Details

Storyteller: Blair
Tribe: Oneida Nation of Wisconsin
Created: 2018
Location: Duluth, MN
Transcript: Justice for Native People, Justice for Native Me

How to write the Great American Indian novel.

All of the Indians must have tragic features: tragic noses, eyes, and arms.
Their hands and fingers must be tragic when they reach for tragic food.

The hero must be a half-breed, half white and half Indian, preferably
from a horse culture. He should often weep alone.

I am as Native as my father. Old-school Native: my father his mother and grandmother were not traditionals. They were puritanical boarding school Christians… and in their legacy, still are. We are not stereotypes or filled with a woodland wisdom. We are jaded and cautious and hardworking and when we weep, we weep alone. I am as white as my mother. Staying white through the admission of guilt and the acknowledgement of a depraved indifference... Happily egocentric, immersed in the national fiction. ‘I know they suffered tragedy trauma and extreme malfeasance, but they’re uneducated and ill-mannered and irresponsible.’ Integration, also known as, submission is offered as a compassionate option. Native is what I am not. I have not grown in a Native community and have only come in later life to know some Native people and to develop some connection to local Native culture. I don’t speak English like a Native or understand local Native cultural norms. Native is what I am. Brown- and black-haired, hawk-nose, cheek-boned, enough that I am at least a white man's Indian. They know me from my multiple film cameos where I am often drunk, confused, simple minded, and kind. They know me from the historical fiction of their youth where I portray a barbaric loser. I am Native or some type of bipedal forest creature; I am Native because Native is what they are not. I am for justice for Native people or at least justice for Native me. Justice for Native me might be not claiming to be Native if you’re not. Who do you spend your time with and what are your physical circumstances in a racist society? Do you have to tell people that you are Native? And does it seem that your doing so gives other white people license to argue that their 1/32 Native blood makes them Native too? Do you suffer as Native or do you gain as Native? Do you fall short as Native or does it lift you up? Does it keep you from having a job or does it get you a job? Is Native a thoughtful choice or a depressing reality? Justice for Native me is the death of flute music and the discontinuation of the generic image of Sitting Bull. Not equating Native with poverty and ignorance. If I know five words in my traditional language, I am not an Indian. To be Native is not to know a lot about the woods. To be Native is not to be part of a fictional hemisphere-wide culture. To be Native is not a casual exploration of my heritage. Justice for Native me is rigorous honesty. Now I sit with people who are simultaneously Native and not Native and discuss identity decisions based in the tolerable degree of honesty: fearfully designing a comfortable reality. Real but not too real. Comfortably Native, possibly not white, defined by societies that are not our own.

In the Great American Indian novel, when it is finally written,
all of the white people will be Indians and all of the Indians will be ghosts.

Alexie, Sherman. “How to Write the Great American Indian Novel.” The Summer of Black Widows, Hanging Loose Press, 1996.