indige•zine 'issue #2: healing'

“What race do people think you are?” my cousins and I would tease one another. Some were paler than me, some more olive. Puerto Rican, White, East or West Indian. We got it all -- anything but Native. All of us were hardwired to accept these prescribed identities as normal.

Check the box that describes your background. Even the college application prescribes me an identity: American Indian.

Until I went off to college, it had never occurred to me to ponder what it was that lumped together and renamed our many evolved indigenous communities with the watered-down title of “Native American/ American Indian.” But whatever this ideology was, it had also simultaneously caused people of our newly prescribed race to reject one another. In anthropology class, I learned that this blatant attempt at the divide and conquer of my indigenous roots and the ease to claim my own identity was called whiteness.

Whiteness dictates how I am expected to identify myself because it is the ideal measurement on which America was built. Whiteness is the normative default that reinforces those who have it, like Brawny-Boy with a sense of entitlement while alienating those who do not. If history permitted Whites to be deconstructed into a separate inferior race known as White Trash and the globally rejected Jewish community to become normalized as White, then American Indians embodies both. Whitemixed Natives are the normalized exception to the government-instigated stereotype of full-blood American Indian; while black-mixed Natives are demoralized as inferior and labeled as imposters unworthy of inclusion.

28