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Raised white -- walking in two worlds: how the heritage lost as a child is reclaimed as an adult. I am Indian, my family had always told me. For years,
however, I let society tell me otherwise. I lost my Indianness in the
chasm separating those two views. And it has taken me much of the past
decade to circle back, retracing both my and my ancestors' steps, to
rediscover and begin to appreciate its importance. Life is full of choices. People make big and little
ones every day. The choice of what element of heritage to identify with,
and why to do so, is one of the toughest decisions any of us can confront.
Losing it: Like the erosion of ways of life that tribes have endured for centuries, my Choctaw and Cherokee heritage receded from my mind as I became more immersed in the white world in which I was raised. For years, I formed perceptions of where my life would go, not an understanding of where my ancestors had been. As the child of a middle-class family in the suburbs of Oklahoma City, the only reservations I knew were any teenager's self-doubts. My hometown of Norman is thoroughly white. My well-to-do neighborhood (think Portland's West Hills meets the Great Plains) was even more so. Not until high school, when my classmates and I were united with kids from the east side of town, do I remember sharing the halls with more than a dozen minority students. In my young eyes, Indians were nowhere to be seen. When I did hear of them outside my home, it was usually from friends, most commonly in the same breath as "bingo hall.” Beyond relatives, I knew of no living Indian role model I could look up to. This in a state whose license plates proclaim Oklahoma is "Native America." My father tried to keep that element of our blood warm. While we waited for our order when the family would go out to eat, he often drew on napkins the beautiful faces of Indians in elaborate feather headdresses. Often the pictures came with stories. The depictions were much like those in family pictures on the walls of our home. They looked like me, like my relatives. But as I became a teen, wanting to get back to my friends, my room or my music, I often found myself just wanting the food, not the greater sustenance those moments offered. Around age 13, a group of us briefly took nicknames
from characters in the 1988 Western "Young Guns.” We had
Emilio Estevez's "Billy the Kid" and What name did I get stuck with? "Chavez y Chavez," the knife-wielding, peyote-taking Navajo played by Lou Diamond Phillips. My view of Indians had become so skewed that I remember thinking I would rather have been Dirty Steve -- who always lived up to his name -- than Chavez, the outsider. A few years later came my first confrontation about being Indian. By virtue of my heritage, I was allowed a lower acceptable score on my college entrance exams. That, my white friends were quick to inform me, was a crock. Their words stung, and much worse than the barbs we traded about one another's athletic abilities or love lives. If my closest friends didn't understand my Indianness, how would anyone else? We'd grown up in the same neighborhoods, yet colleges were going to treat us as if we were from different worlds. After being born an Indian, then having what little I understood of its meaning crumble, it came to this: Can I be Indian? The stories of my Choctaw and Cherokee ancestry came
to me as if from birth. But those family stories were buried in my mind
just as most of the people in them were buried in reality. Now, when
it was up to me to pay for college being Indian helped me stand apart.
I had come to a crossroads. I could check "white"
and go on with life, as I had known it. Or I could check "Native
American," and accept the responsibility to embrace and better
understand my Indian blood. I took the test and got accepted at the University of Oklahoma with scholarships. OU's school colors: crimson and cream or, to the casual observer, red and white. A higher education In college, I worked toward a bachelor's in journalism
and a higher degree of understanding of my heritage. It's an ongoing
course, but I have learned that in the native view, circles represent
life's interconnectedness -- birth and death, knowledge and ignorance,
light and darkness -- in a cycle that creates nature's balance. As freshmen, a friend and I attended the year's first
meeting of a Native American student group. It was a big step for me.
