Such a silly damn insult. I was an Indian being racially insulted by other Indians. I was being called white by Indians who had a white mother or father. I was being called white by Indian kids who’d known me since our births. Many of us had played together as babies in cribs. So they were racially insulting me for the whiteness they knew I didn’t possess. Well, my maternal grandfather was partly descended from a Scottish traveler, but he died years before I was born. Some of my uncles, aunts, and cousins had married white folks and had biracial kids, but every one of my living blood relatives was an official member of one tribe or another. A few of my cousins were distant urban Indians. That didn’t make them any less Indian. It just meant they weren’t reservation Indians. But I was the child of two reservation Indians who were the children of reservation Indians who were the children of reservation Indians. It was ridiculous and maddening to be called white by Indians who were less Indian than me.
As an adult, I can now intellectually understand why they called me white. In the Indian world, “white” is our enemy. “White” is the conqueror. “White” is the liar, killer, and rapist. So, if one Indian wants to inflict a grievous emotional wound on another Indian, then “white” is the Big Fucking Gun of insults. The bullies wanted to hurt me as much as possible. So, despite the fact that I was culturally, economically, politically, racially, and geographically a full member of the tribe—as much a Spokane Indian as any other Spokane—I was called white, not because I was white, but because I was the frail kid. I was the easiest target. In the Land of Others, I was the Otherest. These days, you can go online and read other indigenous people’s scholarly and less-than-scholarly reviews of my books, and you’ll discover that some of those assholes overtly and subtly accuse me of whiteness. And, sure, it hurts my feelings. It definitely gives me PTSD flashbacks to childhood shame. But it also makes me shrug, sigh, and laugh. I used to be bullied because I was the Indian with the least social power. Now, I’m sometimes bullied because I’m one of the Indians with the most social power. So, yeah, when another Indian, especially one of the smart ones chasing that completely nonassimilative prize known as academic tenure, accuses me of whiteness, I think, “Different bully; same bullying.” And, sometimes, when I’m being the best version of myself, I will remember that bullies are created—that bullies seek to torture because they’ve been tortured. When other Indians—friends, acquaintances, or strangers—talk shit about me, I try to remember they are acting out of their own weakness, their own crisis of self-identity, their own pain and fear and paranoia. I try to instantly forgive them.
I try. I try. I try.
But my adult understanding of this indigenous cultural cruelty does nothing to help the bullied rez kid I was. My intellectualism, empathy, and self-empathy cannot time-travel.
“Junior High Honky, Junior High Honky, Junior High Honky,” my bullies chanted at me.
They chanted, “You’re so ugly. Ugly. Ugly. Oh, uh-ha! Oh, uh-ha! You’re ugly!”
Not all of the Spokane Indian girls called me names. I distinctly remember the kindness of many girls. Those kind girls have grown into kind women. But there were three girls in particular who incessantly bullied me. And they happened to be beautiful and overwhelmingly popular. Shit, one of them owned her own snowmobile and a full-body snowsuit she could have worn to climb Mount Everest.
A snowmobile! A fucking snowmobile on the rez! I didn’t even have my own radio. I didn’t have a bicycle. I had to wear my only pair of shoes—tennis shoes bought in Kmart—during winter.
“But, Sherman,” my critics like to say. “Not all Indians are poor on the reservation.”
So, yes, yes, yes, I agree, there were a few rich Indians, relatively speaking, who lived on my reservation. There were also a few middle-class Indians living on my rez. And nearly all of those rich and middle-class Indians were dickheads. There was income inequality on my rez. There was a 99 percent and a 1 percent. There was social and political separation based on economic and cultural class. I can’t imagine how those class differences play out now within tribes that have serious casino money. Or maybe I can imagine it. There are plenty of tribes disenrolling their members—legally destroying their tribal identities—exiling them. I think of those wildly successful casino tribes, and I wonder if their reservations have come to resemble and mimic the inequities of the United States itself. Doesn’t an Indian tribe finally surrender to colonization by becoming as capitalistic as our conquerors? Isn’t indigenous economic sovereignty one of the sneakiest damn oxymorons of all time?
I was a poor rez boy, and from the spring of 1978 through the fall of 1979, I was intensely belittled by three Indians who had some family money—whose parents had and kept jobs. My father died at age sixty-four without ever having had a checking account in his name. So, yes, I was a poor kid and those three rich Indian girls bullied and brainwashed me. They called me ugly with such cruel and constant precision that I came to fully believe that I was ugly. I looked in the mirror and said, “You’re ugly, ugly, ugly.” I often look in the mirror now and say, “You’re ugly, ugly, ugly.”
That same fall, during the first few days of seventh grade, I opened my math book and saw my mother’s maiden name written on the inside cover. I cursed at the obvious injustice. They had handed me that ancient math book because I was an Indian kid and because I was a reservation kid and because I was a small-town kid and because I was poor and because I was a poor reservation Indian from a small town in a small state in a region of the country where almost every kid, no matter their race, is treated like shit by the rich and powerful. I was enraged at the racism and classism. I felt doomed. I felt like all my classmates, my fellow tribal members, were also doomed. In real life, I stood and threw that thirty-year-old math book across the room and impaled it three inches deep into the wall. In the fictional version of that incident, as detailed in my novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, my autobiographical avatar throws that math book across the room and breaks the teacher’s nose. The fictional version is much more satisfying.
My childhood dream had been to become a pediatrician, like all of the doctors who had treated me so well during my sickly childhood, but the reservation school was so shitty at that point—so devoid of advanced math and science curricula—that I might as well have been dreaming of becoming bulletproof, invisible, and ten feet tall.
When I got home from school that day, after being suspended for three days for throwing that old math book into the wall, I asked my mother and father if I could leave the reservation school and go somewhere different, somewhere better.
My father had gone, on purpose, to Immaculate Heart of Mary Academy, a Catholic school in Coeur d’Alene, where he and his sister were the only Indians. So I don’t think it was a shocking idea to him that I might want to see more of the world. He’d been in the army. He’d traveled on all-Indian basketball teams through Canada, Montana, the Dakotas, Idaho, Oregon, and Northern California. When he was drunk, he often bragged that he used to have a Japanese girlfriend who lived in San Francisco. He’d written the first thirty pages of an “autobiographical” novel about his love affair with her. I doubt she was real, but he’d wanted her to be real. My father’s lifelong dream had been to live in Phoenix, Arizona.
He said, “I want to live in a place where it never gets cold.”