I Am Where I Come From

Native American College Students and Graduates Tell Their Life Stories

Andrew C. Garrod, Robert Kilkenny, Melanie Benson Taylor, Andrew C. Garrod, Robert Kilkenny, Melanie Benson Taylor

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501708015
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de nativos americanos

"The organizing principle for this anthology is the common Native American heritage of its authors; and yet that thread proves to be the most tenuous of all, as the experience of indigeneity differs radically for each of them. While many experience a centripetal pull toward a cohesive Indian experience, the indications throughout these essays lean toward a richer, more illustrative panorama of difference. What tends to bind them together are not cultural practices or spiritual attitudes per se, but rather circumstances that have no exclusive province in Indian country: that is, first and foremost, poverty, and its attendant symptoms of violence, substance abuse, and both physical and mental illness.... Education plays a critical role in such lives: many of the authors recall adoring school as young people, as it constituted a place of escape and a rare opportunity to thrive.... While many of the writers do return to their tribal communities after graduation, ideas about 'home' become more malleable and complicated."—from the Introduction I Am Where I Come From presents the autobiographies of thirteen Native American undergraduates and graduates of Dartmouth College, ten of them current and recent students. Twenty years ago, Cornell University Press published First Person, First Peoples: Native American College Graduates Tell Their Life Stories, also about the experiences of Native American students at Dartmouth College. I Am Where I Come From addresses similar themes and experiences, but it is very much a new book for a new generation of college students.Three of the essays from the earlier book are gathered into a section titled "Continuing Education, " each followed by a shorter reflection from the author on his or her experience since writing the original essay. All three have changed jobs multiple times, returned to school for advanced degrees, started and increased their families, and, along the way, continuously revised and refined what it means to be Indian.The autobiographies contained in I Am Where I Come From explore issues of native identity, adjustment to the college environment, cultural and familial influences, and academic and career aspirations. The memoirs are notable for their eloquence and bravery.

PART I

BROKEN

Racial Mixture and Cultural Hybridity

1

Seeking to Be Whole Shannon Joyce Prince

A particular memory from my teenage years stands out as one experience that shaped how I thought about race, racism, and responsibility. Ironically, it’s a memory of the extremes a white woman took to make my family feel welcome in a predominantly white space. We were at the Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, a centuries-old resort staffed by many black employees, where my family and our friends are usually the only nonwhite patrons. A docent was explaining some of the resort’s history to us, and she pointed to a lithograph of the resort back from the 1700s.

“You see,” she said, beaming at my little sister, Ashley, and me, “if we were back in the colonial era, the two of you young ladies would be sitting on the porch drinking tea.” My sister and I both tried desperately not to laugh. We knew that we definitely would not have been drinking tea on the porch of the Greenbrier in the 1700s. But the docent was so unwilling to face the human-rights abuses of the past—and the inequity of the present that still kept most nonwhites out of the Greenbrier, except as staff—that she wittingly or unwittingly engaged in historical revisionism. She completely lied.

That revisionism couldn’t help but throw some light on the truths I hadn’t been able to see before. The experience was compounded on that same trip when an African American bellman smiled at Ashley and me and asked, “Is everyone treating you well?”

“Oh, yes,” we told him. “Everyone has treated us beautifully.”

“I know they have,” he said, and then his smile became more conspiratorial, “because we take care of our own.” Even though I’m a mix of cultures, three of which the bellman probably wouldn’t consider “his own,” the way I experience race means that all of me feels a sense of solidarity with someone offering good-natured kinship. I realized the bellman was articulating the attitude of many nonwhite service workers I had encountered, especially those at my predominantly white, private college-preparatory school. They encouraged and supported us, their pride always evident. They did take care of their own, but what about us? I realized that minority individuals privileged enough to benefit from institutions like private schools or historic resorts had responsibilities to those men and women not given the same opportunities. The fact that in both contexts white people got to be the students and guests while nonwhite people were stuck with the brooms and frying pans wasn’t an accident. It was an inequity. It was the direct result of the situation the docent had been too uncomfortable to acknowledge. My experience at the Greenbrier occurred when I was a teenager, but if I’m going to describe my journey with race, I’ll need to go back much further.

