University of Montana, Missoula, 1979–83.
After Yellowstone I landed on campus once more: Dad’s alma mater, the University of Montana. I’ve chosen to begin anew, tabula rasa. At the end of my first quarter in 1979, I received a letter congratulating me for making the Dean’s List. The parchment-colored paper sported an official gold emblem in the upper right corner. It accomplished two things immediately: it brought tears of joy to my eyes and restored some of my lost confidence. I don’t believe I received that letter because I was super smart. I received it because I was isolated. By choice. I knew only Herb, who had moved here with me and was majoring in geology. Distractions were at a minimum; class effort and output were at a maximum. And it paid off.
At the end of the quarter I’d caught the attention of a biology professor. My first few tests didn’t go well, and I was pulling a D. Herb made me go to IHOP the night before the final exam to pull an all-nighter. He quizzed and requizzed me on all aspects of the Krebs cycle. Who knew there were so many steps? In high school biology I’d had to know only six. I hadn’t realized how easy high school had been. After finals the professor contacted me and asked me to come talk with him.
“I checked for cheating, but found not only were your answers different from those around you; they were right! You have worked hard to bring your grade up, harder than anyone I’ve ever seen.” He handed me the test. I’d missed two questions on the hundred-point exam, the second-highest score in the class. “This exam was weighted pretty heavy. As a result this brought your quarter grade to a B; I gave you a B+. I’ve never seen anything like that. Congratulations!”
Life was good.
Well, life was better than it had been two years before. But now I’m in my second quarter, and I’m slipping. The problem is I’ve made friends; I’ve found groups to hang with. Distractions abound.
I want to major in anthropology, a forbidden discipline among Natives. I know this because in Bozeman I attended a lecture by a young Inupiat man, who talked about the Native economy in Alaska. Afterward I approached him and introduced myself as a Salish woman, telling him that I was majoring in anthropology. His smile was contemptuous, as he said, “Oh, I know all about anthropologists. They study us like we’re bugs under the microscope, talking about us like they know us, making up lies about our culture, fascinated by our primitivism. Every summer anthropologists come up to our village and walk the riverbank. They’ll see something in the rocks, bend down, and pick it up. They’ll hold it up in the air and turn it this way and then that, and say, ‘Oh, this must be a very powerful spiritual symbol.’ Ha! We laugh then. It’s a fishhook!” And just like that he turned away, and I was dismissed.
To be an anthropologist is to be a traitor. But I have a secret. I believe this is the only way I’m going to ever learn about Indians, about being an Indian: this discipline and the books I read. So I take my classes, and by the time I graduate from the University of Montana, in 1983, I have learned so many lessons.
Lesson 1: Indians Don’t Go to College—They Go to Vo-Tech.
It is September 1979, and as a newcomer to the university, I’ve been assigned an adviser in the Economics Department, a balding professor who rises from his chair as I walk in the door. We shake hands. Being a mathphobe, this department makes me anxious, and the perspiration begins. He is a serious, forty-something man who wears glasses as well as a touch of arrogance.
After our introductions he motions me to take the seat opposite him. My transcript file lies unopened on his desk. Seeing the direction of my gaze, he explains it away, saying, “I never like looking at those things. People just talking to me helps me understand their goals so much better.” He leans back in his chair, at ease, and crosses his fingers over his stomach. “So, what’s your major?”
“I haven’t chosen one,” I reply. “I’m not sure what I want to major in.”
“Well, what are you interested in?”
“I’m interested in a lot of things. I love writing; I like anthropology; I enjoy science and music.”
“Hmmm,” he says, nodding; he studies a spot on the wall to the left of my head. “That’s pretty broad. Is there any particular direction you’re leaning?”
“Toward science. The problem is,” I confide, my voice dropping, “whatever I choose can’t have a lot of math in it. I can’t do math.”
“Why is that?” The confusion on his face is clear.
I shrug; my cheeks warming in embarrassment. I have no idea why I can’t do math. I have no idea why I could get As and Bs in all my classes in high school and get Ds in math. I have no idea why I could get the concepts of chemistry and physics but be unable to prove my understanding of them by running the numbers. As a junior I was encouraged by my chemistry teacher to take physics my senior year. In early November, in the midst of Mom’s bipolarities, the physics teacher laid it out: “If you quit now, before the end of the semester, I can guarantee you a D. If you stay, I can’t guarantee you’ll pass at all, and I would hate to see you fail so close to graduation.”
I have no idea why no one thought to explore the disparities in my abilities, or why Mom would look at those grades year after year after year and not do anything. Years from now when I tell her this, she will look at me with a certain amount of guilt, and she will say, “Your home life was so chaotic, I didn’t think you needed additional pressure to get through your day. And by the time I realized how important it was and enrolled you in remedial math, you joined the swimming team instead.”
“Mom,” I will say, “I was a senior in high school! There was no way I was going to go to dumb math!”
