PRIMITIVE By Vera Starbard (Tlingit, Dena’ina)

Primitive.

By nineteen, I already had a lifetime of holding back anger at all the slights and barbs and aggressions built up. And with one word, from one “well-meaning” workshop presenter, it found its inevitable release.

Primitive.

More than anger. In the last few years my carefully stuffed-down anger—the anger child therapists repeatedly told me to display despite not knowing its source—had grown to a pool of boiling fury.

You know, I think you’re the first Native person I’ve had in any of my AP classes.

I think Alaska Natives are the ugliest race. Oh, but not you!

Isn’t this apartment a bit south for a Native person? We don’t usually have Natives apply.

And one day, in my college sociology class where we were discussing the recent scourge of rapes and murders targeting Alaska Native women in Anchorage, the professor posed the question, Why is the public not outraged by this?

The breathtakingly quick response from the all-white-except-me class was united: We see Native women as less than human.

The coldness with which they agreed on and discussed this was at first jarring. But as I sat there, trying to hold back tears, their cold and scientific certainty about my perceived animality helped me keep them at bay. Keep that anger down. Don’t let them make you an angry stereotype on top of this.

Not that Tlingit women often defied that stereotype. Tlingit women of legend and Tlingit women of today are known among other Alaska Native groups as being ready to fight. Back in the day, the fights were literal life-and-death battles. Nowadays, the fights are with words, with laws, with activism—not life-and-death anymore. Or so I thought. And despite being a naturally “sensitive” kid (which translates in Tlingit as I was a big crybaby), I was raised to fight like a Tlingit woman. My mother may have sung my sister and me Tlingit lullabies, but she also taught us to speak up when we saw injustice. My grandmother may make a killer nagoon berry jelly, but she also modeled how to insert yourself at the table to fight for your literal land. When I think of “sister,” I think of mine physically inserting herself between myself and my abuser. When I think of “auntie,” I think of innumerable women and ancestors stepping in to give me cookies and lessons in equal supply. My stories growing up were of Fog Woman demanding respect, of Elizabeth Peratrovich schooling white senators on the Bill of Rights. I may have been born with no fight and little strength, but until I had to stand on my own, I had a lifetime of Tlingit women lending me theirs.

And so, less than a year after that stunning realization of how others perceived me as a human, I maybe should have been prepared for how they saw our artwork. But I wasn’t. I was listening to this white woman in an arts workshop describe Alaska Native art as she showed examples, including a totem pole carved by the Tlingit Master Artist I admired the most, Nathan Jackson.

The art may seem primitive, but I encourage you to check Alaska Native art out.

Primitive.

In the spectrum of racist actions and words I’d dealt with my whole life, up to and including physical threats, an offhand remark about our art would, on the outside, seem pretty mild. And yet here it was. As I sat there in that room of white people, listening to this well-meaning white woman, that word “primitive” jumped out and proved to be the drop of water to unleash a childhood of holding back anger and spill the whole, swirling pool. The fury built up over the years and the inevitable release.

Except it wasn’t fury that came out.

It was grief.

Unlike that day in sociology class, this time I let the tears fall. I couldn’t stop them as I walked out of the building, and I didn’t care who saw them. I just happened to pass by an older Tlingit woman, who had also spent her life around primarily white people on her own land. I didn’t know her well, but when she saw me, she must have recognized something of a need in me. I told her the simple fact of what was said, and she sighed with a familiar weariness.

Oh, Vera. They just don’t understand.

It didn’t make me feel better, but it did make me feel less crazy.

You see, it had never occurred to me in my nineteen years of life that Tlingit art was anything but brilliant. Formline paint and woven Chilkat designs and carved cedar stories adorn everything we do. I was raised to fight, but I was also raised in a culture that highly valued both its art and its artists. We don’t even have a word for “art.” There’s no separation between what the Western world calls “art” and the community’s economy, or politics, or identity, or spirituality. Art is not a separate thing, and it is not a frivolous thing. And it certainly had never occurred to me that anyone could look at the complexity and skill involved in our visual art as anything but that. It never occurred to me we could be seen as primitive.