Whenever I’ve been called on to define my heritage, I’ve never been perplexed about how to answer. My response has not changed since I was first able to speak, just as my ethnic identity has never shifted. When asked what I am, I smile and say, “I am African American, Cherokee (Aniyunwiya) Native American, Chinese (Cantonese) American, and English American.” I excise nothing of myself. I claim the slave who was a mathematical genius; the storyteller, the quilt maker, and the wise healer; the bilingual railroad laborer and the farmer—regardless of the amount of melanin in any of their skins. I pay no attention to the pseudoscientific idea of blood quantum (the idea that race is a biological, measurable reality) and am uninterested in dividing myself into fractions. I am completely, concurrently, and proudly all of my heritages.

From the time I was able to think about such things, I have considered myself both quadricultural and ana-racial (my personal neologism for “without race.”) I am zero (raceless) and hoop (part of peoples from the world over). I think my parents might have been a little more comfortable with my homogeneous white world had I been a little less comfortable in it, but I felt that four peoples had found space in my blood; thus, people of all bloods belonged in every space in general. I was comfortable at school not because I didn’t know who I was but because I did. And I knew who I was because I came from a strong family.

When I was little, I didn’t recognize my relationships with my relatives as being racialized. I adored and was close friends with my black/white/Cherokee great-grandfather, Papa, but it was my African American great-grandmother, Mamo Seal, whom I idolized. I was able to bond with Papa. With his gold skin, straight hair, and pale blue eyes that other nonwhites had been trained to worship, Papa was my playmate. We drove tractors together, walked through the woods, and played with the cows on his farm. I recognized that his startling azure eyes made him unique, and I admired his uniqueness, but I didn’t value his irises over any others. In contrast, Mamo Seal inspired genuflection. To me, my African American great-grandmother was and remains an unparalleled beauty. Her most celebrated quality was her dark skin—hence her name. She was a feisty woman not entirely opposed to profanity. I usually sat across the room from her, not in her lap, and listened to her rather than chatting with her.

One of my fondest memories is of helping her to dress. I remember guiding a bright scarlet dress over her head, ringing her neck with crayon-bright glass beads, pulling stockings over her ebony calves, wondering if the baby-soft texture of her skin was somehow connected to its pure blackness. The world tried to teach me to see beauty as Papa, but Papa saw beauty as Mamo Seal, and so did I. When I was young, Mamo Seal (and Papa, too) were simply beautiful. As I grew older, their beauty was politicized. And in a world where Queen Elizabeth was on the curriculum but not Yaa Asantewaa, where girls dreamed of being Britney Spears but not India Arie, seeing Mamo Seal revered and having her to revere was one of many affirming examples set by my family.

For that reason, my constant proximity to whiteness didn’t cause me to romanticize, normalize, or idealize it. It did cause me to expiate it, however. I was always around white people and white people were always nice to me. It didn’t occur to me that maybe I was palatable to white people because I was a pigtailed, upper-middle-class little kid. I considered myself an empiricist, mainly because I was reluctant to condemn unjustly, and my experience had taught me that racism among whites was rare. If white people didn’t discriminate against me as an individual, then they must not discriminate against nonwhites as a group.

I understand that there’s a trope in horror movies where the protagonist will see someone she knows and begin happily interacting with him or her, only to discover that her acquaintance’s body has been taken over by aliens or monsters. The protagonist feels shock, revulsion, panic, and horror. She doesn’t know those she thought she did. She realizes the world isn’t what she thought it was and discovers that her perspective was flawed—and that scares her. It scared me. But I didn’t feel fear when a classmate told me they were moving to a public school that “was a good one without lots of minorities,” or when a girl I knew described being afraid because “a big black guy” asked her to dance at a party, I felt horror. The mask had been ripped off to reveal the ugliness underneath.

Something I also understand about horror movies is that their viewers often warn protagonists not to walk into dangerous environments. “Don’t go up those stairs!” they cry. “Don’t open that door!” “Are you crazy? Don’t go in there!” But what do you do when your whole world is “in there”?

What do you do if the stable where you take riding lessons, the golf course where you practice your swing, the incredible museums you regularly visit are all “in there”? What do you do if your people have spent the past few centuries literally dying for your right to go “in there”? What happens when the actions and passivity of your peers “in there” reveal that the majority of them have been “body snatched”? Sometimes I’d argue with myself that my glimpses of the beings behind the masks were only tricks of the light. I had to figure out what to do with my increasing awareness that my world wasn’t what it had seemed.

