Playing Indian

My last post talked about ways in which identity and culture were commodities and how they were exchanged through a global market that often put ethnic identities up for sale. In Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, Linda Tuhiwai Smith adds:

Whilst imperialism if often thought of as a system which drew everything back into the centre, it was also a system which distributed materials and ideas outwards. Said’s notion of ‘positional superiority’ is useful here for conceptualizing the ways in which knowledge and culture were as much a part of imperialism as raw materials and military strength. Knowledge was also there to be discovered, extracted, appropriated and distributed. (58)

This is part of the problem that Smith has with Western research: rather than acknowledging that knowledge and culture existed within indigenous communities before the dominant Western culture (namely, Europeans) “discovered” them, researchers have historically turned knowledge and culture into commodities to be interpreted and appropriated. According to Smith, “The production of knowledge, new knowledge transformed ‘old’ knowledge, ideas about the nature of knowledge and the validity of specific forms of knowledge, become as much commodities of colonial exploitation as other natural resources” (59).

Similarly, visual authenticity acts as a commodity as well. Smith tells a story about an international conference held in New Zealand “to discuss issues related to indigenous intellectual and cultural property rights” and how the reporters wanted to get a picture of the Natives together to publish with the story. They changed their minds, however, when they saw that the indigenous people they wanted to photograph looked pretty much like everyone else. Signs of visual authenticity are still something people look for in identifying Natives—romanticism and stereotype are still very much problems that face indigenous people throughout the world. In the following passage, Smith suggests a reason for this categorization:

Questions of who is a ‘real indigenous’ person, what counts as a ‘real indigenous leader’, which person displays ‘real cultural values’ and the criteria used to assess the characteristics of authenticity are frequently the topic of conversation and debate. These debates are designed to fragment and marginalize those who speak for, or in support of, indigenous issues. They frequently have the effect also of silencing and making invisible the presence of other groups within the indigenous society like women, the urban non-status tribal person and those whose ancestry or ‘blood quantum’ is ‘too white’. (72)

This sounds very much like the cases that Scott Richard Lyons referred to in X-Marks: these visual markers and authenticity tests because tools of exclusion, usually for the other’s profit. Think again of disenrollment and loss of federal benefits.

There’s a flip side, too, for those who do “look Indian”: they are judged as being only Indians, and are expected to conform to the stereotypes. In Chrystos’ poem “The Old Indian Granny,” the narrator shares some of the deplorable conditions of poor Indians, those who society has forgotten.

               

                Sometimes I don’t want to be an Indian either

                but I’ve never said so out loud before

                since I’m so proud & political

                I have to deny it now

                Far more than being hungry

                having no place to live or dance

                no decent job    no home to offer a Granny

                It’s knowing with each invisible breath

                that if you don’t make something pretty

                they can hang on their walls or wear around their necks

                you might as well be dead

This poem from Reinventing the Enemy’s Language serves as a perfect example of the expectations of Indians to perform Indianness. If Indians can’t emulate public expectations of them, they are invisible. Those Indians who are neglected and abused by society are the ones who are apt to live in poverty or succumb to addiction.  Too much social injustice is racialized, and for no good reason (as we’ve seen through many arguments about “touchstones” of ethnic or racial identity).

 The quality of life on many Indian reservations suffers as well; I’ve read of many accounts of Indians being unable to prosper in reservation communities, which often force members of the community to live in squalor and poverty. This is something I don’t really understand, though. I’ve never lived on a reservation, and my nation’s reservation in Shawnee, Oklahoma is a wonderful place to live, stay, and work. Sometimes I wish that I lived on the reservation just so I could be closer to great tribal resources and culture.  I remember reading somewhere once that reservations were poor because the Indians that lived there felt that they needed to represent public opinion of Indian living conditions and culture, so if that meant squandering money and neglecting to pay bills, that was just a part of being Indian. I don’t know if I really believe this, though. What can explain the impoverished conditions of certain Indian reservations?

X Marks Identity

This book is so rich I don’t even know where to start! So let me just dive in…

Scott Richard Lyons suggests in X-marks: Native Signatures of Assent that Indians are continuously undergoing removals. The first remove he describes actually connects to my tribes Legend of the Seven Fires. Lyons, too, refers to seven prophets that visited the anishinaabeg (that’s “O-gibberish” for the Potawatomi word nishnabe), but times their visits around the time that the three individual tribes—Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Odawa—emerged. Lyons’ telling of the Ojibwe story names the three tribes as the three fires, whereas the Potawatomi story refers to the seven prophecies as the seven fires. So while the stories differ, we can certainly trace certain homologies. I think that’s pretty cool.

According to Lyons, we are in the fourth remove, which began somewhere around the time the American frontier closed. Shortly after that, Americans gained citizenship in 1924, and continued to progress through the process of modernity. Like the metonymical signatures Indians first used as they were coerced into signing treaties, Lyons identifies x-marks as indicators of Indian presence or Indian identity. Because of changing definitions of what constitutes Indian space in our contemporary world, Lyons explains that “[a]ny consideration of an x-mark should contend with this intractable multiplicity of Indian space. Further, we must always admit that space can be modernized. Indian space is never defined by tradition or culture alone because Native people migrate in modern times as well” (21).

X-marks beg the question of who determines the definition of Indian identity and Indian space. Lyons claims that “X-marks are always made in the political context of discursive formations that never emanate from organic indigenous communities. I am saying this even in the so-called age of ‘self-determination’: even now our discourses of Indianness are generated by institutions, the state, and the market” (24). These discourses exist within many loaded contexts, including such areas as tribal government, the art world, workplaces, federal government, communities, and more. Definitions of Indianness are made to change in any situation that increases someone’s profit. What definition of ourselves will best allow us to be successful and profitable? Lyons cites Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s text Empire (2000) in order to illustrate the concept of cultural multiplicity as a world market:

Many of the concepts dear to postmodernists and postcolonialism find a perfect correspondence in the current ideology of corporate capital and the world market. The ideology of the world market has always been the anti-foundational and anti-essentialist discourse par excellence. Circulation, mobility, diversity, and mixture are its very conditions of possibility. Trade brings differences together and the more the merrier! Differences (of commodities, populations, cultures, and so forth) seem to multiply infinitely in the world market, which attacks nothing more violently than fixed boundaries: it overwhelms any binary division with its infinite multiplicities. (19-20)

The coming-together of multi-faceted identities, articulated for some gain, is illustrated as early as the writings of Samson Occom in the late eighteenth century, to Charles Alexander Eastman in the late nineteenth-early twentieth century, and continues through Native writers today. Lyons explains that “early Native writers were always acutely aware of their rhetorical contexts and addressed them accordingly, sometimes through challenging or appropriating the dominant discourses of their day” (25). In this way, discourse is symbolic of a capitalist market, and an individual’s appropriation of the dominant discourse offers one a chance to profit. I have written in other work about the rhetorical strategies of William Apess in the late 1800s, and how wielding Euro-American rhetoric commanded the attention of a formerly dismissive audience, thus ensuring change for the better in the lives of Indian people.