Now is when someone who has been paying attention to, oh, everything ever created about Native people in popular culture would ask, Really? You really never saw Native people viewed as primitive? I suppose feeling a little dumb was also in the grief. But it was still grief, nearly overwhelming grief as this word finally put that puzzle together for me. Suddenly, years of confusing comments finally made sense. I never understood the perspective of those flinging the barbs, and I suddenly did.

As a Native woman, maybe a majority of the people around me, on land my ancestors have held for over thirteen thousand years, see me as something closer to an animal. At best, an exotic interest; at worst, an infestation to be stamped out. As a Tlingit woman, I was also raised to constantly consider how everything I do and say and experience impacts my clan. My community. And so it was at a stoplight on the way home, I gasped with the full tonnage of grief hitting me. It was not the weight of my lifetime, but of decades of communal mistreatment. Of identities stolen and language taken and shame and shame and shame heaped on our heads for daring to live how we had always lived. Of entire generations lost. For what?

When I pass through that stoplight, I still have to take a careful breath.

In the days, and then weeks, and then years to follow, it felt like a habit to collect all these things stolen and lost and weakened and killed. All these people. I snatched knowledge from wherever I could, grieved its loss in our culture, added it to the ever-growing burden. One of the pillars of Tlingit culture is the communal grieving of loss and trauma. It takes years to process grief as a community, and it comes with ceremony and art and stories and song. And at the end, you come out of grief together. But that too was outlawed for a long time, right when we most needed to know how to grieve. I longed for a way of grieving like we used to know. Instead, we are left to grieve individually our greatest losses. When we come out of grief, we come out alone—or not at all. For a long time, I thought I’d never come out of my grief. I went over and over our loss, our overwhelming, inexhaustible loss, for well over a decade.

And then one day…

As much as my long period of grief began with a seemingly mild comment, so too did the moment I began to leave my grief behind. I was sitting with a group of playwrights, brought through strongly on the Western idea of staged storytelling, and nearly all of them were talking about the difficulty in working in a culture that didn’t value what they did. The jokes over getting a “useful degree,” not some arts degree. The snicker of a parent talking about their starving-artist child who would never get a real job. And I just couldn’t join what was obviously a universal experience for them. I’d certainly been raised in the same American culture they had. But I had been nursed in an older culture that saw art as immensely important. It couldn’t be separated from our very identity. And the thought occurred to me: Tlingit culture could really teach them something about how to treat artists. Just a thoughtful moment, and not something I was immediately cognizant of, but just a little bit of the heaviness of grief slipped away. Pride took its place.

Not too long later, I was watching interviews about domestic violence as research for a play I was writing. Again and again and again, I would hear the women comment about the treatment of women throughout history: “Women have always been treated like second-class citizens” and “Society has always accepted abuse toward its women.” And I thought, Not in my society. Early American anthropological reports on Tlingit people remarked on the “curious equity of the sexes” in Tlingit culture. Everything is inherited through the mother, and your entire identity comes from her line. Your father’s line is honored, but ultimately, it has no say in your upbringing. And that is no small thing. When power is not hoarded by one gender, when the female line is the most important factor in determining who you are, your treatment of genders is quite different. As is treatment of abuse. We knew this for millennia, practicing our “equity of the sexes.” I pitied the Western cultures—the Western women—who never knew their power.

And a little more of that grief slipped away.

It was around this time that I really started to think about just how much the ills of the dominant society could be answered by the wisdom of the very cultures whose land they resided on. It was also around this time that I was able to not just believe our culture was much more than primitive but share it. I showcased and celebrated our Indigenous excellence with my art. That word we don’t have a word for. As generations of Tlingit women knew before me, what I do is valuable, and needed, and integral to a working society.

Primitive.

It no longer stings, that word. I feel sorry for the people who can’t see the beauty and complexity and answers right in front of them.

Primitive.

I still feel sorrow for the losses. I still feel anger. But I don’t feel that sting anymore of those who think I am less than human. Who think I’m something that almost disappeared—or should have disappeared—when the great white sails first arrived on this land.

Our land. Our land, which, when they first arrived and we looked at them with no leadership of women, who couldn’t survive on the land, who treated the ones we finally saw abhorrently, and we thought…

Primitive.