As we walked in it seemed as though the small talk stopped and 50 pairs of eyes turned to the two white-looking guys. They were the Indian youths I'd always imagined -- from rural Oklahoma, elsewhere across the Midwest, a smattering of rez kids. We were preppy city boys. No one spoke to us. My friend and I sat through the meeting, hearing of programs we knew nothing about and a blessing we could not understand, feeling increasingly out of place as the minutes ticked by. We left as soon as it was over. We never went back. It was my worst fear come true. I felt unwelcome, as if my authenticity were being challenged. With that sick feeling in my gut, I let myself get lost in the blur of freshman year. I studied, partied, met new people and tried new things. I did not, however, think much about my Indianness. A year or so later, though, the question still gnawed at me. In an effort to try again, I became a mentor to Native American freshmen. It was as good for me as it was for them. In hearing about their life experiences, I learned mine weren't so different. I grew more comfortable with my Indianness, and I got to know a small circle of Indian leaders on campus who accepted me as I was, lighter skin and all. Meanwhile, my work on the campus newspaper led to an internship designed to jump-start the careers of minority journalists. The organization sponsoring the internship flew the 100-plus students to Washington, D.C., for a four-day orientation. That weekend, with aspiring journalists of all colors, I again felt slightly out of place. I got the look whose meaning I had come to understand -- What's the white guy doing here? --and the question, dripping with doubt, I had come to dread -- So, how much Indian are you? I knew the answer; I am about one-quarter between my
Choctaw and Cherokee blood. But I didn't know what it meant. My insecurities
festered. I'd learned about Indians in general and my tribes in particular,
but I still had not delved into my family's depths. Deep red blood People die but their stories, like vines climbing a
wall, live on, growing more complicated the further they are from the
root. What I know is that I am Choctaw. There are two stories;
both support my heritage. The differences would change my degree of
Indian blood, or blood quantum. Some in my family contend that he had little Indian blood and that after his death in 1895 his wife, Linda Washington Walker, had him listed as a full blood on the tribal rolls. No one disputes that Linda was a full-blood Choctaw. So, depending on which story my family believes, William Walker's children are full- or half-blood Choctaws. The strength of one of those children, Eliza Walker, my great-grandmother, is the bedrock of what I've always known to be my Choctaw ancestry. Eliza, an original Choctaw enrollee who stopped speaking her native language as a child to avoid discrimination, married Jasper Prince Jr., an Irishman, in 1903 after meeting him at a church social. His family disowned him because of the interracial union. Undaunted, Jasper and Eliza pressed on. They farmed the allotment that was one of the few benefits her roll number offered. They had seven children, and Jasper, planning for his growing family, borrowed against the land. Then he died in 1918 at age 37, leaving his wife with a row of mouths to feed and a stack of bills to pay. A widow at 31 with children ranging in age from 6 months to 13 years, Eliza lost the land as she struggled to hold her family together. She persevered, though, serving as her brood's unbreakable bond through the highs and lows of the 60 years that followed. She died in 1981 at age 94, a slight but commanding woman who always was the anchor of stability in the family. Death is like the toppling of a domino, each one setting off a chain reaction whose consequences may be felt only years later. While one death --that of William Walker -- in my father's family complicates my Choctaw ties, one in my mother's family prevented any official ties from existing to another tribe, the Cherokee. Mary Jane Lowery, my great-great-great-great-grandmother on my mother's side and a full-blood Cherokee, was 39 when a tree fell on her in 1879 in Scott County, Ark. Her tribe had not yet been issued roll numbers, which are key to tribal recognition today. So, like a book slamming shut, the toppling of that trunk also killed any chance of documenting her descendants' ties to the tribe. I am Cherokee, but I cannot prove it. When I think back on the stories of my relatives I can
start to draw connections to my life. Through us all run two threads:
a quiet pride in and defense of our heritage. After college, I dived into a job search and then the
first job itself, and shelved my family and tribal study for more than
a year. Two things pushed me to return to the topic in the past few
years: Through it all, in reclaiming my heritage I've tried to carry on what I see as my growing responsibility to it. One of my roles as a journalist is to push my colleagues toward more representative coverage of Native Americans. That goal, like me, is a work in progress. But it's a heavy responsibility, whether I'm thinking of relatives or of Indian journalists who came before me. I went home last week to speak at a conference in Oklahoma
on the role of Indians working in the news media and how Indian people
are covered. I stood alongside many of those Native American journalists
I have long looked up to I have come to believe that faces such as mine, which
I once questioned whether could be called Indian at all, are the faces
of tomorrow's Native Today I see my Choctaw and Cherokee blood in the pictures
that fill my parents' home and in the stories I hear of the people within
them. I see the dark complexions, high cheekbones and distinct noses.
I feel the quiet drive deep passion and strong spirit. Today, I'm coming to fully appreciate the heritage my
father entrusted to me |
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