 However, there is a negative side to the cultural market:

given the logistics of our peculiar technological age…and considering  what the postmodernists have identified as a general lack of faith in the grand narratives of emancipation and enlightenment, what we would seem to be left with is a call to perform our roles as ethnic spectacles, and the greatest of these is always ethnic discontent. (26)

The expectation of Indians to perform as “ethnic spectacles” is nothing new. Consider the photography of Edward Curtis in the 1800s, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show near the same time, and Indianist art and music in the early twentieth century. The following is an excerpt from a paper I just wrote on the American desire for Indianist compositions:

by the 1920s the broader American public began to call into question United States assimilation policies and sympathize with the Indian “plight.” Now there existed a non-Indian concern with and demand for the experience of “authentic Indianness, just as the anthropological theory of cultural relativism began to significantly infiltrate universities and the press.”[1] Unfortunately, the product of that desire and demand for authentic Indian culture constituted inauthentic, Indianist creative works of music, literature, and art. Theses Indianists aimed to “[infuse] their music with the spirit of Indian life, as others had tried to do in various genres—Edward Curtis with photography and Mary Austin with poetry.”[2] In doing so, Indianist composers hoped to elevate “Indian” music as a legitimate art form in the dominant culture.[3] The “sound of the Indian” during this time included musical interpretations of Indianness which created elaborate narratives on Indian life and imposed symbolism in ways that did not relate at all to actual Indian life at the time.[4] Troutman explains that one of the signature components of the “sound of Indian” was “the ‘war drum’ (DUM dum dum dum DUM dum dum dum), [which] came in the first half of the twentieth century to cue pioneers on the silver screen to shriek with horror or muster their manliness.”[5] (Funk, “(Mis)Representations of American Indians in Early Twentieth Century Popular Culture” 9) 

In my blog post on Vine Deloria, Jr.’s Custer Died for Your Sins, I briefly referred to the popular American obsession with representing Indianness through advocating environmentalism. Of course, many Indians are guilty of this as well. Lyons explains that “[g]lobal capitalism is the culprit here, as it has spent the last several decades dismantling boundaries, shattering essences, and obliterating binary oppositions in order to open markets and put ethnic identities up for sale” (26). By putting ethnic identities up for sale, by emphasizing multiculturality, anyone who can appropriate Indianness, for whatever reason, can profit by this market mode of cultural trade. He continues, “What is called ‘diversity’ and ‘multiculturalism’ also happens to function as a ‘niche market’ from another point of view, and this new ethnic market is the machine that now produces most of our dominant discourse” (26). He discusses ethnic protest as being a driving force in capitalism, saying that because protest and resistance in regard to ethnic definitions does not necessarily occur for the benefit of freedom or recognition of Indians as people anymore, they rather attract notice, instigate debate, and provide people with “economically logical and socially viable vocation[s]” (qtd. in Lyons 27). Identities are essentially “things,” according to Lyons, “things used to describe people, and always the invented fabrications of human beings” (36).

This doesn’t necessarily mean to stir up trouble for trouble’s sake, however. Appropriation isn’t always a bad thing. Lyons contends, like Paul Chaat Smith in one of my previous posts, that cultures change with modernity, and Indians, too, are “adopting new ways of living, thinking, and being that do not necessarily emanate from a traditional source (or, for that matter, ‘time immemorial’), and sometimes it means appropriating the new and changing it to feel more like the old. Sometimes change can make the old feel new again” (33). In fact, change can be a good thing. Trying to go back to traditional roots is rather counterproductive, and Lyons specifically refers to the disenrollment of Cherokee Freedmen in the early 2000s (an attempt to “ethnically cleanse” themselves) along with the insistence that many Native Americans’ practice of Christianity for the past 500 years isn’t traditional enough.

Ultimately, identity is a social process, so how do we determine what constitutes Indian identity? Lyons opines that [i]dentities always serve particular interests…all identities can be challenged and redefined; a successful assertion of identity depends mainly on its recognition by someone else” (37). And sometimes assignments of identity seem highly suspect, such as what Lyons calls the “eyeball test” of federal officials who defined Indian identity based on skin color: do you look Indian, black, or white? The chairman of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation legally fought with the federal government over this classification of Citizen Potawatomi according to color, mainly because many Potawatomi certainly don’t “look” Indian, and by claiming that if one Potawatomi worked outside that summer and therefore had darker skin, then he was more Indian than his neighbor who worked inside that summer and didn’t get much of a tan. Indian dentity was never based on “blood” because those identities “do not come from biology, soil, or the whims of the Great Spirit, but from discourse, action, and history” (40).

Discourses are stories. And like Thomas King states in The Truth about Stories, “the truth about stories is that that’s all that we are.” Our identities are constructed through discourse, stories. Most importantly, “Identity orients you in space and time, connects you to the past, helps you identify a vision for the future, and provides you with a story” (Lyons 39).

So whose story defines our identities?

Authenticity Test

Since my current research focuses on interpretations and appropriations of American Indian identity, image, history, and so on, I’d like to highlight Paul Chaat Smith’s words in Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong, in which he claims that “the continued trivialization and appropriation of Indian culture, the absolute refusal to deal with us as just plain folks living in the present and not the past—is the same as ever” (18). He claims that unlike the American Indian Movement in the 1970s, which brought about vast social change and political change for Indians, we are not likely to be able to conjure up such a movement now in terms of altering perceptions of the popular image of the Indian, most commonly seen through the image of “the Plains Indian of the mid-nineteenth century” (20). Now, instead of identifying Indians by tribal affiliation, “Indian” has come to define a much broader scope of individuals of many cultures. Smith explains that “[w]hat has made us one people is the common legacy of colonialism….Five hundred years ago we were Seneca and Cree and Hopi and Kiowa, as different from each other as Norwegians are from Italians, Egyptians, or Zulus….When we think of the old days, like it or not we conjure up images that have little to do with real history” (19). The problem facing Native Americans today is that colonialism has made all Indians “one people,” and romanticism springs almost organically from that metamorphosis. Now, our dilemma lies in distinguishing romanticism from reality, which given the complexity of Indian histories, is easier said than done. What we can do instead is begin to reconceptualize our notions of Indian identity through understanding bits and pieces of what constitutes Indianness today.

