BEING INDIAN By Kimberly Guerrero (Colville, Salish-Kootenai)

It’s 1971. I’m four years old and I’ve got dreams. Big dreams. I want to sail around the world as Jacques Cousteau’s assistant, give birth to at least two litters of kittens, and join the Jackson Five. But my biggest dream, the one that burns deepest in my bones fueling my wildly overactive imagination, is this: I want to be Indian. I want the horses and teepees, the songs and dances, the laughter and stories. I wanna live life on the move, going on adventures with my family and friends, being in nature all day, every day—all while wearing buckskin leggings and moccasins, a war shirt, and a feather in my hair.

I learn about Indians every chance I get. My mom gets me these picture books from the Stuckey’s rest stop that show all the different tribes across America. I memorize which books on the encyclopedia shelf at the top of the stairs have pictures of Indians. I glue myself to the television looking for shows with Indians. Real Indians, I mean. I don’t for one second buy that the bad guys on horses with their goofy face paint, bad wigs, and crayon-colored feathers are Indians. Nope. Especially not the cartoon one who hunts Bugs Bunny. One day, I’m eating cereal sprawled out in front of the tube when The Brady Bunch comes on. The Bradys are visiting the Grand Canyon when Bobby and Cindy spot an Indian boy, Jimmy, and get lost in the canyon trying to find him. I’m out-of-my-gourd excited until I discover that Jimmy has run away from home because he wants to be an astronaut and is afraid that his grandfather, who practices the old ways, won’t let him. I wanna jump through the screen, shake the kid by the shoulders, and scream, “Jimmy, what are you thinking?! Your grandfather will understand—he’s an Indian Chief for crying out loud! GO. HOME.”

Then one afternoon, my mom and dad ask me to come upstairs with them to my bedroom. Crap. I scramble, thinking of all the things I know I’ve done wrong or may have done wrong in the past couple of weeks. Whatever it is it must be bad because my dad, who’s normally a Chatty Cathy, gets suspiciously quiet and all red in the face—like he’s holding in a mountain of toots. My mom sits me down on my bed and with the precision of a special ops bomb disposal specialist drops this piece of life-altering news:

I am adopted.

Time freezes. The beat of my heart takes on this slow, deafening BOOM-BOOM. BOOM-BOOM. The inner dialogue that ceaselessly rages between my ears gets really small and quiet and goes something like this: I mean, yeah. Okay. I do look totally different than them. When we go to the lake, they come back red, I come back brown. We don’t really seem to be into the same things—they don’t like nature as much as I do and don’t seem able to talk to animals or trees like I can. And whenever I watch that singing game on Sesame Street—“One of these things is not like the others, one of these things doesn’t belong”—I feel like vomiting. Right. I’m adopted. CRAP! If these people got me, that means they can give me back! I’m not sure where back is, but I damn sure know it’s not good. But then… I’m not good. I know what I am; deep down I’ve always known: a mistake. Some sub-human species that has slithered out of a hellhole and is faking my way through. I don’t belong.

Just as I feel myself surrendering to what I can only hope is a merciful bout of spontaneous sub-human combustion, my mom brings out this thick orange book. On the front cover of this book is a drawing of horses, teepees… and Indians. She carefully opens it, points to an old black-and-white photograph, and says, “See him? That is your great-grandfather.”

People… it is an Indian Chief. An Indian Chief sitting on a horse wearing this epic for-real feather headdress and exuding a degree of badassery that quite frankly scares the bejesus out of me. Mom then turns the page to show me a picture of a beautiful, familiarly chubby-cheeked girl in a buckskin dress. “And this is your great-grandmother.” She reads me what’s written below the photo. The girl is married to my great-grandfather, and it says that she herself is a descendant of a Chief named Seattle.

Next thing I know, I’m sitting in the bathroom, all quiet and alone. I’ll think about the whole adoption thing later, but right now all I can do is stare at my face in the mirror. My Indian face. Dreaming about being Indian is one thing. But actually being Indian? What does that mean? What do you do when a dream this big comes true? It’ll take me a whole lifetime to fully answer that question, but even in that moment I know that being Indian, really being Indian, is something way bigger than horses and teepees and feathers in your hair.

