IDENTITY

Since there's been a kafuffle on Twitter about autochthonous/indigenous writing, I'll use it to talk about what guides lives once an individual is established as mature (after 26, we're told, for the pre-frontal lobe of the brain where are located the ability to prioritize information, form morality, and make "executive" decisions about who to be and how to act.)  Survival cares less about this than the maturity of the ability to reproduce which comes as much as a decade earlier which turns out to have bad consequences.  Even worse, in some situations, the life span of many people is less than the age of maturity, particularly in times of war when young men are killed in great numbers or in places where there is no gestation and birth care so that many women die young.  They have no chance to write from the wisdom of old age experience.

But if people have longer lives, they organize into families, neighborhoods, clubs and clans, affinity groups, employment groups,  Some want to see groups as tribes, which they equate with species.  The definition of species is in question these days because it was originally based on the idea that if two kinds mated, they would be infertile so they must be organically, genomically, different.  This turns out to be untrue. Now no one is sure what a species is. Some people still think it's like breeds of livestock, but they can cross-breed.

Nor do cultures turn out to be so separate from each other.  Usually there is a central uniqueness created by the time and place where the people have been for a long time, then a circle around them -- maybe their children -- who still identify with that central model, mostly.  Then a looser circle that isn't quite different enough to separate, and another circle outside that who are coming and going with divided allegiances.  

Before the next adjacent cultural circle, there mayl be people who are on their own.  Not a definite line of in and out, but a graded variation.  In the case of African Blacks, defined by skin color, there is a range of size and shape among tribes from pygmy to Watusi, from Nigerian bookkeepers to hunter Masai.  But who can sort them out by culture or even body type when it's not even easy to decide at what point Black skin becomes white enough to pass?  Some people made color cards like paint chips or lipstick shades so they'd have a reference between dark skin and a decent suntan.  Yet we cling to such an iffy way of making distinctions.

When it comes to Blackfeet, in the Sixties when I came it was pretty easy to tell that the oldest ones I knew were full-bloods.  Chewing Black Bone, Old Jim Whitecalf, Louis Plenty Treaty,  Molly and George Kicking Woman, Louis Fish, and so on were plainly quite unlike immigrant groups, Swedes or red-headed Irish and so on.  But now, generations later, some either need documents or explanations to say what race they are and no one can explain what that race means except entitlement to money and voting.

Writing is not a matter of race but a matter of human imagination. It is a print art about getting in touch with what some other being is living through, maybe a different species like a grizzly or maybe a different person like an Auschwitz survivor of great age in Manhattan.  No one says one can't tell the story of a dog, imagining what that dog thinks and remembers, unless one is a dog.  There are famous stories about or "told by" dogs.

And yet they do:  ""What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" is the name of a philosophy paper written by Thomas Nagel in 1974. ... Nagel argues that consciousness has a subjective aspect, and that understanding other mental states is difficult or impossible for those not able to experience those mental states. Nagel chose bats for a reason."  They can fly, they are noctural, and their acoustic sense is extremely sensitive.

Here's a discussion of the dilemma that is so elevated and philosophical that it's not very possible to understand.  Luckily, there are pictures, which help a little bit.  But this is the elevated Ph.D. notion about being able to really understand each other or others not even human.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTDvoXLX_VE

The idea of preserving the category of "Native American" is a good one.  Even better is the idea that the experience of any human that is close to the forces that created a native of America in the first place will take that person closer to understanding subjectively, even becoming like them.  Those forces are likely to be a specific ecology.  This means that it would be difficult for a Seminole to imagine being a Navajo or a Navajo to imagine being a Chinook, or any tribe of today to understand an indigenous person who lived in the same place before 1492.  But since they are human, they can do it.

For a person who claims an identity as an "Indian," it is meaningless without knowing which one, where, when.  An identity is a process.  Even being one kind does not mean that person has the ability to decide who is entitled and who is not, except by resorting to the same standard as the US government, who found themselves in so much hot water over the attempt to set a standard that they delegated the whole concept to the individual tribes, as if they didn't already have enough trouble.

Having found an identity to inhabit, one that is somewhat mythified into a kind of supra-race (pan-Indian) with special qualities, individuals become invested in keeping others out by whatever means they can find, and don't understand that they are denying a major part of humanness, the empathy of sharing.  They claim for themselves the Euro concepts of "owning," borders, and aristocracy while trying to deny the existence of the Euro idea of wealth privilege, which was imposed on tribes in terms of money, per capita, and subsidies.  Ironically, out of this sense of superior identity comes an arrogance that is quite at odds with the romance of the mythic super-Indian who is humble and humanist, rather like the liberal version of Jesus while all the time acting like a right wing Nero deciding who is in and who is out.

So there is a plot for someone to write into a novel, about a snotty little indigenous girl rebelling against an awkward adoption into a white family who in her resentment-based choices finally discovers her inner continuity with all humans, a pan-humanity.