So what’s the big problem then?

The true story is simply too messy and complicated. And too threatening. The myth of noble savages, completely unable to cope with modern times, goes down much more easily. No matter that Indian societies consistently valued technology and when useful made it their own. (20)

 I pointed out in a previous blog that Vine Deloria, Jr. thought that one of the benefits of people idealizing Indians is that it inspires some to be more conscious of their impact on and connection to the environment. Here, Smith cites it as a problem: “Today the equation is Indian equals spiritualism and environmentalism (20). An “antidote,” he proposes, lies in reconciling manufactured history with “the secret history of Indians in the twentieth century,” and on the same page shows a picture of Geronimo in his 1905 Locomobile Model C (21).

More than simply having a penchant for keeping up with modernity, Indians also have a not-so-bright history, which includes “a riot of vastly different cultures, which occasionally fought each other, no doubt sometimes viciously and for stupid reasons. If some Indian societies were ecological utopias with that perfect, elusive blend of democracy and individual freedom, some also practiced slavery, both before and after contact” (19-20). Refusing to acknowledge otherwise is to refuse to recognize real history, even if it isn’t pretty. By valuing false, manufactured versions of people and their histories over real accounts, including glorifying stories of the greats—like Black Elk and Geronimo—we emphasize the importance of “the myth more than the genuine struggles of real people” (22). Smith explains that as contemporary American Indian people, if we “pretend we are real Indians, instead of real human beings, to please an antique notion of European romanticism, we may think we’re acting tough but instead we’re selling out” (23).

Since, as Smith claims, “[t]here will always be a market for nostalgia and fantasy,” he suggests that Indians as artists (and as I suggest, Indian writers, too) infuse their art with elements of real Indianness—which is often so much like the expressions of other artists, that it’s hard to label this kind of art as Indian in nature. Often, and sadly, others perceive that Indian art doesn’t meet the demands of the market for “Indian art” as it’s commonly preconceived. Smith states, “To be an Indian artist means always arguing about the rules, the process, the judges, the reviews, where the shows are and where they aren’t….In 1958 Oscar Howe famously protested his exclusion from the Phillbrook Art Center’s annual art fair. The judges said his entry was ‘a fine painting, but not Indian’” (35).

The problem lies not only in representations of Indianness through art, but also through film (which, I guess is also art when you think about it). Personally, the only movie with Indians in it that I can recall is Dances with Wolves, but since that presupposes much about Indians, I’ve read much debate on its legitimacy. Smith questions the appropriation of Indianness in film, especially film produced by non-Indians. He explains:

We are the Indians. On the screen, up there? That’s a movie about Indians. The films we write about and debate and criticize are usually about the idea of us, about what people think about that idea, about Vietnam, the West, or buildings and food. Often, we’re simply a plot device or there to provide visual excitement. That many of us would place real hopes and dreams of advancement in the hands of a business renowned for its single-minded focus on the bottom line speaks volumes about the intellectual state of Indian Country these days. (39)

His statement, of course, assumes that the market drives the role of Indians in film, and Indianness is appropriated through whatever means will ensure the attraction of consumers. Indians, again, are the objects of romanticism and stereotype.

His statement about movies being “about Indians” echoes Gerald Vizenor’s conjecture that appropriation does not equal authenticity. In Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance, Vizenor states, “The various translations, interpretations, and representations of the absence of tribal realities have been posed as the verities of certain cultural traditions. Moreover, the closure of heard stories in favor of scriptural simulations as authentic representations denied a common brush with the shimmer of humor, the sources of tribal visions, and tragic wisdom; tribal imagination and creation stories were obscured without remorse in national histories and the literature of dominance.” (17) He cites as an example artist Rene Magritte’s inscription on his painting of a pipe, which reads “Ceci n’est pas une pipe, This is not a pipe” (18). A painting of a pipe is not the same as a pipe in reality. So, too, are the Indians in the films Smith discusses. Smith might say in the words of Vizenor, “The portrait is not an Indian” (Vizenor 18): the films do not represent Indians, but merely appropriate their image and performance. However, the dilemma in representing truly authentic Indians and cultural practices disrupts popular notions of Indian identity according to the American public: they are reluctant to believe anything about Indians that doesn’t fit their definition of Indians. As an example, Smith refers to the director’s exclusion of Mohican farming settlements in the film Last of the Mohicans because “[p]ictures of Indian towns challenge the idea of settlers clearing a wilderness and instead raise the possibility that Europeans invaded and conquered and pillaged heavily populated, developed real estate.” He claims that the reason is “because the audience knows about Indians, and knows Indians didn't live in farming towns. To be outside the narrative, then, is not to exist. A film that attempted to show something more historically accurate would appear to audiences to be like science fiction, a tale from a parallel universe” (51). Smith, like Vizenor, points out that a close look at the dominant art/literature reveals the complete absence of Indians, and instead puts on a show of Indianness according to dominant ideology.

I’m including the following passage because I think it really illuminates some core issues that Smith explores in his text and poses some very real and important questions about notions of Indianness:

The particular kind of racism that faces North American Indians offers rewards for functioning within the romantic constructions, and severe penalties for operating outside them. Indians are okay, as long as they are “traditional” in a nonthreatening (peaceful) way, as long as they meet non-Indian expectations about Indian religious and political beliefs. And what it really comes down to is that Indians are okay as long as we don’t change too much. Yes, we can fly planes and listen to hip-hop, but we must do these things in moderation and always in a true Indian way.
It presents the unavoidable question: Are Indian people allowed to change? Are we allowed to invent completely new ways of being Indian that have no connection to previous ways we have lived? Authenticity for Indians is a brutal measuring device that says we are only Indian as long as we are authentic. Part of the measurement is about percentage of Indian blood. The more, the better. Fluency in one’s Indian language is always a high card. Spiritual practices, living in one’s ancestral homeland, attending powwows, all are necessary to ace the authenticity test. Yet many of us believe that taking the authenticity tests is like drinking the colonizer’s Kool-Aid—a practice designed to strengthen our commitment to our own internally warped minds. In this way, we become our own prison guards. (91)

Smith raises an important point: Indians in addition to non-Indians are responsible for perpetuating antiquated ideas of Indian identity and authenticity. If one needs to meet the above criteria in order to be Indian, well then, even as a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, I’m not a real Indian at all. Time to dump that Kool-Aid!

