Details

Storyteller: Justin
Tribe: Lakota
Created: 2018
Location: Duluth, MN
Transcript: I am mixed blooded. My father was Cherokee, Mandan and Swedish; my mother was Hunkpapa, Oglala and French Canadian. When I was four and half years old my mother died unexpectedly from cancer at the age of 23. It was 1958. My little sister and brother were killed, thrown in a ditch and left to the crows. Within the year, my surviving brother and I were made wards of the state by the state of Oregon. At the end of that year, the Baptists came. They took us back to Illinois to the tail end of the Native American boarding school system. That’s when I first became surrounded.

In Illinois everything was different. Flat land that was further flattened into orderly, plowed rows and only a smattering of trees in hedgerows. The region was almost entirely anglo-entric with a few blacks and Latinos sprinkled in, but rarely a Native American. I hated it. It was so artificial and hypocritical. The longer I was forced to stay the more hypocritical I felt. Against my will, I was slowly becoming them. But I was always the outsider. They paraded me around and called me “their little Indian,” but also tried to systematically beat any trace of the “little Indian” out of me. Those brutal attempts only further ingrained those fragments as I secreted them away their grubby hands. That’s when I knew why my mother called the whites “flat asses” and the wasicu-sa (the fat takers). Having no parents, no role models or few and far between positive forces, I grew up without a moral compass and a capacity for greater brutality. I refused to die, and it made me ruthless and relentless. I also refuse to lose.

The day I turned 18, was the day I left the care of the Calverlites. That started me on a path of living in NYC, LA and Chicago for the next 25-years. Because of my quasi exotic look (native/anglo) of dark hair, high cheekbones and powerful athletic build, I started with modeling for catalogs, magazines, newspapers, billboards and runway shows. I progressively parlayed that into acting for TV commercials and movies and singing in recording studios. But due to a crushing experience on a movie set, I quit acting, took the money and became an audio and acoustic design engineer. From there I designed, and or operated, sound systems for Broadway plays/musicals, toured with national/international music stars and designed recording studios. Becoming an audio/acoustic design engineer was a compromise to practicality because all I really wanted to be was a singer. I learned every peripheral skill set that would make me a better singer one day. Music is the only thing that has saved me in my life. I left acting behind, but I always kept it percolating in my core. One day I would return to it despite the crushing movie set experience.

I tried to reconnect with my culture by going to the urban Native American centers. This, and eventually my experiences at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, were rife with discrimination, reverse discrimination and outright greedy, vindictive hostility for not being pure blooded. This just further isolated me and only continued to leave me feeling more disconnected.

After living in major urban centers for 25-years I realized I needed urban detox. In the end, it came down to moving back to the west coast or up to Canadian Shield near the Canadian border. I chose to go north. The final city destination turned out to be Duluth, MN. For a number of reasons. One, because I seem to be drawn to large bodies of water (the ocean, Lake Michigan and Lake Superior. After I moved to Duluth, I discovered I was still surrounded and an outsider in my own land once again. 

That’s when I experienced discrimination/reverse-discrimination at the University of Minnesota - Duluth. The first phase was back when the early incarnation of the American Indian Learning Resource Center (AILRC) was in Cina Hall. If you weren’t pure-blooded, or any other version of their perception of a wannabe, the hostility and isolation was palatable. Not being Anishinabe was a crime but being mixed blooded left me feeling like a leper. I eventually excised that social/cultural option from my UMD experience

In my junior year I was injured in a devastating auto accident that knocked me out of school. It took me thirteen-years to get out of the hospitals, nursing homes, surgeries and physical therapies before I could return back to UMD to complete my degree. The Cina location for the Native students gathering was now replaced with the new AILRC center in the Kirby Center. The hostility was better this time, but I still felt/feel like a second-class citizen because I’m not Anishinabe or pure blooded.

So. To make sense of it all I have been compelled to be an artist. All of my artistic mediums (writing, metalsmithing and music) are centered around trying to make sense of being caught in a cultural crossfire. I try to mitigate feeling lost, feeling impossibly broken and being a living ghost, through my art. I try to dull the nightmares where I hear buggles blaring and women and children screaming. | try to remember who I am and where I’m from, but it all seems so far away like it’s someone else.

The most important Lakota word my mother taught me on the sofa as she lay dying, is geeksuya. It means remember. I try, but it all gets blurrier, and possibly more corrupt over time. I know who I am. I know who I want to be, but I don’t know where I am. I want to be where I’m supposed to be. I want to come home.