THE BULLSEYE AND THE BIRD’S EYE By Angeline Boulley (Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians)

Dear Reader,

Identity is a familiar theme in my writing. My stories focus on Native teens claiming their identities and finding their places in the world, while also solving mysteries and falling in love. When I was growing up, my Ojibwe identity was challenged rather than validated. It messed with my sense of worth well into adulthood.

I used to visualize Native identity like an archery target—a series of concentric circles, with each ring symbolizing a definition of “being Native.” The largest ring had the most inclusive definition and held everyone who claimed Native heritage. Inside that was a slightly smaller ring filled with those who knew which tribal Nation they were descended from; i.e., they claimed a connection to a specific Native Nation. Nested within that was a smaller ring for those whose specific tribe or band also claimed them as an enrolled member. The smaller the ring, the more narrow the definition of Native identity. The bullseye in the center, therefore, had the most exclusive definition. I believed there were Native people, a small group of fortunate individuals, whose identity was universally accepted by everyone. I also realized that there was a difference between where I might place myself within the archery target and where others would fix my position.

It’s no surprise that Daunis, the protagonist in my debut novel, Firekeeper’s Daughter, would share these same struggles. She and I are both light-skinned Ojibwe women with a Native dad, a non-Native mom, and a maternal grandmother who did not care at all for Native Americans. We both experienced white peers asking, What are you? White adults phrased the identity question as, Where does your family come from? My response was met with a version of, Really? You don’t look Native. Most white people saw Native identity as a binary—either you were Native or you weren’t—and their definition of “Native” was limited to uninformed stereotypes. Since I didn’t look like the Indian maiden on the Land O’Lakes butter package, my claim of being Ojibwe did not compute. The interaction was often followed by, Yeah, but at least you’re not like those other Indians. This was intended as a compliment to me, that I didn’t fit the negative image they had about Native Americans.

Early on, Daunis and I learned that others saw us differently than we saw ourselves. In chapter 1, Daunis shares a memory illustrating the push and pull of her Anishinaabe (Native) and Zhaaganaash (non-Native) grandmothers on her identity:

When I was seven, I spent a weekend at Gramma Pearl’s tar-paper house on Sugar Island. I woke up crying with an earache, but the ferry to the mainland had shut down for the night. She had me pee in a cup, and poured it into my ear as I rested my head in her lap. Back home for Sunday dinner at GrandMary and Grandpa Lorenzo’s, I excitedly shared how smart my other grandmother was. Gramma Pearl fixed my earache with my pee! GrandMary recoiled and, a heartbeat later, glared at my mother as if this was her fault. Something split inside me when I saw my mother’s embarrassment. I learned there were times when I was expected to be a Fontaine and other times when it was safe to be a Firekeeper.

This cornerstone moment changes how Daunis views herself. She will spend the rest of her childhood and adolescence amplifying or de-emphasizing aspects of her identity to blend more successfully with whichever side of the family she is with. In fact, Daunis will become so adept at this code switching that she will create different behaviors or rules for other aspects of her identity, such as Hockey World and Science World. Her self-construct is a mercurial target, the bullseye constantly shifting in response to the people around her.

My own cornerstone moment also involved a maternal grandmother. Grandma Bea was proud of her English and Norwegian heritage. She told me it was a good thing that I had inherited my skin color from her side of the family, otherwise I might have been as dark as my father. I was puzzled by the remark. My dad was my hero—a well-read, kind, muscular man, with russet-brown skin showing barely visible tattoos from his Navy days. My ivory skin was a lucky break, according to Grandma Bea, and I had better avoid the sun. She wasn’t concerned about wrinkles or skin cancer, just the melanin-triggered prejudices she espoused. To my grandmother, Native identity was defined by skin color.

In college, I learned that Native identity was defined by where I lived. There was a local Native tribe a mere three miles from the university I attended. (It may as well have been three hundred miles away, for the lack of Native students on campus.) I was asked to serve on a diversity committee within the School of Education. Since I was the president of the American Indian Student Organization on campus, it wasn’t an unusual request. What was out of the ordinary was when the committee chairperson, a faculty member who was non-Native, asked me to recommend a different individual to represent the Native student body, preferably a male (to help balance out the primarily female committee) and someone from the nearby reservation. The implication was clear: I wasn’t Native enough because I wasn’t from the local tribal community. I felt embarrassed about being asked to find a replacement. It didn’t matter that there were eleven other Native tribes in Michigan, including mine. Nor did it matter that the vast majority of Native Americans do not grow up on reservations. To the diversity committee chair, the bullseye of the identity target was filled with Native Americans from the local community. The rest of us landed in one of the outer rings of the target. (By the way, I was invited back when the young man I recommended was a no-show for the committee meetings. I declined.)