A Visit to the NMAI Archives

I want to dedicate one of these posts to my visit to the NMAI Archives in Suitland, Maryland. At the end of this post will be a PDF of the article in the Citizen Potawatomi Nation's HowNikan newspaper (I'm in the picture, bottom row, third one from the right). This visit made quite an impression on me, and it was the first time I can remember a stranger recognizing a group a very white-looking people as "the Potawatomi" as we came up the front steps. Granted, we did have an appointment, but it was nice to be recognized as Potawatomi on first sight alone.

The entrance to this circular building faces East, and all architectural features hold significance to many Native Americans. Once inside the atrium, we could see that much of the structure is made of wood--the entire building incorporated many natural features--and a skylight is situated in the center of the ceiling. Our guide pointed out that the Archives is meant to let in as much natural light as possible and encourage a welcoming space for Indians to visit. The Archives also includes a ceremonial room, which the Smithsonian keeps supplied with tobacco, sweet grass, sage, cedar, abalone shells, and matches. There is a fire-pit in the center of the room, too, (many of us fell in the fire pit, since we weren't accustomed to having one in the middle of an indoor environment) and our guide said that it was very important for the architects to have such a space in the building, and so the room was built with a complex ventilation system that allows for fire to be lit indoors.

Our tour began with a private viewing of Potawatomi artifacts that our legislator selected. Here are some pictures of those.

This last picture is of our guide holding up a Potawatomi breast plate (an ornament), and the tag on the box indicates that the breast plate is non-Indian in origin. I asked why it was included in the Potawatomi artifacts, then, if it wasn't made by  them, and she assured me that many Potawatomi artifacts were not made by Potawatomi, but were traded for. Similarly, many of the artifacts are ornamented with elaborate beading--the beads were introduced to the Potawatomi by the French, and consequently many beads were acquisitions by way of trade.

After we viewed the selections, we were invited to explore the entirety of the collection of artifacts in the Archives. The artifacts collection is located on the second floor of the building, the first containing archaeological finds (mainly sacred things from grave sites, which many Indians do not wish to see) and the third containing the archives of text (I can't wait to go back to explore this one on my own!). The layout of this collection is pretty neat: all artifacts are stored according to the location of the individual tribes. Since the Potawatomi are from the Northeastern Woodlands, the Potawatomi artifacts are located in the northeastern part of the room. I love this system! Since there are so many artifacts, the stacks that hold them can move to collapse and expand aisles. I filmed a bit of this happening so you can understand the full effect. Items on the top shelves can be accessed by lifts, which guests are welcome to use. While only the staff can touch the individual artifacts, visitors can pull out shelves and hold the boxes containing the artifacts to view what they please. In the following video, the guide also explains why the NMAI continues to collect artifacts from our contemporary environments....they, too, become a part of our history (and yes, my dad is wearing my grandmother's purse...and yes, I did forget that I was filming for a time).

Hope you enjoy this information as much as I did!

Coming to terms with Vine Deloria, Jr.

I’m pretty sure that each of my posts will focus on identity, because that’s the subject I’m most interested in that surrounds Native American rhetoric and literature. So now I’ll just jump into Deloria, who I at times agree with and at other times…well, not so much.

First, I’m going to introduce the abstract of my conference paper so you can see where I’m going with this:

“The truth about stories is that that’s all that we are”: Interpreting Indianness across the Years

Since first contact, American Indians have undergone transformations in identity through interpretations of Indianness. Popular American conceptions of Indians have traditionally been interpretations that create elaborate narratives on Indian life and impose symbolism on a manufactured Indian culture. Thomas King claims in The Truth about Stories that “the truth about stories is that that’s all that we are”— told either by us or about us. The foundation of perceived notions of Indian identity are largely the stories of Euro-Americans. Implementation of federal Indian policies, followed by the instruction of “acceptable Indianness” in Indian boarding schools, perpetuated false conceptions of Indian identity that persist in popular culture even today.

In this presentation I will tell a new story that weaves together a narrative that differentiates between interpretations, appropriations, and authenticity of Indian identity in order to reconceptualize the real experiences and identities of Indians. I will investigate Paul Chaat Smith’s ideas about romanticism—“the distinctive type of racism that confronts Indians today”—through discourses on Indian art, politics, and culture, and Scott Richard Lyons’ claim that these discourses are driven by institutions, the state, and the market.

By understanding the ways in which Indianness has been interpreted and appropriated throughout American history, Indians and non-Indians alike can begin to deconstruct and reform our interpretations of Indianness.

So, like I said, I’m going to begin with Deloria before I move into Smith and Lyons (they’ll be in a later post).

This first quote is from the preface to Custer Died for Your Sins and relates to appropriation and the market:

Today Indian shamans, medicine men, and snake-oil salesmen follow the lecture-workshop circuit, holding ceremonies and otherwise performing feats of power for their disciples and fellow practitioners. Many Indians object to this commercialization of the Indian tradition, and there is something to be said for their complaints. Nevertheless, it seems beyond dispute that within the tribal religions is a powerful spiritual energy that cannot be confined to a small group in the modern world. It would be hazardous to predict where this movement is headed, but if it influences people to deal more kindly with the earth and the various life forms on it, then there should be few complaints about its impact on people’s lives and practices. (xi)

Of course, I already have several complaints about this passage. There is a long history of commercialization of Indian traditions, but I think that Deloria is stretching the idea of Indian religion to cover many small parts of the whole—many tribes, or individual Indians, have been practitioners of Christianity and other religions for quite a while. He also passes a strong judgment on the energy of tribal religion, enhancing its worth over other spiritual forms. As to the other stuff about people’s idolatry of supposed Indian identity and implicit connections to the Earth, I think this is another problem that Deloria doesn’t address, and instead seems to also assume about Indians—that they all are all quintessential environmentalists, and a great example for the rest of society to follow.

