I’m a city boy. I grew up in a city, yes there were trees around and areas you could honestly get lost, but I am a the cliché city slicker.
When I was young, around six or seven, I used to imagine the Indians living on the Duluth hillside. I didn’t know then that I had some Red Lake Indian blood in my veins, and I wouldn’t have believed anyone who told me otherwise. I was as white as white gets, and I grew up on a steady diet of television and imagination. In that imagination, I came in on a wagon to live at the new port growing at the nose of Lake Superior, or I came through on a canoe with the French traders, I never was here to begin with.
My perspective on some of this stuff is naive, really, but when I told (with proof) at age twelve that I have somewhere between twenty-five to fifty percent Ojibwe in me I got all gung ho on it. There was no one more Indian than me.
It took me a couple of years to cool down, hearing from white people that I wasn’t Indian because I am too pale, and hearing from Indians that I should keep my pale ass outta their business. That I shouldn’t steal their culture as their own.
Over time I got to the point where I really don’t care about other’s opinions very much anymore. Some twinges occasionally, but really not too much.
I want to emulate the best of the Ojibwe, and to me that has always been the elder. The elder is there to help the young with their experience and wisdom.
So when I hear a story about the Lakota “ceding from the Union” I have to think about it. Almost a bit like mental indigestion. Firstly because of the incorrectness of implying they joined the Union instead of being conquered. Secondly the lack of big media coverage. Thirdly, who is defined by the phrase “the Lakota?”
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