Once this reality sets in, I begin seeing Indians everywhere. At church, we sit in front of Coach Kaniatobe and his family. His dad’s a big, gentle man who makes this incredible “stuff.” If you rub it on sprains, bruises, finger jams, and the like, I kid you not, you’re better the next day. Rumor has it that Mr. Kaniatobe makes it for the Dallas Cowboys. (One day, when I’m in college, I will sit in front of our star quarterback, who will go on to become the Dallas Cowboys’ star quarterback. I will turn around and tell him I’m from Oklahoma, too, and find out that Coach Kaniatobe was his high school coach!) On the pew in front of us sits my future softball coach, Miss Fuller, and her brother, Curtis. Next to them sits their sweet momma who grew up on a real live reservation in South Dakota. Even though she is missing the bottom half of one of her arms, she beads me the most beautiful hair ties and necklaces. There are also Indian kids on my (not adopted) brother’s little league team and Indian people who work at the bank and at the Piggy Wiggly and, eventually, I’ll start school and make all kinds of Indian friends. Some outgoing and goofy like me (my friend Vicky Billy and I are so much alike, people will mistake us for twins) and some shy and quiet like David Williston (our senior year of high school, I’ll ask David to be my escort on the Football Homecoming court and he’ll simply duck his head, smile, and nod). I realize pretty quickly that the whole horses and teepees thing—which, don’t get me wrong, is still crazy awesome—is just the tip of the iceberg.

A couple months after I learn that I’m Indian (and adopted, but honestly, I still don’t want to think about that), my mom drives me to a Choctaw camp up in the mountains where folks are learning to sing old songs and dance old dances they’ve just brought back from Mississippi. Even though the ladies invite my mom into the camp, she waits outside in the station wagon and reads a book. They take me into the circle, and I see more Indians gathered in one place than I have ever seen in my whole life. It’s incredibly cool, but I know I don’t fit in. I feel like a dirty turnip in a candy dish. Crap. Now that stupid Sesame Street song’s playing in my head. But the Indian people, they treat me just like I’m one of them! Which, technically speaking, I guess I am…? Even though it’s ungodly hot and buggy and I have to dance this one dance holding hands with this giant kid with sweaty palms, I cannot believe my luck—I am dancing real Indian dances with real Indians.

For weeks, we practice for the opening night of the very first Kiamichi Owa-Chito Festival up in our state park. It’s a big deal. All the campsites are full, and the park is crawling with people. But about a half hour before we’re supposed to dance, it starts clouding up. A giant bolt of lightning cracks open the sky, followed by this terrifying boom of thunder. Raindrops start hitting the ground like projectiles from heaven. I love thunderstorms, but this one isn’t like any I’ve ever seen. This storm is like a person. Like it’s shouting and crying and laughing all at the same time, trying to get our attention. It shakes the trees, the rocks, the river, and us as we stand there under an awning in our beautiful regalia. I feel a good cry coming on, sad that we all worked so hard and don’t get to show everyone the dances. But then, as I watch the storm rage on, something about not dancing feels right. Almost like the dances we were supposed to dance had already been danced. A little while later, we quietly pack up and drive home.

A few months later, on a bitterly cold, gray Sunday afternoon in December, my dad asks me if I want to drive out with him to Goodland. I’m not exactly sure what Goodland is, but as I am always up for a road trip, I jump in the front seat of the station wagon as Dad loads the back with boxes of Wranglers and winter coats from his dry goods store in town. I ask what we’re doing, and he says dropping off some stuff for Christmas. For who? I wonder.

