Once I realized I had only profited from being an “H” without enduring any of its hardships, I descended into a guilt-laden identity crisis that didn’t subside until I moved to Mexico when I turned thirty. That journey has been recorded elsewhere, but its gist is this: the last time I crossed my inner borderline, I stayed there.
GIVEN MY PREOCCUPATION WITH CHICANIDAD, I am curious about what constitutes Mohawkness. Membership in the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe is determined on a case-by-case basis but generally mandates a 25 percent blood quantum and a verification of ancestry. An even more complex potion must congeal before someone actually feels Mohawk, however. To better understand when identity angst first strikes, I visit the Akwesasne Boys and Girls Club, which works with more than 300 Mohawks between the ages of six and eighteen a year. It is located in a former bingo hall surrounded by a chain-link fence off the main highway. My host is program manager Ryan King. With his coppery skin engraved with Haudenosaunee tattoos, he seems to epitomize Mohawkness. He has even shaved his hair to create a raised mound across his head.
As we stroll down hallways plastered with student photographs and statements like “I’m awesome because _____,” he talks about his organization’s struggle to balance the New York State educational system with traditional Mohawk values. Students must spend their first forty-five minutes here doing homework, but afterward they can play lacrosse or volleyball, log on to a computer, or participate in arts and culture programming that is specifically oriented toward identity formation.
“Not knowing your culture is a sore spot here,” Ryan says. “They all know specific Mohawk words, phrases, and commands, but only one or two are actually fluent. We push them to speak more. And if you don’t know ceremony, or if you don’t know a song or dance at a social, it is a self-esteem thing for them.”
Appearance is another concern, particularly for girls. “If they are fairer, they get picked on more because they don’t look Mohawk. ‘You look white’ is the worst thing you can say here. When a baby is born, we always ask, ‘Are they dark?’ We like darker features; that is considered much more positive here.”
At thirty-two, Ryan is the son of a longtime chief of the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne. His family contains Longhouse members as well as Catholics, which makes him conversant in both spiritualities. Yet certain aspects of Mohawkness evade him, too, such as language. “When I was three or four I was raised by my grandma and she was fluent, but when I enrolled in the public school system, it left,” he says.
He left too for twelve years, to study public communications at Buffalo State College and work in the field. He never questioned whether to return, though. “Go out and get an education, but always make sure you come back; don’t ever forget home. That is ingrained in us at a very early age,” he says. “If I hadn’t left the rez, I would probably not be doing too much now.”
These are the ideals he promotes at the Boys and Girls Club, and I imagine he’s persuasive. In addition to his traditional creds, he drives a new car and wields the latest iPhone. Diamond studs line his ears. Yet college can be a hard sell at Akwesasne, given the lure of the river. “The drug trade is a lot of easy money. These kids are looking at that, working for an hour or two, and then not having to work for the next month. They will say, ‘I will make more money in an hour than you will in a week,’” he says with a cringe. “A lot of them just don’t look at the dangerous part. I have friends who’ve been held up at gunpoint. I have friends who’ve been robbed. I have friends who’ve had to go into hiding.”
His voice trails off as his eyes grow distant. Then, as if remembering the pen in my hand, he shifts topic. “We get a lot of press for drugs, but nobody ever focuses on the good stuff. We have the best lacrosse program here. Some of our kids play for Albany University 3 and for Syracuse. Our girls are the best volleyball players, and they play for colleges too. One of our summer employees is valedictorian at Massena High School. We don’t ever hear about that, about how talented our kids are, about how much pride we have in our kids.”
With that, he shakes my hand. Dozens of those kids will be arriving within the hour, and he wants to be ready to receive them.
AS SOON AS BRENDA STEPS out of her Ford Trailblazer and strides toward Canton’s Blackbird Cafe, I see we have something in common. Her dark hair and cashew-colored skin could pass for anything from Brazilian to Lebanese. Only when we sit down for lunch do I notice her indigenous bone structure and arms bereft of hair. She also has pale green eyes. Though our conversation feels formal at first, it escalates in intensity until we are in tears within an hour of meeting.