After graduating from college, I was hired by the local Indian tribe, and I learned that Native identity—to some—was defined by Indian blood quantum, or IBQ. There are 574 federally recognized Indian tribes, each with the sovereign right to determine the eligibility requirements for citizenship. The majority of federally recognized tribes include an IBQ requirement. The most common minimum requirement is 1/4 IBQ, which means that one of your four grandparents must be traced to the official tribal rolls or historical documents listing those who were part of the distinct Native community. To those who cling to IBQ, the identity target has a bullseye labeled “full bloods,” and each circle rippling outward has a decreasing IBQ minimum: 3/4, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8. My own tribe uses lineal descendancy rather than a minimum IBQ. This means children are enrolled because their family tree connects them to ancestors on the tribal rolls, regardless of how many generations between the child and the ancestor.

My job with the local tribe was to be an advocate for the Native students attending the public middle school. I was to help those students who, as enrolled tribal members, were eligible for the advocacy services. There were students, however, who were not eligible but still considered themselves Native. I helped them regardless, because I already knew from personal experience that enrollment and eligibility for services was a complicated matter.

Although my tribe did not calculate IBQ for enrollment purposes, they still included the documentation for other purposes. For example, there were scholarships and, in Michigan, a tuition waiver that did require a minimum Indian blood quantum. My own IBQ, unofficially, was 1/2 because two of my four biological grandparents are Native. But my father was born at home on Sugar Island and didn’t have a birth certificate until he wanted to join the Navy. His biological father, who was also Ojibwe, wasn’t listed on his birth certificate for unspecified reasons. The result is that my dad’s IBQ is calculated only from his mother’s side. Officially, I am listed as 1/4 IBQ. I know from my family history that IBQ can differ significantly from what is “official” or documented and what is “unofficial” or the real story. Because of my personal experience, I was determined to help all Native kids as their designated Student Advocate. I never wanted to invalidate a Native student’s identity by gatekeeping services from them. I decided that my career in Indian education would be spent increasing access and services. My true purpose was to support Native children and teens as they formed their own self-construct.

There are some Native people with a negative, even hostile, opinion of lineal descendancy tribes such as mine. I have worked for other tribes whose community members did not think highly of my tribe, which is the largest federally recognized tribe east of the Mississippi River. My individual IBQ meant nothing to the disgruntled co-worker who once told me to go work for my own “washed-out” tribe. An Indian Health Service (IHS) worker at another tribe’s clinic once complained about having to provide health care services to my tribe’s “barely Native” members when their own tribe’s descendants, unenrolled children or grandchildren, were not eligible to receive care. Even friends from these other tribes would joke about me being “the best of the worst” tribe. This lateral targeting, the arrows aimed at Native people by other Native people, is a survival response rooted in a zero-sum equation where one tribe’s share of federal resources can grow only at the expense of another tribe. (Let me digress for a moment: pitting tribes against one another, whether over federal funding, IBQ, or other Native identity issues, is a classic “divide and conquer” tactic.)

When I ran for election to serve on my tribe’s Board of Directors, I learned that Native identity wasn’t a matter of simple geography, a contradiction to what I’d experienced in college. After various jobs, I decided I wanted to work for my tribal community. It was important to me to raise my children among cousins and for them to attend the variety of cultural activities sponsored by our tribe. After more than a decade living and working in Sault Ste. Marie, I was local, no longer a newcomer. I met the residency requirement to run for elected office in the tribal district where I lived. I was confident in my chances… and was devastated when I didn’t win. A few cousins who don’t sugarcoat their opinions said I was from the side of the family that had “left the Rez when times were bad.” See, my dad had left the area as a young man. He met and married my mother during his Navy years, and they raised us in a small town at the opposite end of the state. Although we frequently made the seven-hour drive back north for weddings, funerals, and powwows and spent time each summer visiting my grandparents and cousins, some family members would always see me as an outsider. They had created an even smaller, more exclusive circle within the Native identity bullseye of locals who lived within the reservation borders: the ones who stayed.

