Details

Storyteller: Teague
Tribe: Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe
Created: 2018
Location: Duluth, MN
Transcript: The lessons we learn from our elders help keep us in place. My grandparents have always been my strongest role models; they shared their wisdom to ground me culturally, and I always saw them living their lives with dignity and strength.

I have good memories of waking up early to get groceries with my grandmother Jane. She wasn't related to us, but my sister and I spent a lot of our childhood with her and she became our grandmother. She used to wake at 3 or 4am and we would walk to town across the railroad tracks and watch the sun come over the lake. We'd sit on the dock, she would pray and snap at us to "watch the scenery" if we weren't reverent like she was at that time. She made pastries with way too much liqueur in them, but they always turned out amazing because she learned to cook from being in boarding school. She also tried to teach me table manners, and how to walk evenly like a lady, and this caused us to fight often because I was an unruly child and I didn't like wearing nightgowns. She threatened to tie me to my chair once because I slurped soup on purpose and put my elbows on the table and stared at her. She used to hang turtle shells all around her apartment and make traditional bags out of them. Grandma Jane tried so hard to convince us that turtle soup "did not taste like rubber bands". I honestly do not know how she put up with us so well. She did tell another elder once to "rotate her eagle feathers up her ass" when they got into an argument, and that always impressed me--that she used traditions to make her own rules. She taught my sister and I not to put up with less than we thought we deserved, and I stubbornly carry that lesson.

My grandmother Jane was my best and strongest example of someone who could balance the Anishinaabe lifestyle with her own interests from the western world. She taught me how to use plants as medicine, but she also had a strong interest in biochemistry and collected books. She loved Victorian culture, and popped wild rice, and sitting in the garden with her sunflowers drawing and painting. She was a lovely woman with a fierce tongue.

And my grandfather Cedric was a boxer for Golden Gloves. He never feared death; he told me this year that he "doesn't fear anything" and even though it sounds crazy I believe that. He taught me how to box when my family moved to Duluth and I started getting picked on in school. A lot of people always wanted to fight my grandfather for sport once they would hear who he was, but he would always ignore them and continue taping my hands at the boxing gym. I could never keep up with his speed or accuracy, but it was important to me to try to impress him with my strength and stamina. I don't know if I ever did, but he never treated me with anything less than honor  and deep love. He is humble, and gentle, and strong.

My grandparents have been the core of my life: I love their quiet wisdom and am grateful for what they could pass on to me.

My Native identity was troubled for a long time. I grew up with my family on the Lake Vermillion reservation. My cousins and I spent a lot of time in the woods running around and playing games. I think of that as a very idyllic time but sometimes I probably over-idealize it and then it bums me out. I never really feel like I fit in there, but I don't think it mattered. When we moved to Duluth my mother put me in ballet classes, and then when we would visit the reservation, I would dance ballet in the basement. My cousins tolerated me fairly well; we weren't judgmental back then. My aunties would drive around in their cars listening to 90's and 2000's R&B looking cool and bumping beats; I'd sit in the back seat of their cars playing Pokémon on my Gameboy  thinking "This is swell!" (I was a nerdy kid.) Again, I don't feel like I fit in anywhere but among my own people it didn't feel suffocating to not fit in or to accept their norms because they were mostly my norms too, like the language we used to speak to each other and the way we would tease each other. When we moved to Duluth honestly the culture shock was overwhelming. I had one friend, who was also native, and she was my best friend for a while. I got into fights a lot with the other kids and learned to just not talk in school. I grew up only ever being around other Natives, but never consciously processed my identity because of that. I remember at a really young age seeing Plains Indians on a field trip, with bows and arrows. I did not identify with that imagery at all, but everyone said they were Native American. I thought to myself, "Maybe I'm not Native American then." Because I never had to tell another person my ethnicity on the reservation or even at a powwow because we were all the same. In a city I didn't know what I was, but I always felt different and strange around most other people in that kind of stifling way. It hurt. When I was 13 my grandfather gave me a poem from Chief Dan George about natives who live in a city and how painful it is, and that poem resonated with me deeply--how your spirit yearns for water and it gets the kind that lives in a bottle. Sometimes you feel like you live in a bottle too.

So many Indigenous people talk about the difficulty of "living in two worlds". The overuse of the phrase does not really diminish the truth of it. In one world I float effortlessly, and then in the other I struggle to walk and have to learn a new gravity. The one I struggle in often depends on how long I spend in the other. The two worlds don't often meet nicely but maybe someday they will. When I was in college, I struggled through the majority of my science classes. I loved biology because I grew up with a kinship to plants and animals, but then instructors would teach framework for "what is alive?", which to me is a rhetorical question of "what deserves respect?" and then they would exclude rocks, water, trees, and ultimately animals too because they are deemed as less intelligent. I was an obnoxious student who would always object; "I KNOW water is alive. Water is stronger than all of us." In a General Chemistry class we were asked to write a statement either supporting or denouncing the storing of nuclear waste in the Yucca mountains. I wrote that the mountains were sacred to indigenous people and no one had business storing nuclear waste there. I failed the assignment; my response had not been "objective" and I had not been asked to write an ethics essay. I consistently had points knocked off for anthropomorphism in my lab reports and eventually gave up on a science degree; the classes were too rigid, and everyone was speaking a language I didn't know. But I only had one other native friend who had even gone to college. When I sat and talked with my old friends it started to feel foreign to me. Most everyone I knew had not been able to graduate from high school and talking about college started to seem like bragging. A lot of my family members weren't really impressed, they didn't finish college and didn't think there was much point to going. I stopped mentioning it, and even still I rarely talk about it.

I do see where they're coming from because the diploma on my wall doesn't really change my life from day to day; it didn't automatically turn into a job or a new life. It just gave me good experiences, and I learned how to teach myself. I could probably do the same things without a college degree, but then again it would have hurt my self-esteem not to finish mine. The family members that went but didn't graduate... they seem to have the most disdain for my degree. I lost touch with some of my family members when I moved away and went to college, but I needed to be away from home and develop independently. It was hard to be completely alone--face things alone, but it forced me to take a hard look at myself.

Indigenous identity is immensely complicated. I don't wear signifiers to express my identity, like feathers or beads or tribal prints, because I'm very comfortable and I know who I am. But it does make me uncomfortable when people tell me "You're Native American? I thought you were just really tan! You don't act native...." I really question how people know how Indigenous people "are supposed to act" if they don't know any Indigenous people personally. I think that's why so many indigenous people adopt a kind of performance identity: because they're tired of outsiders questioning their authenticity. I think part of it is that people expect me to be "savage" on some level, or really in tune with nature. To be honest, I don't know what they expect or what stereotypes they are waiting for but when they see how much I am like them it must defamiliarize them somehow.

I’m different, I’m just different and I’ve always been different. As an adult I’ve learned to accept myself for not fitting in. My grandfather told me, "there's good and bad to everything" and I tend to look at my culture through that lens. There is a beauty and a resiliency in Native teachings: a medicine that could shift the way the world is. At the same time, my people are in pain and unsure how to cope. Sometimes I don't know how to cope. But I'm still here, and I'm still trying. I try to pass on the good things. I keep fighting for my values and trying to get these two worlds to join. Like my grandmother, I can always use these traditions to build the framework and the new rules for how I will live.