After about an hour, we pull off the two-lane highway and drive into a little grass square surrounded by a handful of small, old buildings. We park in front of a simple wooden house, and I notice there are a few other houses around the square that look exactly like it, which for some reason makes me feel icky. No, more than icky. Scared. On the front porch of each house, kids are hanging out. The more I look at them, the more I realize that these kids look just like me. Older, but just like me. These kids are Indian. Dad asks me if I want to come in. I shake my head and slink down in the seat. I peek over the dashboard to watch them, their breath filling the cold air like smoke. Some look bored. Others are roughhousing—just kids being kids. But there’s something different about them. Something that makes my heart hurt. When Dad gets back in the station wagon, I ask him if these kids go to school here. He says, no, they live here. It’s an orphanage. My world stops. I can’t breathe. They’re orphans, I think. Like me. But not like me. As Dad drives away, I look back. I can’t stop looking. Part of me feels like I should make him stop the car and take me back to stay there with them. The other part of me is like, Are you crazy? Turn the heck around and keep your mouth shut. I turn around. On the long drive home, I feel an unbearable load of guilt piling onto the shame that already burns in the core of my being like a nuclear reactor. Those kids, the memory of them, will stay with me forever.

I have them with me that next summer when my mom, big brother, and I hop into a baby-blue conversion van with my antique-dealer grandparents and drive all the way from Oklahoma to an antique show in Seattle. After a visit to the top of the Space Needle, my mom walks me over to the statue of Chief Seattle and gives me—gives us—our space. I feel small and shy as I approach the still, bronze figure. I stand there studying his face, looking at his arm stretched out over my head. It feels like an invisible hand is squeezing my heart. In a whisper, and trying to do it without moving my lips so no one can see, I introduce myself. I tell him I have to talk to him. I have questions. A lot of them. About me. About the orphans. About what being Indian means. After a while, the constant chatter in my head stops, and I hear answers. A lot of them. Answers that not only help the shame and guilt feel a little less heavy; they also gift me with two other things—direction and purpose.

A few years later, I’ll trade in the dream of becoming a cat-bearing oceanographer/pop star for the dream of becoming an actress. I’ll eventually find out that the odds of pulling this off as a brown girl in Hollywood during those days are only slightly better than the odds of birthing kittens. I’ll head out to LA and attend a college so big that everyone in my entire hometown could fit into one section of our football stadium. A Kiowa-Delaware professor will take me under his wing and introduce me to Indians in LA, San Francisco, and New York. I’ll meet iconic activists, actors, singers, dancers, artists, writers, and Native folks from all walks of life—many of whom will become like family to me. My tribe.

Speaking of family and tribe, when I’m twenty I will find my biological family. I will watch my birth parents wrap my adopted parents in blankets, and we’ll all dance around the circle at Cherokee Holidays. And up on my grandfather’s reservation, he and my uncle will take me before our tribal council. Right before we go in, I’ll suffer a panic attack after convincing myself that the council is going to kick me out of the tribe. Instead, they will lovingly wrap me in a blanket and tell me that our people, like the salmon, always know how to find their way home.

Those answers I heard on that drizzly day in Seattle, whether real or imagined, will lead me to spend a large part of my life traveling to different tribal communities where I’ll make more friends-like-family, and my “tribe” will grow. I will pour my heart into Native kids from around the country, eventually helping them learn how to tell their own stories through filmmaking. Back in Hollywood, I’ll stay in the trenches alongside my storytelling tribe, fighting that exact same fight—to be able to tell our own stories in our own way. Years upon years will pass, and there will be times when I don’t think we’ll ever live to see the breakthrough.

But then, one day, things will change.

One day, I’ll even get to pull on a pair of fringed buckskin leggings, a war shirt, and the most beautiful pair of beaded moccasins—all of it made with love and care by Indian hands. I will sit on my horse with a feather in my hair surrounded by horses and teepees, songs and dances, laughter and stories, as I join my family and friends on a great adventure. A storytelling adventure. And even though cameras will be rolling, what we feel won’t start with the word “action” or end with the word “cut.” It will feel bigger than that. It will feel like an old wound healing. It will feel like an orphan finding home. It will feel like a sacred belonging. It will feel like being Indian.