In my predominantly white world, addressing racism meant you were oversensitive. It meant you waited eagerly to play the “race card” and enjoyed being a victim. It meant you “made everything about race.” Nonwhite people were inherently seen as biased, as unable to determine objectively what was and was not racism. I noticed that the person who criticized racism was the problem. The person who perpetrated the racism was the victim.

When I entered upper school and began to acknowledge racism, I tried to address it, always voicing my concerns and suggestions with the utmost care. I would point out to the headmaster that if I didn’t love our school, I wouldn’t want the student body to be more diverse; it was only because I thought the school was wonderful that I wanted more nonwhite students to attend. When I approached the upper-school librarian about library books, some of them published in the past few years, that contained statements such as “abolitionists exaggerated the negative aspects of slavery,” I would explain that my objection to the books being in our collection was a manifestation of my care for the library. I was (and remain) quiet and soft-spoken, and I rarely brought up the subject of racism. When I did, my concerns sometimes were met with the greatest respect, compassion, and, most important, positive action. I did not feel, however, as though I was always heard—such as when the principal continued to allow my teacher to wear Confederate-flag ties to school.

I was coming to realize that the same people who thought I was a cute five-foot-five teenage girl clutched their purses tighter when my six-foot-one father passed them on the street. The same students and teachers who enjoyed having one or two of me in a class didn’t want to be in a neighborhood full of me after dark. It occurred to me that whereas any negative action a nonwhite person took was seen as confirming stereotypes, positive actions a nonwhite person took didn’t erode them. The positive actions of nonwhite individuals only allowed them to be seen as exceptions to the rule. And it hurt so badly to realize that someone I loved, someone who loved me, was racist.

I started becoming aware of the way my white environment had shaped me. Before kindergarten, when I pictured falling in love with somebody, the image was always of a guy with brown skin. Somewhere along the way, completely unconsciously, it changed to that of a white guy. As a little girl, even before I began creative writing, I would make up stories in my imagination as I waited to fall asleep. It occurred to me one day that whenever I crafted stories, all but one or two characters would be white. Again, the practice was unconscious. I wasn’t choosing to dream up predominantly white characters; it was just that the environments I imagined naturally reflected the one I inhabited. Such realizations surprised, fascinated, and disturbed me. I didn’t mind white people playing a part in my imagination, but it bothered me that they dominated it. Even my dreamscapes had been colonized.

My parents couldn’t have been happier when I became aware of white privilege. Although almost all our family and individual activities took place in predominantly white contexts, it was the school they had selected for my little sister, Ashley, and me, where we spent most of our waking hours, that concerned them the most. They had picked our school because it offered a world-class education, but they wondered if the extreme lack of diversity we experienced there was too high a cost to pay. They particularly worried about me, as Ashley never struck them as assimilated. While I had always taken pride in my heritage, it wasn’t until I acknowledged the presence and prevalence of racism that they were able to exhale. My radicalization meant they could relax.

On paper my parents don’t seem like the kind of people who would send their children to a predominantly white school in the first place. As a little child, my black, Cherokee, English mother had adored Malcolm X the way other girls fell in love with rock stars. She admired Martin Luther King Jr., but his patience and nonviolence wearied her. In college she became fluent in Swahili, eventually teaching courses in the language. She challenged her professors on everything from the maps they used that showed Africa as disproportionately small to their neglect and distortions of African history. Her activism (and kindness and beauty) eventually won her a proposal from the king of an African country—which she politely declined.

Instead she married one of her college classmates, my father, a black Chinese man so disgusted with America’s racism that he was well into his twenties before he could bring himself to say the Pledge of Allegiance. He cited prejudice in the arena of employment as a primary incentive for owning his own business. My father was baffled at how he could be given the key to the city and still get pulled over for driving while black. He occasionally entertained my little sister and me with the true story of how racist policemen once nearly arrested him for “robbing” his own parents’ house.

My parents searched for schools for me when I was still a baby. In fact, my mother may have still been pregnant when they started. They visited one school where nonwhite children only a few years old spoke a variety of languages with great fluency, but, as my mother explained, “There was no joy in their eyes.” At the school they ultimately settled on (when I was still under a year old), the one my sister and I would attend from kindergarten through twelfth grade, they saw a scholarly and warm faculty teaching enthusiastic students in state-of-the-art classrooms and theaters. Little kids were playing with sheep and chickens in the campus petting zoo. Older students relaxed in beautiful, colorful gardens. Everyone looked engaged, inspired, and happy. But almost everyone was white. The black and brown people around the school were cafeteria ladies and maintenance men, as well as nannies and housekeepers picking up their charges in the carpool line. That fact concerned my parents.

