In being friends with white people, I’ve always had to live entirely inside their circle of experience—inside their white world. And my white friends have rarely, if ever, spent even a moment in my indigenous world. This inequality in my friendships has a lot to do with my own introverted nature; I am far more emotionally available when performing onstage and in the books I write than I am in person. But it happens mostly because “being American” means “being white,” even for a brown boy like me.
So, at Reardan High School, I was successful and acceptable and loved because I was—and still am—great at negotiating with whiteness. But that means my white friends often mistakenly believe that my ability to successfully negotiate the white world means that I am white—or more white than Native. My white friends can mistakenly believe that my intellectual and artistic abilities are intrinsically white. And, yes, I am heavily influenced by Whitman, Dickinson, Springsteen, Hank Williams, and Dusty Springfield—and owe them and many other white and non-Native artists and intellectuals a huge debt—but I am also very much a product of my ancient tribal culture. I am the genetic, artistic, and political descendant of my mother and father, and grandmother, and thousands of years of salmon-fishing ancestors.
But here I must also indict the strange anti-Indian racism of many Native Americans who have, over my nearly-twenty-five-year literary career, sought to discount, discredit, and demolish me as a writer and as an indigenous person. These are the Natives who, like white racists, mistakenly attribute my success to my perceived whiteness. These are the Natives who cannot believe that a reservation-raised boy could ever become the man I am.
A few years into my career, and in the early, less universal age of the Internet, a rumor started that I wasn’t a real Indian—that I was actually adopted and raised by a white family. Of course, that falsehood was primarily a grievous insult to those indigenous people, like one of my first cousins, who were taken from their birth families and given to white folks—an act of bureaucratic genocide so commonplace that the U.S. government needed to pass the Indian Child Welfare Act in order to stop the practice. But this mythology about white parentage was told about me, a Native man who grew up with two Native parents on his tribe’s reservation in a government-built house located across the street from the tribal school. If my wholly indigenous identity can be viewed with suspicion—in the past, present, and future—then I sigh and grieve at the heinous shit that other Natives endure because they have a white parent or grew up in the city or fail to meet some other imaginary standard of Indianness.
And I laugh when I think about my wife, Diane, a Hidatsa/Ho-Chunk/Potawatomi, who called her sister after our first date and said, “He’s way young and way rez.”
And I think of the continent-sized leap I took in my early teens when I left the reservation school to attend Reardan.
I was a courageous explorer, scholarly adventurist, and terrified child. And none of you, Native or not, would have ever heard of me if I had not taken that first step onto the moon. I have been harshly judged by other Natives who were either too scared to take that step or who somehow think their first step was more pure—more Indian—than mine.
What does it feel like to experience such hypocritical anger from other Natives? Well, if dealing with white anti-Indian racists is like soft-shoeing through a minefield, then facing anti-Indian Indians is like dodging bullets from camouflaged snipers, sneaky and deadly.
But very few of even the most cruel Indians voted for Trump. So I must recall the ways in which my race, and my indigenous identity, did become problematic when I attended Reardan High School and spent five years in Trump Country.
I remember how my parliamentary-procedure-team coach and teammates sometimes called me Chief Gayfeather. And, yes, that’s an obviously racist and homophobic insult, but it was also, impossibly enough, an affectionate acknowledgment and gentle mocking of my Native American identity and highly emotive personality. In high school, as now, I cried more easily than most people. I wrote poems and stories. I constantly expressed my love for people, places, and things. I was affectionate. So, when viewed through the hypermasculine lens of white small-town America, my emotional vulnerability was sometimes perceived as being stereotypically homosexual. One would think that an androgynous Indian boy would be tortured in a farm-town high school, but I was the androgynous and popular Indian boy who led that debate team to a state championship and made out with two of my female teammates, separately, while on road trips to debate meets. I would love to say I also made out with one of my male teammates, because it would make for a more dynamic story, but alas, I’ve always been approximately 84 percent straight.
Chief Gayfeather! I’m sure that shit would get students suspended and teachers fired in Reardan today. But it was acceptable in the 1980s. In some sad-ass spasm of self-denigration and self-preservation, I accepted that shit, too.
I also remember a basketball game we played against Freeman High School where I recognized one of the refs as we did warm-up drills. He had been, for years, notoriously and obviously biased against reservation-high-school teams. And though I was the only Native on my team and my parents were the only Native fans sitting in the bleachers, I knew that ref would still practice his official form of anti-Indian racism on me.
So I told my coach, a white man, of my suspicions about that racist ref.
I don’t think my coach believed me. But that ref called a foul on me during the opening jump ball, then called two more fouls on me in the next two minutes, and then called the fourth and fifth fouls on me. The Freeman coach had understood what was happening and had ordered his players to purposely run into me and flop like soccer players.
I was sitting on the bench, disqualified by fouls, before the fourth quarter.
After the game, which my team won without me, my coach pulled me aside in the locker room and said he was sorry about what happened.
He didn’t directly call it racism. But he tacitly acknowledged it.
I also remember a Future Farmers of America extemporaneous speech contest where three judges ruled that I’d either won first or second place while the fourth judge put me in sixth and last place. Her strange decision, and low score, meant I finished in third place and missed out on a trip to the state finals, because only the top two finishers moved on.
Afterward, we looked at her scorecard and saw that she’d deducted points for my “long hair” and “distracting foreign accent.” Well, my hair was not quite as short as my competitors’ crew cuts, but my singsong speaking voice could only be considered foreign if one thinks the Spokane Indian Reservation is an international destination.