denying our native american ancestry

A number of my friends have said to me things like, 'but you must be three-quarters white.'  I'm sure they, like many native americans, feel that I'm striving to be a wannabe.  But that is not it.  It isn't just a matter of blood-quantum - that's an anglo idea, a governmental standard, anyway.  (The former native people adopted outsiders all the time, for one thing.)  Most significantly for me, the great gift in all of this is that I've discovered the culture I was raised in.  The subtext.  We had a veneer, a surface appearance of white culture we aspired to live up to and embody so that the appearance would be real.  But when it all came down, we banked on a set of values that had been handed down.  I need to embrace this heritage with awareness - that's all I'm saying.

Also, I feel it is important for all Americans, whatever their ethnicity, to acknowledge more all the many beneficial and fun and pervasive influences of native culture on America in general - the debt we 'Americans' owe to native americans, the First Peoples of the Americas.  Our mainstream culture and even the subcultures such as the one I come from tend to pigeonhole the native american history of our country as one of wild acting-out, alcoholism, crudity, violence and massacres, yet that all really happened with partners who were very much equal to the task, ie the invaders of the territory.  In reality, there was also a great deal of gentleness, sharing, interchange of culture and goods, and blood - depending on the part of the country - and let's acknowledge that.

I've been reading C.A. Weslager's book "The Delaware Indians."  In the first chapter, he makes it clear how far into disrepair the branches of our tribe had fallen.  A major study was done in 1907, and Weslager's book (written around 1970) quotes it frequently.  He frequently remarks that "Today, the Delawares and their tribal affiliates, the Munsies, are divided and scattered.  The white man's blood is in their veins; they speak his language and compete in his busy world." (p.8)  Probably even more significantly, he remarks that the sacred Big Houses, built in the new places to which the Delawares had been 'relocated', have all fallen into disuse and their logs hauled off to built farms back in the 1920's and 30's. 

Instead of following the ceremonial traditions of the Big Houses, Delaware/Lenape Indians at one point were practicing Peyotism.  Weslager writes, "This is one of the final stages of acculturation, a process by which native Indians who have lost, or are losing, their tribal distinctiveness, substitute nonspecific cultural elements in an almost futile struggle to keep Indianism alive.  The substitutions may be modifications of old customs; whereas others, like the powwow, may be peculiar to Pan-Indianism." (p.15)

This, I believe, was also behind my ancestors adopting Spanish and Moorish attributes - wearing bangles, carrying small scimitars or kohl cases, and so forth.  I really do believe, at this point, that my Indian ancestors adopted elements from these cultures because they were a part of our ancestry too, due to early 'marriages' circa 1500's and 1600's between members of these two groups (Lenape and other native people of the Chesapeake Bay area with Moors who were either Spanish seamen or pirates).  People of my mother's generation and since then have been too embarassed to want to admit pirate ancestry let alone native ancestry.  They may have felt it made them special, but they were hardly announcing it from the rooftops.  It was their 'secret,' and if at times they wanted to share it, they could easily be cowed by embarassment into silence.

When I read about how much the Delaware/Lenape people sort of turned against themselves, neglecting their own spiritual traditions, letting the Big Houses fall into ruin, letting the language die out (almost) and so forth, I keep thinking we need to claim our heritage proudly and attempt to keep it alive.  So what if it is embarassing that we look white, 100% European?  Yes, it's kind of embarassing to say, 'I'm part Native American' when everyone on all sides wants to ridicule or belittle you for it, and just keep you 'white.' 

It's not like we're making this claim in a void.  We have lived a life based in another culture.  A 'sub-culture' as one of my boyfriends informed me - "You were never a part of the mainstream culture."  I thought he just meant we were poor.  But now I finally get it, I get why I am the way I am, why I often disagreed with behaviors, ideas, and approaches that were supposed to belong to my 'race' or my culture.

You know, in a way, it's just like people say about Judaism - it isn't a race, it's a religion or at the very least, a culture.  Jews can be from all parts of the world, and look like they are from very different ethnicities, but they are all Jews because they share a religion and to a lesser extent a culture (there's more than one Jewish culture, so I've heard tell).  Well, it's like that in our case too.  Yes, we are very much mixed with white/European ancestry (or African in many cases as well), and we've grown up, not on reservations or in Indian Schools, but out there in the American world, but that doesn't change who are forbears are and what they passed on to us.  

We've been through a lot too - not the nightmare of reservation/Indian School native people - but the bad dream of ethnic hiding, lying, secrets, ridicule, denial of our identity or the reactions we got when we revealed the truth - I could tell you some stories about that - trying to act 'tough' because we were supposed to be 'wild Indians,' often spurning literacy if we thought that was the 'white man's' way.  On and on.   

Comments

[Carrie K]

It's never a good thing to pretend one part of life doesn't exist. It's fascinating to see what was considered taboo and why in the past. It seems so ridiculous. I wonder what the future will know about us that we don't?

[Kasturi]

an intriguing question, Carrie ~ thanks for your comment ~ K