I can understand why this particular GUEST chose to post anonymously. If this list had the same members who I speak with regularly on several American Indian literature lists, it would have been a flame war by now.

What GUEST is trying to point out is that just being able to parse out in the family history an ancestor who was American Indian in a time when it is very trendy to BE American Indian is not the same as having grown up identifying as a member of a tribe or nation and the horrible infighting that takes place there, for so many reasons. (Take a breath--sorry that sentence was so long!) American tribal land is managed (badly) by the federal government. American Indians are STILL COLONIZED PEOPLE. In many other places of the world, the colonizers went home and left the carnage behind (see Africa for many recent examples of this. Or Vietnam. Or Korea.). But here the colonizers remained. And somewhat less than 50% of self-identified Indians are on reservations. Many were relocated in the 1940's and 50's, others left because there was no living to be made there.

Sherman Alexie is very proud of being an American Indian, but he has done a lot of damage as he makes his proclamations about who is and isn't really an Indian. My friend, Louis Owens, who took his own life this summer, was 1/2 Choctaw and Cherokee, identifying primarily with his father's Choctaw family. They were migrant farm workers, a family of 9 children moving through California fields and back to Mississippi along the Yazoo River for periods of time. Louis defied the odds and put himself through college, getting his Ph.D. in English in 1981 from UC Davis. If you want an excellent analysis of American Indian literature, read his Other Destinies: Understanding American Indian Literature. And if you want to understand how very difficult it really is to grow up identifying as Indian (especially when it wasn't popular in the 1940's and 50's) read his autobiographical book Mixedblood Messages, with a mix of autobiography and observations on literature and film. And how Indians are represented therein. Louis didn't choose to kill himself just because of Sherman, but Sherman was a continual thorn in his side for the past 10 years or so. Louis, by the way, who died at age 54, had just reached the average life expectancy for American Indian men.

Sherman Alexie decided that Louis "wasn't really an Indian," a pronouncement he made for some reason known only to him. Louis, like many mixedbloods, had dark hair, Choctaw features, green eyes, but was lighter skinned than fullblood Indians. And perhaps this was what Alexie was viewing. Or perhaps because, like so many Indians, Louis didn't come from a reservation, and refused to apply for papers. "My dog has papers" was his response when I asked him about this one time.

Louise Erdrich has a joke in one of her novels about some crawdads. I know I won't tell this right, and it isn't a funny joke anyway. It's sad and ironic. The gist of it is that two buckets of crawdads are sitting on the mud, one white crawdads, one Indian. The white bucket empties as all of the crawdads climb out and skuttle off. The bucket of Indian crawdads are all picked up and eaten, because each time one tried to crawl out, the others pulled him back down into the bucket. She's right. In some ways, American Indians can be their own worst enemies. And there's so much more to argue about now, with outsiders getting Indians to front their gambling casinos. Amazing how many Indians there are all of a sudden, though I personally think it's turn about's fair play if Indian people reap profits from whites gambling in their casinos.

My ex is Taino Indian, born in Puerto Rico, but wasn't raised with a strong identity as Taino, because he grew up in Brooklyn where they moved when he was six. This was at a time when there wasn't the density of Puerto Ricans to support the oral traditions and carry on the stories. He knows more about knishes than he does his Indian culture. My daughter is dark like him, my son isn't. They both know they're Indian, but they also both know that except as a statistic on government forms, they'll have to learn about their family on their own (they have a large family in PR, so this is a possibility). And that by just having the blood, it doesn't confer on them any special skills or spirituality. That comes from nurture, not nature. They can't go around appropriating some other Indians' culture and spirituality (unless of course, they chose to be christians--many of whom can't stop themselves from pushing their religion down everyone's throats--but I digress). If they choose to practice one of these religions, fine, and they won't look so much like outsiders, but they'll understand the issues involved in taking such a step. I've suggested that Unitarians or Buddhists might be directions to explore. ;-)

My 10 cents worth. Thanks Kat for referring to what I've sent before (I think I sent the Little Tree essay to you as a link or a PM, I don't remember posting it to the entire list). I'm sure there are lots of holes in my arguments here, but I don't think I'll revisit this thread to hash them out. GUEST might want to leave it alone as well.

Ok, I'll take a breath. 'Nuff said.

SRS