Growing Up Native American

by Bill Adler

  Patricia Riley has carefully selected and woven together these “growing up” stories, which give us a sense of the commonality and diversity of experience (in terms of historical moment, gender, full or mixed bloodness, reservation or urban background) within the Native American community. I hope readers of this book will understand the fallacy of trying to use only “a few ill-chosen words…to encapsulate an entire human life!” (Bruchac) In matters of identity, labels are generally imprecise and problematic in their “lumping together” of peoples who do identify with each other culturally and by ethnicity. Often, unfortunately, people can become quite rigid in their notions, especially if they have unquestioningly accepted restrictive (and prescriptive) stereotyping. Recently I had a non-Indian student in a Native American literature class become indignant when a guest speaker (who curates Native American art exhibits) showed us images by contemporary Native American artists that made use of irony, highlighted contradiction, and otherwise manifested “Indian humor.” In response to the presentation, the student wrote furiously (and with an assumed authority that was quite startling) that the “true” images of Indians are those that depict still and solemn faces. He insisted that the artists were catering to and appeasing non-Indian audiences. There were just too many smiles, and the subjects (and the artists) were just having too much fun! That couldn’t be “Indian.” Indeed, humor is very much a part of living and “fighting back” as an Indian in today’s world.

  I hope readers will get a sense also of the “strong positive view of our collective Indianness” (Ortiz), and “the integrity and dignity of an Indian identity” (Ortiz), as well as the intense struggle that is involved in “being human” from a Native American perspective in contemporary society. I am happy that Patricia Riley has dedicated this book to young Native Americans; they deserve to come first in a collection that is about growing up Native American. If they come to read these stories that are about people like them, maybe they won’t feel as “distant as the stars” (Johnston) from their own people, wherever they might be. Maybe the question and declaration from the little girl in Anna Lee Walters’s story will ring true for them, too, “You Indian, ain’t you? We your people!” And in the end this book is also for all young people everywhere, for their just hearts and spirits, and for their own “belief in a continuing life.”

  Inés Hernandez

  NOTE

  For those readers who would like more information on Native American literature, here are a few titles of the many available: Studies in American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and Course Designs, ed. Paula Gunn Allen (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1983); Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literature, ed. Gerald Vizenor; and Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets, ed. Joseph Bruchac. For a focus on the diversity of Native American Women writers, Beth Brant’s A Gathering of Spirit and Rayna Green’s That’s What She Said: Contemporary Poetry and Fiction by Native American Women are good introductions. The Rights of Indians and Tribes, by Stephen L. Pevar, and American Indian Federal Policy, ed. Vine Deloria, Jr., are important for providing the legal, legislative, and political explanations of the status of Native Americans in the United States. The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest, by Robert A. Williams, Jr., and The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization and Resistance, ed. Annette Jaimes, both provide a hemispheric and global perspective to the status and struggles of indigenous peoples today. The Sacred: Paths of Knowledge/Sources of Life, Anna Lee Waters, Peggy Beck, and Nia Francisco, which is published by Navajo Community College Press, focuses on Native American spiritual foundations, and the journal Wicazo Sa [Red Pencil]Review, ed. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, offers perspectives on Native American Studies as a discipline, and on issues of critical importance to the Native American community today, such as the current struggles for Native American religious freedom.

  INTRODUCTION

  What does it mean to grow up Native American? There are as many answers to that question as there are Native American people. Certainly, there are as many stories. Stories of oppression and survival, of people who grew up surrounded by tradition, and people who did not. Stories of the pressures of forced assimilation and stories of resistance, of heritage denied and of heritage reclaimed. A multiplicity of stories. When I began to choose narratives to exemplify both the commonality and diversity of Native American experience, I also began a backward journey through my childhood to examine my own growing up Native American.

  I remembered a conversation that took place between my mother and my great-aunt Avorilla one hot and humid summer afternoon during a visit to my father’s family in Jackson, Tennessee. My mother mentioned that my paternal grandmother had always attributed the black hair and brown skin that she and her sister shared as coming from their Black Irish ancestors. My great-aunt got a real look on her face and said, “Oh, she did, did she? So that’s what she tells people.” I was a young girl then, maybe seven or eight years old, and did not yet understand the practice of “passing” or the historical factors and racial prejudice that brought it into being. Nor did I understand the internal conflict and anguish of those who attempted to be what they were not.

  This same grandmother, who took such pains to disguise her Cherokee blood, woke me up very early one morning that summer. The dew had been heavy the night before and still glistened on the grass as she led me by the hand into the piney woods to show me the place where the little people danced at night. She said she often heard their music and their voices. I thought she was talking about leprechauns, though she never once said that was who they were. Leprechauns were Irish and I knew all about them from my mother’s side of the family. Many years later, after I had searched out and reclaimed my Cherokee heritage, I came to understand who my grandmother had been really talking about: the Cherokee little people, the Yunwi Tsunsdi. Especially fond of lost children, these protective guides helped them to find their way home again. My grandmother, this woman who had lived her entire life in denial of her Indianness, blessed me in the only way she knew how, with a memory and a story that would eventually enable me to find my way home again to my Cherokee roots. I can’t help but wonder if that was what she had intended all along.

