The Indian in Me |

I’m going to tell you the story about how I came to love the Indian in me, and how I learned to embrace social justice. It’s gonna be a long one, so settle in, grab your snacks, and pee beforehand.

First, let me tell you a little more about myself. My name is Loralee, which rhymes with “orally,” and I’m an English major and an Education/Native Studies double minor from various parts of California. What I truly consider my home is my reservation, a small town called Big Pine located about an hour south of Mammoth Ski Resort near the Yosemite Forest. I lived there until I was about eight, and when I was eight, my mother, stepfather, brother, and I moved down to Costa Mesa, home of the Orange County Fair. Most of my family still lives in Big Pine. I’m the oldest of four children. I come from a low-income background. I’m not a first-generation college student, since my aunt graduated from UC Berkeley (awkward), my mom received her degree from Westwood College in 2014, and my grandmother attended UCLA for a couple of years in the seventies and graduated from ITT Tech in 2010. I’m a cisgender woman and use she/her/hers pronouns.

My racial identity, something I’ve struggled with for many years, is Native American; specifically, my tribe is the Big Pine Band of Owens Valley Paiute Shoshone Indians of the Big Pine Reservation. Genetically, I’m mixed; my father is white, and my mother is native. But since I don’t know my father and didn’t grow up with him or around his family, I don’t consider myself to be white, although with my light skin and green eyes, I certainly look the part. I grew up with my tribe, with Native values and Native culture and Native customs and Native identity. These align very similarly with other groups of color, which were abundant at my high school; although I was off-the-rez at the time, I found commonality among the high Hispanic and Asian populations that I was surrounded by. But white people, especially middle to upper class white people, are different; not a bad different, just a different that isn’t always compatible with who I am. I remember feeling uncomfortable or confined or awkward at dinner with white members of my family or with families of my white friends. A lot of my values and practices and habits just didn’t align with theirs, and as an other, I always felt like I had to hide who I was in order to fit into their idea of who I should be. I don’t think they expected me to do this, but I felt like I had to. It hurt me, it made me uncomfortable, but I had to because I didn’t want them to think less of me if I showed them the Indian in me. It wasn’t until I got to Stanford that I learned to embrace the Indian in me.

As I mentioned before, I’m an English major. I have always been a voracious reader and a passionate writer. As a child, I devoured everything from the Harry Potter series to my mom’s Stephen King collection and then some. I wrote stories about werewolves at summer camp, about nerdy girls who became prom queens, about giant sea crabs who sucked people into the sand at a deserted beach. I loved discussing Hamlet and writing fan-fiction, and read the whole of Tolstoy’s War and Peace by the time I was twelve. I loved English, and majoring in it at Stanford seemed like a no-brainer. But what I didn’t know was that this is a field that screams white, upper-class, high culture, and most of the time, the professors and the students embody those traits. During nearly every literature class I have taken here, I always felt inferior. The very thought of speaking up in section would send me into a panic attack, heart racing, breathing heavy, face hot and mind racing with the possibility of the TA calling on me- what would I say, oh everyone will think I’m an idiot because I don’t know what to say oh dear lord what am I going to do I can’t even remember the book everyone here is smarter than me better than me-continuing until the class was dismissed. At the beginning of my freshman year, it was difficult for me to even concentrate on the text at hand during these dreaded discussion sections, even if I loved it more than anything I had ever read before.

I would hear my fellow students say brilliant things about Chaucer and Milton with eloquence and clarity and really big buzzwords, listen to my professors make jokes about pre-Raphaelite art that would while everyone else would chortle around me. I became “that quiet girl with the glasses and the curly hair,” and professors would tell me not to be afraid to speak up just because I was younger than the rest of the class. But it was more than just being younger. I was different in ways that Stanford didn’t acknowledge or openly accept. And because I was so different, I construed the cultural differences between myself and all the other students as a mark of my stupidity and inferiority, and I didn’t have the confidence to even try to compete with the others who seemed so smart, so privileged, so blessed and easy and natural.

At the end of Fall Quarter of freshman year, I received an email through the Native Students mailing list about the NACC’s Frosh Fellows program, a two-quarter research commitment that came with support, mentorship, and, most important to my perpetually broke ass, a hefty stipend. I hadn’t been to NACC events that quarter because I was still very shy, and very nervous that my light skin and green eyes would brand me as an outsider to a community that I associated with the choke-cherry eyes and dark skin that my brothers and sister have. Despite these fears, I applied to the program and received the fellowship, and found myself immersed in engaging literary research and, most importantly, surrounded by indigenous students and staff who were kind, intelligent, and accepting.

