperwork, they invariably said “white”.

Why did they not claim their heritage?

One reason, I believe, is the lessons we learn from our families. For most Native American peoples, the lesson is simple survival. Although most of my students had no personal experience of racism, they had absorbed these family lessons. Hiding is a very good survival strategy.

Another reason these children did not identify as Indian is the US blood quantum rules. In no other nation in the world are indigenous people's self-identity controlled by the government. Don't have a Degree of Indian Blood (DIB) card? Don't belong to a tribe which has not been terminated? Federal agents skulk around powwows and confiscate feathered regalia from those who do not have this seal of “Indianness” under the Migratory Bird Protection and the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Acts which carries a fine of $250,000 and five years in jail. Belonged to your great grandmother? Sorry. No government issued DIB card? Hand it over.

I started a club for my students, based on Native American cultures but expanded to include indigenous students from anywhere as well as those who were interested in these cultures. To my initial surprise, our club attracted international students. Upon reflection, I realized that the world outside the US admires our indigenous peoples.

Once a week, I would do up a big batch of fry bread and chili, and we would eat and talk. We covered a bulletin board in our meeting room with information and pictures. One day when I was teaching a class in this room, I looked over my student's heads and saw that our club display had been vandalized. The students thought I was having a heart attack. (Anyone who has suffered a racist attack knows how it strikes at your heart.) I passed it off because I did not want them to know this ugliness. I repaired the damage.

I discovered that our meeting room was always locked and only open for our meeting, my class and two athletic team meetings. At no time were students in the room unsupervised. I emailed the athletic director about this and received absolutely no response.

Luckily, my principal is a good person. When I brought this to her, she was appalled and has since acted to improve the situation.

My principal asked how this could be when she had seen nothing of racism against our indigenous students and wondered why and how it had suddenly occurred. From my background in human geography, I told her a story to illustrate the how and why.

Human geography is a way of looking at the human condition from a perspective of reality. Landscape is what results as an interaction between the topography and human culture. The story is this:

If you are walking down a street full of people, you do not recognize it as a heterosexual landscape until you see two men holding hands. The contrast is what makes the heterosexual norm visible. Likewise, my club's display was a contrast to the white landscape and made racism visible.

The last thing the fish notices is water. *

Hiding is also a strategy of racism. If we just don't talk about it, we won't see it and everything will be just fine.

I hold many dreams of how America will change when we elect Barack Obama. Out of all these dreams, my dream of honest and real conversations about America's original sin of racism is my most dearly held. Obama carries in his very flesh—half black, half white-- the living metaphor for American multiculturalism.

Fry bread, anyone?

* David Foster Wallace, 2005 http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html