I’m aware that Deloria is writing this in the context of the late 60s, and I know a lot of other Indian voices have contributed since then to the idea of Indian identity and place in the world. The following excerpt comes from Karen A. Redfield’s article “Native American Storytelling” (in Ernest Stromberg’s American Indian Rhetorics of Survivance: Word Medicine, Word Magic), in which she quotes Randall A. Lake:

militant Indian rhetoric is more appropriately viewed from a perspective which examines its significance for Indians themselves…[T]he judgments of failure so often leveled against Native American protest rhetoric are problematic because they misanalyze this rhetoric’s primary audience. Most Red Power rhetoric is directed at movement members and other Indians for the purpose of gathering the like-minded, and is addressed only secondarily to the white establishment…In brief, AIM may have been judged a failure because its rhetoric is expected to do something which it is not intended to do. (qtd. in Redfield 158-9)

I’m most certainly criticizing Deloria from outside of the Red Power movement. But I wonder why Indians would only want to speak to other Indians. Redfield further comments, “Contemporary resistance, I would argue, is taking a familiar form, internal rhetoric. The activism is reflected by American Indian storytellers, intellectuals, artists, students, and elders, telling their stories in their own languages for their own people” (159). I think this practice employs a sort of separatist methodology that suggests that Indian identity, culture, and concerns are only relevant within Indian communities, excluding the external rhetoric necessary to communicate with Others. If Indians withdraw from the greater world, including the dominant culture and ideology, they remove themselves from contemporary dialogue about important issues, issues that may affect them and their representation to the majority. Employing external in addition to internal rhetoric is important to assuring the prosperity of Native nations in the contemporary world.

Deloria emphasizes “things [which] represent areas of growth and change that life in the modern world requires and extracts from tribal peoples” (xii) and only mentions as a possibility the continuous move toward cultural hybridity, and certainly seems to value traditional tribal identity over hybrid identity. What’s more, he concludes his preface with the following:

But the Indian task of keeping an informed public available to assist the tribes in their efforts to survive is never ending, and so the central message of this book, that Indians are alive, have certain dreams of their own, and are being overrun by the ignorance and the mistaken, misdirected efforts of those who would help them, can never be repeated too often. (xiii)

I find this troubling, simply because the rhetoric he employs is mainly internal, and wouldn’t resonate much with non-Indians (or many other Indians for that matter).

I like to draw on Sherman Alexie’s young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian as an example of the need to embrace hybridity. Junior, the protagonist, struggles with identity and where he belongs. He leaves the school on the Spokane reservation to pursue a better education at a “white” school, but upon this change rests his notion of identity; he doesn’t know whether he belongs to the world of the “white” school, where no one accepts him into their society, or to the reservation, where his people thought of him as a deserter, someone who preferred to identify as white than Indian. At the conclusion of the novel, Junior makes some profound observations about those of his tribe that resist change:

I cried because so many of my fellow tribal members were slowly killing themselves and I wanted them to live…Reservations were meant to be prisons, you know? Indians were supposed to move onto reservations and die. We were supposed to disappear. But somehow or another, Indians have forgotten that reservations were meant to be death camps. I wept because I was the only one who was brave enough and crazy enough to leave the rez. I was the only one with enough arrogance….I was going to have a better life out in the white world. I realized that I might be a lonely Indian boy, but I was not alone in my loneliness. There were millions of other Americans who had left their birthplaces in search of a dream. I realized that, sure, I was a Spokane Indian. I belonged to that tribe. But I also belonged to the tribe of American immigrants…. (216-217)

Junior recognizes that we do not live in a world of purity, but at an intersection of worlds, and to refuse to thrive as a cultural hybrid is even more culturally devastating than anything imposed on us by the colonizers. The key to hybridity is to recognize that identities are ever-shifting, and that doesn’t mean that a part of us dies with the coming of change.

I wonder if it’s beyond Deloria’s capabilities to consider Indians capable of adopting hybrid identities while still remaining Indian. He relates the following about “white” people who come to him claiming Indian blood: “I would confirm their wildest stories about their Indian ancestry and would add a few tales of my own hoping that they would be able to accept themselves someday and leave us alone. Whites claiming Indian blood generally tend to reinforce mythical beliefs about Indians” (Custer 3). His conceptions of “white” and “Indian” are quite polarizing: as someone who is both white and Indian, I can’t help but feel that he’s constructing very limited parameters for Indian identity that force individuals to fit in one box or the other. 

On "Casual Racism" in Sports and More

The other day my husband asked me if I thought that the Washington Redskins team should change its name. My response (to several people) has always been that I'd never really thought about it before, and even now I can't say that the name offends me. But I think the more important question is whether it matters if individuals like me aren't offended: the point is that many people are offended. After watching the "NMAI Symposium on Racism and Cultural Appropriation in Sports," I feel that Dr. Jackson makes a great point in saying that "the issue is that some are offended," and that that's a good enough reason for a name change to occur. Names like the New York Jews and San Francisco Chinamen have been done away with (some still exist, like the "Arabs" at this California school), but for some reason Native American mascots are still largely considered appropriate. Our reasons for perpetuating negative stereotypes are just downright absurd. See the following clip from W. Kamau Bell's show "Totally Biased" (I found this on indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com):

I think one of the helpful strategies we can take from the symposium is that the dominant group must join in protest against racist stereotypes. Why have there been over 30 years of dispute over the "Redskins" name without any resolution? Why do people still think this is okay? 1. Money. Especially at the pro level. 2. These racist ideas are ingrained in American culture and our psyches. Dr. Staurowsky accurately terms this "casual racism."."  Why is racism in sports “casual”? The scholars of the symposium point out that people often use origin stories to justify the existence of racist mascots. Even the one lady in the “Totally Biased” slip justifies keeping the Redskins’ name because “it’s tradition” (also, sadly, because that couple of ladies think that if Indians are so offended, why haven’t they said anything? Facepalm.). Dr. King rightly points out that we should focus on “impact” rather than “intention,” because obviously the intention in the origin stories cannot justify the harm being done to actual people.

If we allow such casual racism to exist in our society, Dr. Jackson wonders, “What do we pass onto the next generation?” Is a legacy of racism something we want those generations to inherit? If not, changes must be made now. Native Americans must be represented in a positive, non-stereotypical light, or not at all. This idea ties in wonderfully to the issue represented in this Crest commercial:

Indian Country Today Media Network illuminates the significance:

What's wrong with this picture? All but one of the kids are dressed as things that are imaginary, or historical (if not extinct), or whimsical, or generic. Just one of them is attired as a stand-in for a living people -- a living people who are still living, despite the U.S. government's efforts to kill them off. And yes, some of these people do, today, wear a feather headdress or paint their faces in ceremonial gatherings, although many do not.Kids look cute dressed as bumblebees, or robots, or ninjas, and there's little danger that their fertile minds will form opinions about these things they will carry into adulthood. But what of the little Indian? What does his costume teach? If this is what an Indian looks like, does that define, for children, what all Indians are? Can an Indian be a lawyer? Do Indians live in houses? Do Indians speak proper English, drive cars, or even wear underwear? (And how come he doesn't have a dead crow on his head like in the movie?)
It's simply irresponsible to take a diverse and modern population -- a whole race -- and sum it up in a cartoony dime-store costume for a seven-year-old child. Racism, most often, starts at home, and while allowing a kid to dress as "an Indian" seems less controversial than allowing a kid to dress as "an African American" or "an Asian," it's the same thing. Parents (and the people at Crest toothpaste) might not feel they are maliciously reducing Native Americans to a stereotype -- but malice or not, it's exactly what they are doing when they permit such a costume, and it's an insensitivity about race they're instilling in the young.
There's a reason why so many Americans struggle to see the racism that American Indians feel on a daily basis: It's always been there. It's been there since we were all kids. We grew up with it.