I produced my final project about the similarities of the depictions of 1930s Indian reservation life between Ernest Hemingway’s “Indian Camp,” and a novel by a native author named D’Arcy McNickle called The Surrounded. I loved this project, and I loved this research. The Surrounded was the first work I had ever read by an indigenous author, and the experiences in the book, despite it being written over 80 years ago, mirrored my own in ways that people like Alfred Lord Tennyson and William Blake couldn’t. And I loved it.

Slowly but surely, I started to embrace the Indian in me. I started to visit the NACC more often. I started incorporating my Indian culture into my schoolwork whenever I possibly could, from PWR research to writing one of my Italian assignments on how to make Indian tacos. I decided to declare Native American Studies as another minor, and continued to do research into culturally relevant pedagogy and the decolonization of education systems. I decided that I want to help end educational disparities for Native American communities. I started to visit a Native American therapist at CAPS, and I meet with her weekly to discuss my identity issues and reaffirm my belonging at Stanford. I graduated the Leadership through Activism, Education, and Diversity (LEAD) program and have begun to immerse myself into the activism that means the most to me. Slowly, I found my place in this strange, new academic world. I wasn’t dumb just because I couldn’t understand Paradise Lost on the first read. I wasn’t dumb just because I couldn’t relate to the toils of white upper-class Victorian England. My intelligence lies elsewhere, and I know enough to get by with the white texts and to succeed in the brown ones. I have slowly become happier.

But with this increased acceptance of the Indian in me came an increased consciousness of the injustices that surround me.

I looked back on my own education and remembered all the rich Indian history that was ignored or Eurocentralized by my history teachers and by California state standards. I knew the date 1492, but I didn’t know the tribe of Tainos until I read Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (which I only read after my grandmother told me to). My little brother builds his replica of the San Antonio de Padua mission with no knowledge of what the mission system did to our people. And while I could love and understand people like Shakespeare and Wilde and Fitzgerald, there were instances where I couldn’t wrap my head around some subject matter, and I couldn’t possibly find meaning in something I didn’t understand. In my Poetry and Poetics class, we read the poetry of two (2) people of color, William Carlos Williams (who was half Puerto Rican) and Jean Toomer (who was black). I liked Williams, his poetry was simple and interesting and clear. We talked about him quite a bit. I loved Jean Toomer, who talked about inequality and hardship and work, but we never discussed him, in section or lecture. Yes, we did read two poets of color, and this may seem “diverse” in the eyes of some, but this is not proportional to the English literary tradition as a whole. Yes, the English literary tradition began in England, but through colonization and slavery and oppression, it has expanded to include more than just the rich white man. We missed out on so many differing worldviews and cultural questions and rich discussion. And I connected with and understood Toomer’s depictions of the toils of the working class marginalized significantly more than I did Thomas Gray’s ode to some school in England I have never seen and, most likely due to my perpetually broke ass, never will see. But I never even got a chance to write about him, or talk about him, or even think about him. I could have spoken up about it. I could have told my professor, “Hey, I don’t know what the hell this guy is talking about and I can’t possibly succeed in this class if I don’t get a chance to read and analyze something I actually can understand and prove to you that just because someone has a hard time analyzing cavalier poetry, it doesn’t mean that they’re terrible at analyzing every piece of poetry ever written,” but I was still scared and I was still imbued with the mindset that if I didn’t get Tennyson, I didn’t get the English literary tradition at all. I was also scared of how everyone else in that mostly white class would view me. Would I be construed as angry, irrational, lazy, or stupid for asking for more diversity in my education? Should I suck it up and try twice as hard as everyone else to comprehend Norton’s anthology? Why didn’t I deserve academic freedom? Why should I learn these ways when there are so many more cultural avenues to explore?

I didn’t understand why this happened, in Poetry and Poetics and in most of my other literature classes (with the exception of Paula Moya’s Narrative and Narrative Theory). I didn’t understand why people would possibly think that we need even more Westernization in our education systems. I didn’t understand how people could ignore educational disparities between students of color and white students. I didn’t understand how people could be against diversifying faculty, or studying outside of the Western canon, or incorporating cultural sensitivity and responsiveness into pedagogy. But then I recently read a great article that said that people who are accustomed to privilege can construe equality as oppression, and it all made sense.