So they tried to compensate, and I believe they succeeded. Their efforts remind me of the “culture camps” to which white American parents send their transracially adopted children from Korea and China. During the summers, my mother taught my sister and me the nonwhite history that our school’s curriculum only gave a nod to. She brewed us Cherokee pine-needle tea to build up our immune systems when the moderate Houston winter began. My father taught us how gentrification was affecting the city, and our grandmother introduced us to the work of her college professor, John Biggers, one of the greatest African American painters of the twentieth century.

Looking back, I find some of their tactics amusing. I remember the book of hand games my parents gave my sister and me. Most African American girls learn the clapping and rhyming games from their black friends; my sister and I had to read about them. We had books praising the beauty of skin tones described as peanut butter, warm mocha, and sweet licorice, although we were far more likely to see those shades on the people on our book pages than on those around us. Ashley could perform West African dance. I could weave on a loom. But neither of us could claim to have black or Native American friends for the better parts of our childhoods. As I said, my parents weren’t really worried about Ashley’s racial self-esteem. They were concerned, however, that despite my love for my cultures, I denied the prevalence of racial injustice.

I think my parents were confused. How could I be secure in my racial identity if I didn’t understand the important role racism played in the world? It seems that my immediate and extended families and I debated the point endlessly when I was little. It wasn’t that the discussion began with my relatives trying to convince me of the reality of white supremacy. The conversations usually started with a very real, very painful humiliation suffered by one of us the previous week, a tale retold cathartically. But what my relatives saw as prejudice, I was more likely to excuse as simple rudeness.

My sister and I would sit in our maternal grandmother, Dear’s, lap, while my parents sat on either side of her wooden desk. My Creole step-grandfather would sit at the end of the sofa. My aunt Linda and my adopted African American aunt Gwen would frequently stand, animated by passion.

“Wednesday,” I remember Gwen saying once, “we were asking for directions. We were in this white neighborhood, driving around looking for this restaurant, and we just could not find it. So we pulled over and asked these two white people if they knew where the restaurant was. The woman said, ‘I don’t, but Greg does.’ And meanwhile the man was just looking around, looking at the ground. And the woman kept saying, ‘Greg, you know where it is. You know you know where it is. Why won’t you tell them?’ And the man just wouldn’t tell us because he didn’t want us in that neighborhood.”

“That’s how they are sometimes,” said Dear mildly.

“They do the same thing to me,” added my dad. “I got a phony speeding ticket for just driving through a white neighborhood, trying to pick the girls up from school. Sometimes they just don’t want us around.”

“Why are your people like that?” Aunt Linda teased Grandfather.

“I’m not one of them!” he said, emphatically.

“It’s not fair to judge all of a race by one person,” I reasoned. “Maybe Greg was just mean.” What I saw as isolated incidents—though in retrospect, continuous isolated incidents—the adults in my family saw as part of a larger pattern.

“I’m around white people all the time,” I said. “My classmates and their parents and my teachers aren’t like that.” This was true.

But sometimes I wonder if my belief that racism was rare might have been reinforced by my environment. If white people were so bad, then why would my parents choose to be surrounded by them, in the neighborhoods where we lived, the schools they sent us to, and so on? What was I supposed to do—believe that my parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles were right in thinking that it was rare for white people to be truly free of racism, and still comfortably spend all my time learning and playing with them? Did they want me to live the life they designed for me without fully believing in it? Would that calm them down?

Don’t get me wrong. As a little girl I sincerely believed that racism just didn’t happen all that often and that bigots were as rare as hens’ teeth. My belief that most people were full of sunshine and rainbows was genuine—it wasn’t a coping mechanism. But I wonder what my life would have been like had I not believed those things.

I remember the arguments my dad and I would have about racism. I found it hard to believe him when he talked about the prevalence of white ignorance...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction: Coming Home
• PART I. BROKEN: RACIAL MIXTURE AND CULTURAL HYBRIDITY
• PART II. AN INDIAN EDUCATION: LEAVING AND FINDING HOME AT DARTMOUTH COLLEGE
• PART III. FULL CIRCLE: RETURNING AND REMAKING HOME
• PART IV. CONTINUING EDUCATION: NADS REFLECT ON THEIR JOURNEYS
• Notes
• About the Editors and Author of the Foreword