 The stereotypical representations of Indians are an example of what Gerald Vizenor terms "manifest manners...the course of dominance, the racialist notions and misnomers sustained in archives and lexicons as 'authentic' representations of indian cultures. Manifest manners court the destinies of monotheism, cultural determinism, objectivism, and the structural conceits of savagism civilization" (from Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance, page vii).

We don't want to pass "manifest  manners" on to future generations. What we need to do is educate people on the reality of Indians--that they are still here, and they exist in many different cultural contexts. We can start with sports teams and Halloween costumes.

According to Vizenor:

Native American Indians have endured the envies of missionaries of manifest manners for five centuries. The Boy Scouts of America, the wild simulations of tribal misnomers used for football teams, automobiles, and other products, Western movies, and the heroic adventures in novels...are just a few examples of the manifold envies that have become manifest manners in the literature of dominance. (31)

So in the case of sports, racial stereotypes of Native Americans often emphasize those "manifold envies," portraying the "strength," "savagism," "primitiveness," and "nobility" represented through the dominant ideology of manifest manners. Needless to say, these attributes aren't real. Contemporary Indians are real. But what ideas of Native Americans are we passing on to future generations? Vizenor claims that Indians are responsible for asserting survivance—“an active sense of presence, the continuance of native stories, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name. Native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy, and victimry” (vii). The perpetuation of Indian representation through the discourse of dominance (i.e. in sports and advertisements) undermines postindian survivance, and instead expresses manifest manners (think of “casual racism” as the dominant discourse).

Check out this cool example of postindian survivance in action:

So next, let’s consider a movie. 23 years ago this month, Dances with Wolves was released to the public. Vizenor claims that the movie “counts on the bankable manifest manners of the audience to associate with the adventures and dsicoveries of an errant cavalry officer who counters the simulations of savagism in his stories…Manifestly, movies have never been the representations of tribal cultures; at best, movies are the deliverance of an unsure civilization” (6).

Not to say that I completely agree or disagree with Vizenor, but I believe these changes in portrayals of real Indians are in a constant state of evolution. Dances no doubt contains inaccuracies about Native Cultures during the Civil War era, but it sure does something to represent Indians as something closer to human to more contemporary audiences (who then, hopefully, can begin to understand that real Indians may still actually exist today).

ICTMN sure seems to have something to say about everything I discuss in this post, but I need to bring in another one of its articles about Dances with Wolves:

 Leslie D. Hannah, Cherokee, developed a podcast through Kansas State University that featured some of the long lasting outcomes of the film and described his “love/late” relationship with it. “I love that American Indians were finally recognized as human beings but I hate that it happened under these circumstances.”

Hannah said Dances With Wolves opened up people’s eyes, but more importantly it opened their minds. “Dances With Wolves made it cool to be Indian,” he said, noting that paradigm shifted as soon as the movie came out.
The circumstances relate to the fact that Indians have been telling their own stories for years, but it took a white, wealthy filmmaker to bring the reality of Natives to the world. “It took a white man to prove what Indians had been saying all along, Indians are human.”
….
For Ebert, the real shift in consciousness is that the film’s main character, Lieutenant John J. Dunbar, played by Costner, “is able to look another man in the eye and see the man, rather than his attitudes about the man.”

What do we think? Is this indeed progress? I like to think so. The movie still perpetuates stereotypes about Indians, but at least it's getting to the heart of Indians as thinking, feeling people. I think that this movie was a significant step away from manifest manners, but truly, contemporary Native Americans writing and sharing their own stories are simulations of survivance that we still need.

Engaging with Powell’s “Rhetorics of Survivance: How American Indians Use Writing” and “Listening to Ghosts: An Alternative (non)Argument”

Malea Powell describes “survivance” as the process by which Native Americans wield a uniquely effective rhetoric that conveys the ideas of survival and resistance. Powell uses Charles Alexander Eastman’s autobiography From the Deep Woods to Civilization in one of her examples. She claims that by “using dominant discourse, Eastman marks himself as a subject within it, not just as a victim subject to it. In doing so I hear him imagine a new Indian-ness, one that is not a ‘fictional copy of the past’…,but an Indian-ness in which he encounters his enemies ‘with the same courage in literature’ as his ancestors ‘once evinced on horses’” (“Rhetorics”425). In this way, the Indian might come to represent himself or herself as a survivor of the attempt at complete assimilation, while at the same time using English, the language of the colonizers, to maintain a position of power and resistance through rhetorical sovereignty.

            Referring to historical Natives who became adept practitioners of rhetorics of survivance, in “Listening to Ghosts,” Powell decribes those people as “those who encountered Euroamerican culture, learned the language of the colonizers, and negotiated the demands of ‘civilized’ life as they critiqued, resisted, and survived its impositions” (14). Rhetorics of survivance.

            If language is the means through which we articulate our thoughts, beliefs, and stories, is there something of Native culture, including thoughts, beliefs, and stories that we are unable to communicate if we no longer speak our Native languages? In this way, I wonder if there is a divide between the culture of our ancestors and our own due to some lost meaning that never made its way into our understanding. Is there a profound difference between our idea of Native culture and our ancestors’ idea of Native culture due to the invisible wall of language? Personally, I can’t say that I feel that a part of my identity is missing in the absence of any knowledge of Potawatomi language. English is the language I know, and it’s the language that feels like it most belongs to me. If I were trying to communicate my thoughts to you right now in Potawatomi, you wouldn’t be reading this—because I wouldn’t be able to say the way I understand it in my English-language mode of thinking. When I do try and learn and speak Potawatomi, the words taste unfamiliar and I hesitate in their utterance. So I take comfort in the words of Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird in Powell’s “Listening to Ghosts.”