The premise is this: say you walk to class every morning, and every morning you pass by a certain person on a very narrow sidewalk. Every day, this person moves out of your way. You’ve grown used to this person moving out of your way. In fact, you expect them to move out of your way. One day, however, this person decides not to move out of your way and asks you to move out of theirs. You become angry, shocked, offended; how dare they ask you to move so that they could pass?

I could translate this into my Poetry and Poetics experience. I read white poetry every day, and I struggled to understand it. I felt like if I asked my professor or my TA for more diverse poetry, they would become angry or offended or accuse me of not working hard enough. I’m sure they wouldn’t have done that if I asked, but I was still terrified. And situations like this one, both carried out to fruition and kept to oneself and everything in between, happen everyday with people of color, from the most mundane such as walking on a sidewalk to the most extreme such as issues of police brutality and the request for body cams.

Some who are privileged often choose to ignore these issues because they don’t have to deal with them on a day-to-day basis, but when they’re confronted with these issues, they can deny their existence. They become angry that others ask for the same treatment or benefits that they receive, because they feel that their rights are being infringed upon. If they’re confronted with or called out for engaging in problematic behavior, defense mechanisms kick into place and those who are calling out these inequities are painted as ridiculous, uneducated, cruel, or hypocritical. We see this when white men like Donald Trump are allowed to call all Mexicans rapists and drug dealers while #BlackLivesMatter activists are criticized for demanding an end to police brutality, because not all cops are bad. We see this when students of color, like those at Mizzou, engage in activism and demand an end to racist threats on their campuses and receive backlash, telling them that the action they’re engaging in is disruptive and unnecessary, and that they should get over it. And most recently, we’ve seen it here at Stanford, where Native American students are called mentally unstable and “morally dubious” for not wanting the name of a genocidal Catholic priest on their campus. Students of color and their allies, rebranded as the “Stanford activist community,” are accused of “witch-hunting” people who support a certain (very racist) initiative. If you’re not white, and you become angry at systemic racism and inequity, you’re accused of being unable to engage in “educated discussion and dialogue,” and everything you say outside of designated academic spaces is made into a political issue and used against the image of your community as a whole. This doesn’t happen, to the same extent, to white people. Free speech is stripped from us by those who claim to value it above all else. Students of color are branded as angry and irrational when they speak up, loudly and unapologetically, for their beliefs. That’s not okay.

And if that’s not enough, the genuine struggles and trauma of students of color are ridiculed with the camp that believes that our generation is too “coddled.” Because asking for equal rights and equal treatment and equal representation is a mark of weakness. Because becoming upset and outraged at racist jokes and sexist commentary is a sign of not being able to succeed in the real world. Yes, the real world sucks. But does it have to continue to suck? Why should we, people of color, be content with the rampage of police brutality that’s sweeping our nation? Why should I, as a Native American woman, see people defend the Arizona cop who shot a Navajo woman because she brandished a pair of scissors at him, and pretend like that’s not ridiculous? Why should I live in fear that my brothers, two brown little boys with dark hair and dark eyes, might encounter a police officer who would profile them, become threatened by them although they weigh no more than 100 pounds soaking wet, and do the same? Why should I, terrified after the Tamir Rice shooting, sit my brothers down and tell them to be careful around police officers, teaching them to be afraid of these people who are designed to protect us? Why should I be okay with my 11th grade history teacher talking about alcoholism in Native American populations like it was given fact for every single Indian, only to have everyone in my class look at me and laugh and tell me not to drink? Why should I be okay with the man who told me that it was good that I moved off-the-rez, because I got away from “all those drunk Indians”? Why should my Stanford acceptance, my full ride academic scholarship, be reduced to me being a poor Native American woman by my high school teachers, classmates, “friends,” peers? Why should I work three times harder than most of my white peers to even get to Stanford, and to continue to succeed at Stanford? And why should I be content that so many other people of color experience the exact same things and more?

To those who believe I should be content in the place I am and by the opportunities I have been given, I say this: I’m sorry that my disobedience and my words and my actions are disrupting your centuries-old model of white cisgender patriarchy. I’m sorry that my peers and I are so goddamn unapologetically excellent. I’m sorry that you lack empathy for the experiences and the lives of others. Your education needs to be changed so that you will finally be able to understand the world outside of your narrow-minded lens, and my education needs to be changed so that I finally learn things that are relevant to my life, to my experience, and to my culture. That’s not radical at all; we’ve been doing this for you for centuries.

I love the Indian in me, and I won’t hide it any longer. I don’t need you to embrace it right now.

But don’t worry, you will.