IN
DIGENOUS ICCSD
With Thanksgiving day right around the corner, Indigenous voices share how they feel their culture is represented in the ICCSD and Iowa City community. BY KAILEY GEE, HANAH KITAMOTO & ROSEMARY TIMMER-HACKERT DESIGN BY ELLA ROSENTHAL
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or centuries, Indigenous peoples in America have been ignored or silenced, from having land stolen to their culture continuously appropriated. The state of Iowa was named after an Indigenous tribe Bah Koh-Je, whom the Europeans called the Ioway. For the small community of Indigenous students in the ICCSD, this is just one example of their culture being misrepresented.
INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE
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laudé Clark ’22 is part of the Mayan tribe, which originated in Central America. According to the Iowa Department of Education, he’s part of the 0.003% of students in the district that identified as Indigenous in 2019. Because of this, Clark feels it can be difficult for Indigenous students to make friends with similar experiences or to form a community. “Growing up, it was really lonely. First, I lived in a white town, so that didn't help. Now that I moved to Iowa City, it's a lot better. I have some friends who are Latino, but that's different from being Indigenous. It is a different culture,” Clark said. “I still am looking for my place to click in,
and it feels like I haven't really clicked into a place yet where I can truly call home.” Clark was adopted by a white family and lived in Illinois for much of his childhood before moving to the ICCSD. While he believes that his race didn’t have an effect on how other people treated him, it did affect his perception of himself. “I would get a lot of compliments about my skin … but I guess for me it was difficult to accept because I didn’t want that. I just want[ed] to look like everybody else because no one … around me looked like me,” Clark said. Without knowing anyone from his culture or of Indigenous descent, Clark has had to learn about his culture by himself using resources he finds on the internet. Growing up with Indigenous parents, Loren Wolf ’23 has had a different experience. He stays connected to his Indigenous roots by practicing the cultures of the tribes he descended from. To do this, he is learning the Navajo language from his mother’s side of the family and takes part in many traditions of the Meskwaki at the reservation in Tama, Iowa, where his father lives. “My dad started putting me in something
called a powwow, which is basically just honoring the relatives by doing specific dances ... I used to do those a lot [before the pandemic],” Wolf said. According to Clark, being able to partake in these kinds of experiences can be important and empowering for people of Indigenous descent. “The Meskwaki nation is [called] the Sac and Fox tribe of the Mississippi in Iowa … They have their own reservation, and they have their own community,” Clark said. “I really want to go down there and … experience what it’s like to be Native American, even if they’re not exactly my tribe.” While Clark values cultural experiences, he thinks it is important that representation comes with the right intentions. He believes there is a fine line between cultural appreciation and appropriation, with one commonly appropriated term being “two-spirit.” The term signifies a member of a tribe who identifies as neither a man nor a woman and has many unique roles in the group. However, some non-Indigenous members of the LGBTQ+ community have begun using the term to describe