We are coming out of one or two centuries of war, a war that hasn’t ended. Many of us at the end of the century are using the “enemy language” with which to tell our truths, to sing, to remember ourselves during these troubled times…But to speak, at whatever the cost, is to become empowered rather than victimized by destruction…These colonizers’ languages, which often usurped our own tribal languages or diminished them, now hand back emblems of our cultures, our own designs: beadwork, quills if you will. We’ve transformed these enemy languages. (20)

            So at the same time I wonder if something is lost in the reverse transfer of language. I’ll look at my own tribe for an example. For the majority of us who don’t know Potawatomi language, but have an understanding of our tribal culture and stories in English, do we lose something of our understanding of the culture we’ve always known through our use of Potawatomi language? Not to say that learning Potawatomi is a bad thing—no language should be forced out of existence. But at the point we are now, a generation that has been Potawatomi in the language of English, are we somehow claiming that there is something about the language that will make us more Potawatomi than we already are? What does that even mean? How can we be more of ourselves than what we are? I think the only possible answer to any of these questions is that we can only go about “reinventing ourselves again, in the indigenous languages that named this continent” (“Listening” 20). After all, it’s not beyond the scope of the Indian’s ability to reconfigure her identity in the face of circumstantial changes.

            There’s no doubt that Indians’ acquisition of English has empowered our rhetoric. Powell points out that through the federal government’s attempt to assimilate Natives into Euroamerican modes of thought and language,

Eventually they created Indian doctors and lawyers, activists and politicians, scholars and teachers. Instead of being at the mercy of white translators, Indian lawyers understand the intricacies of the legal ties that bind us and are invested by the system of Euroamerican justice with the authority to do something about it. (“Rhetorics” 427)

             By using this new rhetorical sovereignty we can renegotiate Indian policy and retell a national history that includes Native Americans in pivotal roles.

But in looking at Powell’s explanation of Winnemucca’s ideas of Indian reform, specifically her insistence that Indians should have individual control over tribal land, I wonder if Winnemucca acted against the interests of Indian tribes. She claims that her tribe, the Paiutes, "can enjoy lands in severalty without losing their tribal relations, so essential to their happiness and good character, and... citizenship, implied in this distribution of land, will defend them from the encroachments of the white settlers, so detrimental to their interests and their virtues" (qtd. in “Rhetorics” 407). I understand the idea that owning land as individuals will keep others from taking over tribal land, but the overall implications of such reform do not represent the best interest of all tribes. Perhaps I’m passing judgment on her because of my knowledge of what happens as a result of that reform, and maybe that’s not fair. The Citizen Potawatomi, too, desired the individual allocation of tribal lands, but in the end many of them ended up losing their land and their money. So I guess my overall question is: how did Natives wind up believing that individual land allotments were a good thing? Was their nineteenth-century rhetoric a little too much like that of the Euroamericans?

This story probably won't change your life

“But don’t say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story. You’ve heard it now” (King).

Thomas King demonstrates through his narrative The Truth about Stories that oral storytelling techniques may also be utilized through a written story. He introduces each chapter with a story about a storyteller telling the story “about the earth and how it floats in space on the back of a turtle,” and a listener’s questions about how many turtles are underneath that turtle, to which the storyteller always replies, “No one knows for sure…but it’s turtles all the way down.” The repetition of the story throughout his book is reminiscent of oral storytelling technique, certainly, but more importantly, the continuous reference to turtles upon turtles upon turtles emphasizes his overall claim that “The truth about stories is that that’s all that we are,” stories upon stories upon stories.

Stories determine our identities. They define our experience, our beliefs, and our histories. King quotes Gerald Vizenor’s assertion that “You can’t understand the world without telling a story. There isn’t any center to the world but a story.” Our current ideologies in some way originate in a story. There’s at least one story to justify each of our thoughts and actions. Somewhere we got the idea from. Take for example King’s reference to creation stories. He posits that the Christian creation story conveys a very different sense of the world than the Native creation story he tells:

Finally, in Genesis, the post-garden world we inherit is decidedly martial in nature, a world at war—God vs. the Devil, humans vs. the elements. Or to put things into corporate parlance, competitive. In our Native story, the world is at peace, and the pivotal concern is not with that ascendancy of good over evil but with the issue of balance.

So here are our choices: a world in which creation is a solitary, individual act or a world in which creation is a shared activity; a world that begins in harmony and slides toward chaos or a world that begins in chaos and moves toward harmony; a world marked by competition or a world determined through cooperation. (King 24-5)

The dichotomy of these creation stories parallels the significant distinction between ideologies of the nation of the United States (Canada, too) and Native nations. United States ideology emphasizes individual power and competition, whereas Native nations generally promote interest in the prosperity of the community as a whole, with any individual decisions made being done so in the genuine best interests of the entire people. (I recognize that this is a broad generalization of the beliefs of various Indian tribes on the part of King.) With the passing of the General Allotment Act in 1887, the United States demanded that tribes split up the land they communally owned, shaping individual Indians into competitive Americans—who would surely learn that the opportunities of capitalism were a vast improvement on their original real estate holdings. Can you see the parallels between these stories yet?

When we consider the continuous chipping away at Indian identity by the government, first through cheating Indians out of their land, then changing the definition of what it means to be Indian (basically, any definition that would be sure to exclude most Indians), instituting Indian boarding schools to replace Native culture with American culture, and so on, we might wonder how things could get any worse. But they do. What results is the stereotypical assumption that if you don’t look like an Indian, don’t speak like an Indian, don’t act like an Indian (whatever that means), or don’t live on an Indian reservation, you aren’t an Indian. And sadly, Indians often judge other Indians’ status as Indian on those very ideas, those very stories, that the government perpetuated. King laments, “the reality of identity legislation has not simply been to erase Indians from the political map of North America, it has also had the unforgivable consequence of setting Native against Native, destroying our ability and our desire to associate with each other. This has been the true tragedy, the creation of legal categories that have made us our own enemy” (149).

This part I don’t understand. Well, I do. Maybe. I guess I can only raise some questions. Is there

something frightening to certain Indians about seeing white faces on people who are supposed to

be Indian? What are the proper criteria for identifying people as Native Americans? What harm

could possibly come to one Indian because another defines oneself as Indian? I guess I was right

in my initial reaction…it doesn’t make sense.

King shares his thoughts on the ways we determine the “authenticity” of Indian identity in a rather perfect way.