Losing hurt, and it was yet another experience that made me question my identity, one that I drew from in creating Daunis’s character in Firekeeper’s Daughter. In the story, her beloved Nish kwe role model Aunt Teddie makes a comment that reminds Daunis of her outsider status. Auntie later apologizes for the words that Daunis internalized as, You’re not really one of us. When an “othering” remark comes from someone you admire, it is an arrow directly to the heart. I know my cousins weren’t trying to be malicious when they told me why I hadn’t won the election. I was a grown woman with children. And still, because I’d devoted my adult life to serving and uplifting Native people, because I’d spent the last decade working for my tribal community, I thought, Maybe now they will see me as one of them, an equal, a true Nish kwe.

It was around this time that I started to write Firekeeper’s Daughter. I knew I wanted to tell the kind of story that I’d loved when I was young, ones with action and mystery and a strong, intelligent heroine. I also knew I needed to make identity a central part of the narrative. Daunis’s Native identity is further complicated by the decision her maternal grandparents made to keep her Native father’s name off her birth certificate. She yearns to be an enrolled citizen; however, she is unable to provide the required documentation connecting her to her (now-deceased) father.

Unlike Daunis, I’ve been an enrolled tribal citizen since childhood. My tribal card, issued from my tribe’s enrollment office, includes my photo identification, an individual citizenship number, and a file number that identifies which branch of the tribal family tree I descend from. This card qualifies me to vote in tribal elections, sell artwork as an authentic Native American, possess eagle feathers, and get a discount on gasoline purchased at our tribal gas stations. If I apply for a job with my tribe or with certain federal agencies that serve Native communities, my card provides documentation of my eligibility for Indian preference policies in hiring.

My laminated tribal ID card is not a shield. It offers little to no protection from the fluid bullseye of Native identity. There will always be someone telling me—or otherwise conveying—which circle they see me in.

About halfway through Firekeeper’s Daughter, Daunis is able to apply for tribal citizenship when the Tribal Council passes a law that allows for other forms of documentation in lieu of a birth certificate. After a moment of joyous shock, she thinks to herself:

I have wanted this ever since I understood that being Anishinaabe and being an enrolled citizen weren’t necessarily the same thing. […] I can become a member. Except… it changes nothing about me.

I am Anishinaabe. Since my first breath. Even before, when my new spirit traveled here. I will be Anishinaabe even when my heart stops beating and I journey to the next world.

When I typed the declaration, I remember feeling a calm acceptance of its truth. My self-concept had, at last, caught up with what my spirit has always known. Native identity has a myriad of external definitions that I cannot control. Self-concept, however, is entirely internal. For much of my life, I looked outward in an effort to understand who I was. My self-concept is not bestowed by others—it is claimed and controlled solely by me. I am Anishinaabe—not fractions of an identity, but the whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Daunis’s story is my story, except she defined her self-concept at age nineteen. I didn’t claim my self-concept until I was in my mid-forties. Once I did, I felt an inner peace that was both comforting and exciting, both powerful and humbling. In writing her story and revealing parts of my own, I hope for readers to feel less alone and more connected.

I challenge you to rethink the Native identity bullseye. Instead of visualizing concentric circles intended to define and exclude, look at it from high above. To me, it resembles a bird’s-eye view of our powwow grounds. At the center, the core of my spirit, is the drum that symbolizes a heartbeat—mine and that of Mother Earth. Each beat reverberates through the ground. When I dance around the drum, I feel it in the moccasins my dad made for me. At Grand Entry, the line of dancers circles the arena before wrapping around and continuing until everyone is present. The spiraling circles that flow from the center are filled with my family—those who came before me, those with me in this world, and those yet to arrive. And just like ripples in a pond, the connections emanate to reach others. I move through this life as the self I claim, and as part of something larger than my individual self. My self-concept is the shield that protects who I am at my core being.

Dearest reader, as you claim your self-concept, always remember that your worth is inherent and infinite.

Cheering you on,

Angeline

Excerpted passages from Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley, published 2021 by Henry Holt Books for Young Readers