Brenda comes from a tight-knit family whose roots at Akwesasne run deep. Six of her mother’s nine siblings still live on the same street where they were born. Growing up, her father worked in the high steel industry, which kept him away for weeks at a time, while her mother stayed home with their six children. As the oldest, Brenda assumed a lot of responsibility at a young age, especially since one of her brothers had muscular dystrophy. “Basically, I was the other adult in the house,” she says, biting into a panini.
Education was the only viable path out of poverty, so Brenda immersed herself into her studies. Her grades were unfalteringly stellar. Yet her teachers never seemed to push her as much as they did the non-Native students. No one urged her to take advanced classes or nominated her for leadership programs. If she wanted to succeed, it seemed she must create opportunities for herself. And so, in eighth grade, she signed up for a college preparatory program that required spending the next five summers in Canton, an hour away. Then she applied and got accepted to SLU and found a financial need program to pay for it. Opening so many doors through sheer persistence was thrilling, but she worried it was also isolating her from her nation. No one in her family had attended college before. Brenda would be the first.
“There is a fear that once you leave, you come back different, and you never truly belong again,” she says. “And there is also this sense, if I do go away and come back, what can it offer me?”
Her apprehension heightened when she attended a summer preparatory session at SLU. “The first thing people often said to me was, ‘You’re not white, but what are you?’ When I said I was Native, they would ask if I spoke the language, and I had to say no. That is when the guilt and shame felt the strongest. But everybody is a product of their immediate family and how they grew up. My parents don’t speak Mohawk, so I don’t either. I was also brought up in the Catholic church, which—in retrospect—felt like an automatic hindrance to my identity as a Native American because I was not exploring the traditions associated with Native American people. If your grandparents aren’t Longhouse, you don’t take that route, and it made me feel less Native in a way, plus having fair skin.”
Casting her eyes down to her hands, she adds, “If you see me alone, people often mistake me for Puerto Rican. Yet if you see me with my family you will see I am Native.”
Once classes began, she confronted another barrier. SLU’s tuition was about three times the average per capita income at Akwesasne. She couldn’t relate much to classmates who wore designer labels and went skiing on the weekends. Some of her high school friends attended the local community college, so she spent most of the next four years there.
“I realized early on what I wanted to do, to help Native youth realize their potential. College should be an expectation for all of us.4 I really wanted to give back.”
Brenda not only received her bachelor’s at SLU but has completed two master’s degrees as well. For nearly a decade now she has been working there, too, fostering her alma mater’s ties to her nation by implementing community-based learning opportunities there for SLU students and doing what she can to increase Mohawk enrollment. While she has achieved much more professionally than anyone seemed to think possible, Brenda worries about the toll it has taken on her identity.
“College changed me, so that I feel more white than Native. I am a completely different person when I go back to the rez
than I am here. It’s like I have to flip a switch,” she says.
Forty-five miles separate her workplace from her nation. She needs every minute driving between the two to make that mental shift. Sometimes she transitions back to her Native mind on her own. Sometimes the Border Patrol triggers it for her.
“One time [at a roadside checkpoint], the car ahead had out-of-state tags, and they handed over their paperwork right away and I could tell they were nervous. Then I was up, and they could see my feathers hanging from the rearview mirror, and right away they asked me to pull over. And I said, ‘Why are you making me pull over, when that other car had out-of-state tags?’ And he searched through my stuff, even went through my dirty laundry bag. You know they are profiling you because they think you have drugs in your car,” she says, her entire body stiffening. “I used to have the Haudenosaunee flag on my car, but I had to take it off because there were so many problems.”
She has moved back to Akwesasne several times to help out her family, including living with her grandmother for the first three years after her grandfather died. Even when Brenda spent her entire day advocating for Native youth at SLU and her entire night at Akwesasne, she still felt misplaced somehow. Binaries aren’t just a matter of blood.