This is no longer true as it once was, for many Native people now live in cities, with only tenuous ties to a reserve or nation. Many no longer speak their Native language, a gift of colonialism, and the question of identity has become as much a personal matter as it is a matter of blood. N. Scott Momaday has suggested that being a Native is an idea that an individual has of themselves. Momaday, who is Kiowa, is not suggesting that anyone who wants to can imagine themselves to be Indian. He is simply acknowledging that language and narrow definitions of culture are not the only ways identity can be constructed. Yet, in the absence of visual confirmation, these “touchstones”—race, culture, language, blood—still form a kind of authenticity test, a racial-reality game that contemporary Native peoples are forced to play. (55)

Why? The way I see it, if we cease to think of ourselves as Indian, if we abandon our (however delicate) ties to Native culture, if we forget our (hi)stories, we succeed in fulfilling the mission North American government began. We make the Indian disappear.

Is that what we want? Who are we without our stories?

Without my stories, I am not Indian. Without my stories, I wouldn’t be writing this now, and you wouldn’t be reading it. Without my stories, I am not me.

Even now, I am astounded by the variety in Native Americans’ conceptions and projections of their own identities. I listened to the contemporary stream on Native Radio last night and underwent an enlightening experience through contemporary Native sounds. The first song I heard, which I assumed to be typical of Native American musical performance, sounded similar to a meditation track—soft sounds, chimes, melodic vocals—and I thought, “I can tell this is an Indian singing.” I’d always believed Indians are such great singers (I never counted myself among them, mind you). Not only should I have determined that this generalization was borne out of the same stereotypes I condemn in others, but I was soon proven absolutely wrong with the next track. The harsh electronic sounds were painful enough, but the introduction of what can only be described as simply terrible singing was both jarring and awkward. Next song: a single drum, beat without rhythm, and the barely audible “Indian singing” of one man. I know, it’s terrible of me to call it that, but it’s the label that’s in my head that I can’t seem to get rid of. Soon I heard a spoken word track, with a severely cliché poem about the importance of children respecting the Earth. Ouch. Just when I thought I’d heard the worst, a country western song came on. But at this point, I can’t say I’m sure which song was the least pleasant. At the very least, I learned something about contemporary Native American music: the sounds, instruments, techniques, and vocals vary just as much as any music I’ve ever heard in my own experience. There is no quintessential Native American song. There’s just song. And the way we express ourselves is indicative of our own distinct, utterly human identities.

An Introduction

The Bodewadmi (Potawatomi), Ojibwe (Chippewa), and the Odawa (Ottawa) were once one people, called the Nishnabe, or Original People. Together, the three groups were known as the Three Fires Council, in which each group functioned to serve the Nishnabe as a whole. The Ojibwe were the keepers of the medicine and the Odawa were the keepers of the trade. The Bodewadmi were the keepers of the fire, and the word Potawatomi means “People of the Place of the Fire.”

The Nishnabe originally lived along the Eastern Seaboard, occupying the area from present-day New Brunswick, Canada to the state of Maine. It was during this time that the Nishnabe were visited by seven prophets. Each prophet spoke of a prophecy that would manifest in time. It is from this time forward that the Nishnabe refer to the prophecies as the Seven Fires.

The first six fires described the Nishnabe’s migration from the Atlantic Coast to the Great Lakes Region, and the critical loss of power within their religious medicine society, the Medewiwin Lodge. What they foretold has been interpreted as contact with the Europeans and the devastation that would soon follow: war, loss of lands, religious conversion, forced assimilation, and the rise of boarding schools.

The seventh prophet was the last to visit the Nishnabe. He was noticeably different from the others. He was youthful, vibrant, and spoke with an air of confidence. In the seventh fire, he told of a new people who would come forward to retrace the steps of their elders, gathering all that had been left on the trail for them. He explained that the new people would take what they had gathered and rebuild the old ways of their culture.

We are in the seventh fire. What we have gathered along the trail can be seen within our Cultural Heritage Center and other tribal programs, where we see how the old way of life has shaped the way we live today. This knowledge gathered is a tool used to teach our young ones not only what it means to be Bodewadmi, or Potawatomi, but also Nishnabe.

-“…since time immemorial…”: Timeline History of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation

            The assimilation of indigenous people into Euro-American culture has had the effect of diminishing the physical, cultural, and rhetorical presence of Native Americans throughout American history. Today, the Native essence primarily exists in echoes of generations past—the mixed-blood descendants of the former sovereigns of American soil. With European imperialism perpetually stomping out the traces of Indian history and culture, contemporary mixed-blood Natives often wind up in some sort of identity quagmire; where ethnic dualism exists, one identity may easily overcome the other, and sadly, the identity of the colonizers often becomes the only identity an individual can express (knowingly or unknowingly) to society—and themselves. How can Indians identify themselves as such when all they know of the world, culture, and language exists within the framework of colonization? Can a mixed-blood, white Native American stake any claim in the old ways of their people?

Even I have struggled with the task of identifying myself as Citizen Potawatomi within the confines of Euro-American culture.  The Indian part of me has always been lurking in the background of my projected identity, only coming forward within the closed spaces of strictly Potawatomi attendance and ceremony. When I look in the mirror I see a white woman with blonde hair and blue eyes, and no matter how closely I inspect my face, I can’t see any physical manifestation of Indian ancestry. When I speak, English shapes my worldview: I don’t know Potawatomi. When I try to study Potawatomi, I can’t seem to leave English behind, and I become frustrated with the structure of Potawatomi language, wondering how many consonants can possibly be strung together in one word before a vowel is needed. Is the Indian part of me buried so deeply in the past that I have no right to try to retrieve it?

When I spoke to my father of my conflicting thoughts on my identity as a Potawatomi and a descendant of Europeans, he shook his head and told me that this confusion was necessary: I was supposed to question my identity as a Potawatomi. He said, “Haven’t you heard the story of the seven fires? The prophecies of the Potawatomi?” At this point I hadn’t, and when I told him so, he smiled and continued, “There are seven prophecies, called the seven fires, that were given to the Nishnabe a long time ago. The first six fires told us of the coming of the Europeans and that the Nishnabe would lose their way. But the last fire, the seventh fire, said that a new generation of Potawatomi, of Nishnabe, would seek to revive the old ways and direct the people, who had been lost, back to the original path. You are a part of the seventh fire.” He allowed me to understand something about my heritage that I’d overlooked: that Indian part of me, somewhere in the background of my identity, lingered there for a reason—to come forward in the light of the seventh fire.