  I also thought about the fact that, as a child growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, I was completely unaware that books written about Native American people by Native American people existed. I never got a chance to read John Joseph Mathews’s Sundown or Sara Winnemuca Hopkins’s Life Among the Piutes until I was a grown woman because they were shelved in the anthropology section of the downtown library. I would never have thought to look there. At the time I didn’t know about anthropology or the way that tribal people were objectified. It was an inappropriate place to house Native American literature and it continues to amaze me that Native American autobiographies and novels are still shelved in the anthropology sections of many bookstores today.

  As I thought back on what I had missed, I also contemplated the history books I studied in school and the numerous books about Indians that did line the shelves of the bookmobile that serviced the eastern edge of Fort Worth, Texas, where I grew up. Most of those books had been written by men and women who, for the most part, had never even seen an Indian, much less known one. As a child, I didn’t pause to think about that. I think a great deal about it today because the lives depicted in the books I read then bore absolutely no resemblance to the lives of my neighbors or friends. I was a ten-book-a-week book-mobile reader, but I never came across an account of a Cherokee family that ran a small grocery store in the black part of town—like the people who lived in the big white house on the hill next to where I lived. I never saw a novel about an Osage boy who tended his mother’s goats and knew how to make cheese, as well as number one, grade A slingshots out of old tree branches and pieces of inner tube—like the boy who lived in the woods across the street from me. I never read a short story about a teenage Cheyenne girl, adop
ted by Mormons, taught to despise herself and her tribal religion, but promised that if she were good and followed all the rules she would be white when she died. I went to school with a girl who had experienced these things.

  In the books available to me as a child, Native Americans were usually exotic, cultural artifacts from the past, the stereotypical “Vanishing Americans,” sometimes portrayed as romantic or noble, but always backward savages on their way out, and soon to be no more. The truth is, we have not vanished, though we have often “disappeared” from the minds and hearts of America, even as we continue to be romanticized and exploited by various “New Age” philosophers who appropriate and distort Native American spiritual traditions, but never look for nourishment in their own ancient European tribal traditions.

  Thinking about all these things, I decided to use the opportunity of putting together this anthology as a chance to rectify, in some small way, the situation of my childhood, not only for myself and my own children, but for anyone, Indian or non-Indian, interested in the real-life experiences of Native American people. One of the most enjoyable aspects of this task is being able to include some of my favorite authors, such as Leslie Silko, Louise Erdrich, Michael Dorris, N. Scott Momaday, and Simon Ortiz. These writers have had an enormous impact on the way I have come to see myself and the world around me.

  Many of the stories I have chosen resonate for me on a deeply personal level as well. Joe Bruchac’s telling about his Abenaki grandfather who claimed to be French reminds me very much of my own grandmother. I’m especially fond of Geary Hobson’s “The Talking That Trees Does.” Each time I read it, I find myself transported all the way home to the moist southern air, the pungent earth smells, and the people that I still dream about almost every night. The young female protagonist in Vicki Sears’s story, “Grace,” brings to mind the Cheyenne girl I mentioned earlier, and makes me wonder if she was ever able to find her own personal “grace” to make it through. I hope she did and that she has been able to find her way home again as I have.

  Growing Up Native American is made up of the works of twenty-two Native American writers, women and men, from fifteen nations across the United States and Canada. I have included selections from Canada because the imaginary boundaries laid down between these two countries are nonexistent in the minds and hearts of tribal peoples.

  The anthology is divided into four sections with a brief introduction to each section. The stories in the first three sections are in chronological order. In most cases, I have enclosed the author’s tribal affiliation in parentheses. In the instances where I have not done this, references to tribal affiliation can be found either in the title or the biographical information preceding the story. Authors listed as Ojibway or Chippewa are members of the same nation. I have used whichever name the author herself or himself has chosen to use as a means of identification.

  GOING

  FORWARD,

  LOOKING

  BACK

  The languages and oral traditions of Native American peoples have carried the thoughts and beliefs of their ancestors forward to their descendants in contemporary America. Passed from generation to generation through storytelling, oral traditions represent living libraries containing thousands of years of knowledge and history about the world and how to be in it.

  From their first intervention, the United States government and Christian missionaries worked together to create a system of tribal education. This new system was designed to eradicate by force the use of native languages and to replace tribal stories with those drawn from Christianity in an effort to remake Native American people in the Euroamerican image.

  The cultural extirpation these policies inflicted has had a devastating effect on many Native Americans. However, there has always been resistance. Though numerous languages are no longer spoken, many do still remain in use, and others are experiencing a revival as more and more young people are moving to reclaim them. Countless oral traditions still flourish and continue to evolve as new Native American storytellers add their voices to those of their ancestors, making the transition from the spoken word to the printed page.