“Even though I am as full Native as I can be, I still feel white. It is hard because you want to be able to respect your parents. They have lived their entire life on the rez, but I haven’t. It is hard to bounce between these two worlds.”
Brenda currently lives off-nation. The rest of her siblings either remain on the homestead where they all grew up or close by. Though she visits once or twice a week, the distance is palpable—and not just because of her professional life. Her tendency to date non-Natives has also caused upset, she says, “because my parents belong to a race they feel is dying.” When she introduced her first black boyfriend to her family, her dad said, “What’s wrong with you? Don’t you know who you are, where you come from, what your culture is?” (The white women her brothers have brought home have been more readily accepted.)
Brenda has also been trying to have a baby, “but it is not working,” she says. Sadness thickens her throat as she shreds her napkin in two. “My cousins started having their children early, while I prioritized my education because I thought I needed to have this aspect of my life in place first.”
She sets down her mangled napkin and looks into my eyes. “I just feel like I am an outlier. I still feel proud to be Native, but it is a constant struggle because I just don’t look it. So do I just keep quiet, or do I speak out?”
I glance down at my own napkin and find it shredded, too. These are the same questions I have long tried to resolve within myself. The only force stronger than my allegiance to my Mexican American identity is my insecurity that I am not really Mexican at all—that I am still benefiting from something others have suffered for, that the identity upon which I have built my entire personhood is a sham.
Looking back at Brenda, whose face is as ethnically indeterminate as my own, I decide that this is what it means to live in nepantla. To always question, to always doubt, and to always, always ache.
NOTES
1. The word “dog,” for instance, is ehrhahrhokon:’a. “Black stove polish,” meanwhile, is the remarkable teienonhsa’tariha’tahkhwahtsherahon’tsistahstarathe’táhkhwa.
2. The first year was called “beginner’s first grade,” the second “low first grade,” and the third “high first grade.”
3. ESPN called the University of Albany’s “Thompson Trio”—brothers Miles and Lyle and cousin Ty—the best lacrosse attack liners in collegiate history. They hail from the Mohawk and Onondaga Nations, claim to have never taken a sip of alcohol, and pledge to return to their communities as soon as they can.
4. According to the National Indian Education Association, the high school graduation rate for Native Americans enrolled in public school is 67 percent, compared with 81 percent for all other students. Among those enrolled in a Bureau of Indian Education school, the rate drops to 53 percent. The stats for higher ed is even more sobering: just 39 percent of Indians enrolled in a four-year postsecondary institution in 2004 earned a bachelor’s degree by 2010. At tribal colleges, the rate dips down to 20 percent, according to the Atlantic.
18
The Bridge
THEY EMERGE FROM THE LONGHOUSE, A DOZEN AT LEAST, ELEGANT as only chiefs can be, wearing buckskin vests, hair braids, hawk- and eagle-feathered kastowa crested with deer antlers, and—the fiercest accessory of all—sunglasses. A hundred people follow, waving Haudenosaunee flags. They turn onto Route 37, where the rest of us file in: young mothers pushing strollers, workers who’ve taken the day off, elders wearing clan symbols, children scrambling to keep up. Many wear dress shirts embroidered at the wrist, hem, and necklines with brightly colored ribbons streaming from the shoulders. Few talk. The quiet is punctuated by the thump of a drum.
Our destination is approximately five miles away. To get there, we must first leave Akwesasne and then New York’s Franklin County before cutting through a corner of St. Lawrence County and entering the otherworld that is U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. There, we’ll cross one bridge that will briefly return us to Akwesasne—Cornwall Island, which Canada also claims—and then a second bridge that will deposit us into the otherworld that is the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA). From there, we’ll finally step into our destination, the city of Cornwall in Ontario, Canada.
