GYASI ROSS AND THE NA GENERATIONS

Carlisle Boarding School graduates in the 1890's.

Believe it or not, when I sit down at the keyboard in the morning clutching my coffee and fending off cats, I have almost too much to write about. Subjects crowd in from every side, some of them with serious implications in real lives. Last thing at night I will have swept my email for interesting messages and, hopefully, a last word from special friends. That means what they said has been “cooking” in my subconscious all night. It’s what I moved here to do.

But there’s another reason I moved here: the land and the people created by the history of this land: the Blackfeet. Since 1961 I’ve been watching, sometimes participating and sometimes “hands off.” I deliberately embarked on an education plan that would be useful for thinking about it. But nothing can be as insightful as the testimony of the people themselves. Like Gyasi Ross, who blogs:

http://thingaboutskins.wordpress.com/2010/02/03/my-friend-chad-victims-and-victory-and-those-visitors-who-want-indians-to-stay-virtually-the-same-part-1/


My dude, Nish Chad, brought up an interesting theory to me.

. . . it’s rarely the exemplary or successful non-Native folks who find refuge amongst us. Every once in a GREAT while, we get a non-Native who has it together -- the occasional white millionaire or Doctor who leaves the hustle and bustle of the big city to come live with us – but that’s rare. Instead, it’s usually the odd, rejected, smelly, sex offender and/or really really hippie non-Native folks who we accept to come live within our communities. They figure, “I flunked out of “mainstream society”—perhaps these egalitarian Native people will accept me.”

And unfortunately most of the time we do.

Sometimes we even allow these oddball non-Natives to have a greater voice than our own people — greater than the very Natives who live amongst our own people, live and work for Native people. Those non-Natives want to be important to the Native community — they want to save the Native community — badly that they assign themselves a greater voice than the very citizens of that community.

. . . according to Chad, white school administrators, academics and bloggers do not like to admit that some Native kids just simply mess up. So they present an all-encompassing excuse for Native kids — intergenerational trauma. He said that when he talks to elderly Natives — or even most of us Natives who grew up within our own communities those Natives want accountability, responsibility and an end to all the excuses. They want Native kids to excel like they know that Native kids can excel if no one is making excuses for them or lowering expectations for them. Further, these older Natives know that as long as these non-Natives keep making excuses for Native kids before the Native kids even get a chance to compete, the Native kids are going to believe the excuses. They’re going to feel that, “Yeah, I guess I do have trauma and shouldn’t be getting these good grades. I guess I should be angrier.”

These non-Natives love to tell us Natives what to do. They attempt to tell us what we should or should not expect from our own children. They attempt to tell us what should or should not offend us. Because, apparently, we’re not smart enough to know ourselves. Crazily, sometimes we even listen to those non-Native folks who tell us that we should lower our standards for our children and we should find a convenient excuse to expect them not to do well in today’s society.

. . . We are not victims. We are victors. We are still here–we’ve won just by surviving the Holocaust of the previous 500 years. And now, we must move beyond merely surviving to thriving. But those non-Natives who were welcomed into our communities attempt to tell us that we ARE helpless–that we need to stay stuck on “survival.”

. . .So does intergenerational trauma exist? Of course. It’s been proven. But it exists for many, many people–not just Natives. And just like the rest of those other “many, many people” who suffer intergenerational trauma, we Natives need to figure out a way to get out from under that shadow, otherwise subsequent generations will suffer and struggle with exactly the same issues as we do, because we were too busy playing victim.
Still, I wonder about Chad’s larger point—why do these non-Natives always want to butt into our internal family business? Whether it’s the “shamanic,” eccentric hippie lady who feels the need to tell everyone about her distant Native heritage or the Preacher who wants to save all the Indians from brimstone, there are always outsiders who want to put their two cents into our internal business.


Read the uncut version. I’m going to claim the identity of that “shamanic” eccentric hippie lady, though I have no Native heritage and what I know is local, not necessarily true of every Indian.

I see two double binds: one is that the kind of education that will get you a job and “success” is European: the kind imposed on those Carlisle graduates pictured above. It forces what seems like an either/or choice: either be like a white person or be an Indian and don’t succeed. Or to put it another way, “How does one succeed in a white/black/yellow world and still stay red?” Many have found the solution that Earl Old Person has made work so well: in this photo he’s a scout in Europe, but he has kept his braids and headdress. Never mind that Boy Scouts are an Ernest Thompson Seton white liberal ripoff of ersatz Indianness. Never mind that this is white Europe, not white America. Never mind that he’s using the very signs of Indianness that make whites think Indians are “different.” He’s there, you’re square, and he has your number.


Earl Old Person, Jamboree Mondial de la Paix, France 1921.

The other double bind is that if Indians want money from government, it’s going to have to come from liberals who believe with Officer Krumpke that “I’m depraved on accounta I’m deprived.” That is, funding progressive programs works better than closing down the rez, which is what the conservatives constantly suggest. (They’d rather the money went to soybean farmers.) It HAS worked. The real equality has begun. But it’s not time to turn on the liberals quite yet.

There’s so much to discuss. What to do is not my decision. I’ll tell you this: I see today’s Browning kids excelling the hell out of many white competitions. And they don’t have to grow braids to show they are Indian. Gyasi! Time to visit home! A new generation! One auntie is superintendent of the rez schools, another is the Superintendent of the Office of Public Instruction. What choice is there but success?