  THE LANGUAGE WE KNOW

  Simon Ortiz

  In this autobiographical essay, Simon Ortiz addresses the relationship between language and culture. He examines how the Acoma language and oral tradition he learned as a child nurtured him and shaped him into a poet and a writer.

  One of the finest contemporary Native American poets, Simon Ortiz (Acoma) was born in 1941 at Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico. He is a prolific writer whose book From Sand Creek won the Pushcart Prize for Poetry. His most recent publication is a collection of three of his earlier works entitled Woven Stone.

  I DON’T REMEMBER A WORLD WITHOUT LANGUAGE. FROM THE TIME of my earliest childhood, there was language. Always language, and imagination, speculation, utters of sound. Words, beginnings of words. What would I be without language? My existence has been determined by language, not only the spoken but the unspoken, the language of speech and the language of motion. I can’t remember a world without memory. Memory, immediate and far away in the past, something in the sinew, blood, ageless cell. Although I don’t recall the exact moment I spoke or tried to speak, I know the feeling of something tugging at the core of the mind, something unutterable uttered into existence. It is language that brings us into being in order to know life.

  My childhood was the oral tradition of the Acoma Pueblo people—Aaquumeh hano—which included my immediate family of three older sisters, two younger sisters, two younger brothers, and my mother and father. My world was our world of the Aaquumeh in McCartys, one of the two villages descended from the ageless mother pueblo of Acoma. My world was our Eagle clan-people among other clans. I grew up in Deetziyamah, which is the Aaquumeh name for McCartys, which is posted at the exit off the present interstate highway in western New Mexico. I grew up within a people who farmed small garden plots and fields, who were mostly poor and not well schooled in the American system’s education. The language I spoke was that of a struggling people who held ferociously to a heritage, culture, language, and land despite the odds posed them by the forces surrounding them since 1540 A.D., the advent of EuroAmerican colonization. When I began school in 1948 at the BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) day school in our village, I was armed with the basic ABC’s and the phrases “Good morning, Miss Oleman” and “May I please be excused to go to the bathroom,” but it was an older language that was my fundamental strength.

  In my childhood, the language we all spoke was Acoma, and it was a struggle to maintain it against the outright threats of corporal punishment, ostracism, and the invocation that it would impede our progress towards Americanization. Children in school were punished and looked upon with disdain if they did not speak and learn English quickly and smoothly, and so I learned it. It has occurred to me that I learned English simply because I was forced to, as so many other Indian children were. But I know, also, there was another reason, and this was that I loved language, the sound, meaning, and magic of language. Language opened up vistas of the world around me, and it allowed me to discover knowledge that would not be possible for me to know without the use of language. Later, when I began to experiment with and explore language in poetry and fiction, I allowed that a portion of that impetus was because I had come to know English through forceful acculturation. Nevertheless, the underlying force was the beauty and poetic power of language in its many forms that instilled in me the desire to become a user of language as a writer, singer, and storyteller. Significantly, it was the Acoma language, which I don’t use enough of today, that inspired me to become a writer. The concepts, values, and philosophy contained in my original language and the struggle it has faced have determined my life and vision as a writer.

  In Deetziyamah, I discovered the world of the Acoma land and people firsthand through my parents, sisters and brothers, and my own perceptions, voiced through all that encompasses the oral tradition, which is ageless for any culture. It
is a small village, even smaller years ago, and like other Indian communities it is wealthy with its knowledge of daily event, history, and social system, all that make up a people who have a many-dimensioned heritage. Our family lived in a two-room home (built by my grandfather some years after he and my grandmother moved with their daughters from Old Acoma), which my father added rooms to later. I remember my father’s work at enlarging our home for our growing family. He was a skilled stoneworker, like many other men of an older Pueblo generation who worked with sandstone and mud mortar to build their homes and pueblos. It takes time, persistence, patience, and the belief that the walls that come to stand will do so for a long, long time, perhaps even forever. I like to think that by helping to mix mud and carry stone for my father and other elders I managed to bring that influence into my consciousness as a writer.

  Both my mother and my father were good storytellers and singers (as my mother is to this day—my father died in 1978), and for their generation, which was born soon after the turn of the century, they were relatively educated in the American system. Catholic missionaries had taken both of them as children to a parochial boarding school far from Acoma, and they imparted their discipline for study and quest for education to us children when we started school. But it was their indigenous sense of gaining knowledge that was most meaningful to me. Acquiring knowledge about life was above all the most important item; it was a value that one had to have in order to be fulfilled personally and on behalf of his community. And this they insisted upon imparting through the oral tradition as they told their children about our native history and our community and culture and our “stories.” These stories were common knowledge of act, event, and behavior in a close-knit pueblo. It was knowledge about how one was to make a living through work that benefited his family and everyone else.