So while this march will be only five miles in length, we must pass through seven governing spheres to complete it. And that’s not counting all the Mohawks who drove in from the portions of Akwesasne that are technically in Quebec. It’s also not counting all the Indians who drove in from the other nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy: the Onondaga, Oneida, Seneca, Cayuga, and Tuscarora.
That makes a total of twelve different jurisdictions that wield some degree of power over roughly 13,000 Mohawks—four counties, one state, two provinces, two countries, and three different tribal governments—every one of which is monitoring today’s proceedings. Should calamity strike, any of the following law enforcement agencies could be summoned to deal with it: the Akwesasne Mohawk Police, the St. Regis Mohawk Tribal Police, the New York State Police, the FBI, the U.S. Border Patrol, the Sûreté du Québec, the Ontario Provincial Police, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and/or the CBSA.
And that’s why everyone is marching in the first place. As the elder I trot behind puts it: “The situation is driving us nuts.”
This is also what it means to live in nepantla, suspended between peripheries. Your ancestors might have tended this soil for centuries, but your citizenship can still be questioned and your identity tested on back roads so remote, no one will hear you when you scream. What I deeply admire about Mohawks: they keep screaming anyway.
WE ARE APPROACHING U.S. CUSTOMS NOW. A couple dozen Border Patrol agents and New York State troopers are waiting for us, their arms crossed over their chests. One officer gives a little wave as we walk by; Mohawks shake their flags in response. As we stream through the customs stations, giddiness sweeps through the crowd.
First of all, it is a spectacular morning. Fleece is necessary all but six weeks a year here, if not a full-length, Michelin Man–style puffy coat. But the sun burns bright this May morning, crystallizing the mountains in the blue distance and, closer in, the gray plumes of ALCOA East. Second: it is Victoria Day, a public holiday celebrating the birth not only of Queen Victoria but of Canadian sovereignty as well. Of all the calendar days to reaffirm Mohawk autonomy, this one seems particularly auspicious.
So spirits are high as we march past the Duty Free Americas shop touting “2 for $28 Stars and Stripes Vodka.” Here comes the first bridge, a classic suspension number dotted with cables and solemn-looking piers. That’s the extent of my architecture observational ability, but I am marching among the world’s experts. As the legend goes, when the Dominion Bridge Company started building a cantilever railroad b
ridge across the St. Lawrence River in 1886, supervisors had to contend with swarms of curious Mohawks. Years later, an official remarked in a letter to New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, “These Indians were as agile as goats. They would walk a narrow beam high up in the air with nothing below them but the river, which is rough there and ugly to look down on, and it wouldn’t mean any more to them than walking on the solid ground … and it turned out that putting riveting tools in their hands was like putting ham with eggs.”
Disaster struck in 1907, when an unfinished span of the Quebec Bridge collapsed and killed ninety-six workers, a third of them Mohawk. Yet they’ve pursued the trade for much of the past century, crisscrossing the nation to erect such iconic ironworks as the World Trade Center and the San Francisco Bay Bridge. Ironwork has even been deemed a modern form of hunting in that it requires a Mohawk to leave his family for weeks at a time for a job demanding nerve and skill, then return home as a hero laden with paychecks and presents.
But for every bridge Mohawks have helped build, they seem to have closed another in protest. The most notorious instance was the 1990 “Oka crisis” over the proposed expansion of a golf course onto ancestral turf that prompted Kahnawake Mohawks to barricade the Mercier Bridge connecting their nation with southern Montreal for a month, enraging 70,000 would-be-commuters a day. A concurrent armed standoff lasted even longer than the Sioux’s famed 1973 standoff at Wounded Knee.
Today’s plan is to block traffic across the Three Nations Crossing bridge for several hours, right at the start of the holiday weekend—and not just because they want to inconvenience a few Canadians (though some undoubtedly do). No: to a Mohawk, a bridge closing is a historical act. It is a political act. And it is a symbolic act. It is a wordless way of saying Hey. We built this bridge connecting your nation to ours to theirs, over land and water that our ancestors have always roamed. We can shut it whenever we like.
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