The economics professor looks at me and lays the unopened file aside. “I’ll be honest. I don’t think college is a good place for you. With your skills I think you should check out the vo-tech program. I really do.” He says this, not with sincerity, but with the sound of proclamation.
I thank him for his time and leave, thinking, You son of a bitch, you watch me graduate with a degree.
Lesson 2: Don’t Expect Every Professor to Be Happy You Are in Their Class.
It is Spring quarter of 1981, and I’m looking into the ice-blue eyes of the cultural anthropology professor, a woman who has extensive experience researching the American Indians of the Great Basin. After she hands back our midterm exams, she asks me to go directly to her office. She has something important to discuss with me. When we leave she, birdlike, flutters her way out of the classroom and down the hall.
I arrive and survey the room as I’m taking a seat. She is already sitting at her desk, her aqua-blue shirt illuminating her silver hair, which has been styled in an abrupt blunt cut that sways above her shoulders. Her desk is messy, but my guess is she knows where everything is. She is surrounded by books, standing upright, laying down, leaning against one another, lazy and resigned to being forgotten.
As soon as I take my seat, I see her annoyance. Her already thin lips stretch even thinner as she contemplates what she’ll say. She crosses her arms in front of her skinny chest, and as I focus on her words, I realize she’s telling me that my work, my average “C-level” work, is inadequate. “I have higher expectations of students in my class,” she says, releasing one of her chest-hugging arms and pointing a slender finger in my direction, its broadening knuckle revealing her fifty-plus years. “You’re not doing well, and I believe anthropology isn’t a discipline you should even be involved in. I don’t think it’s an interest of yours, and I don’t see you applying yourself in any way.”
What she may or may not know is that those classes, of which I’ve had several, in which I don’t apply myself aren’t C classes. They are Ds and lower.
“Find yourself another major,” she says, dismissing me from her light-blue office. “This one isn’t working out for you.”
My blood pulses angrily in my ears and along my wrists. In the seven weeks I’ve been in her class, we’ve had no conversations about my interest, my work, or my abilities. I have no idea why the sneak attack just happened now.
“I’ll tell you why,” says Carl, a graduate archaeology student who I can usually find in the lab, and today is no different. He is doing paperwork resulting from last summer’s field school. When he looks at me, his blue eyes sparkle, but his gaze is serious. “She hates Indians.”
I laugh. “What do you mean she hates Indians? That’s all she studies.”
“Yeah,” he says, returning his attention to the forms in front of him. “But from her perspective, Indians are great to study. They’re just not much good for anything else.”
Lesson 3: “Apple of My Eye” Has a Whole New Meaning in Indian Country.
Later, that same quarter, I’m standing in what used to be the living room of a small turn-of-the-century house, but what is now Native American Student Services. My attempt at invisibility is successful. Since I came here no one has talked to me, nor has anyone shown any interest in me whatsoever; no one has even turned their attention in my direction. But that’s okay; for once I’m surrounded by people who look like me—with their brown skin, their black hair, their dark eyes, and round cheeks. I watch as they talk with one another, girls behind curved palms, boys in good-humored conversational one-upmanship. They never act like this outside of these four walls but rather sit quietly in their seats, mute to participating in the education around them. Just like me.
I so badly want to belong here.
And within a couple of weeks of hanging out, I finally get my invitation. They’re meeting up at the Trading Post, a local bar. Did I want to come along? I do, but I’m nervous. Because I was actively raised not to “be” Indian; I am not supposed to act like them (whatever that means), dress like them (with their ribbon shirts and cowboy hats), talk like them (that rez dialect drives my dad nuts), and most of all date them. I don’t know anything about them, except that I look like them. Outside of the bar I am joined by a group of eight or so Native students, who immediately surround me and crowd inward. Out of nowhere, one asks, “What are you?”
The question, forthright and demanding, takes me by surprise. Before I can answer, another question is tossed out. “Are you Indian?”
And another: “Are you a skin?”
And yet another: “Are you a breed?”
Redskin. Half breed. Their questions are rude, but I want to belong, so I listen and remind myself their questions are not much different from the questions I get asked by whites on a nearly daily basis. But here among this group it is somehow more painful, more cutting. But it is nothing compared to what comes next.
“Naw,” comes the answer from one of the young men who stands off to the side, the sneer barely hidden on his face. “She’s an apple.”
Their laughter, raucous and filled with contempt, interrupts the night, and they turn their back on me and wander inside, their talk soaked up by the music drifting through the opened doors. I’m stunned. I don’t know what to do. The verbal slap stings to the core of who I thought I was, a physical assault on my psyche. So I hang back. Alone. Soon I am joined by a short, slender brown man, whose face is pocked with acne scars and whose ponytail twists uncontrollably down his back. He gives me an apologetic, but sad, smile and remains silent.
“What’s an apple?” I ask.
“Red on the outside, white on the inside,” he answers, then holds the door open for me so we could join the group.
That thud? That was me hitting the boundary of what it is to be Indian.
Lesson 4: Everyone Knows More about What It Means to Be Indian Than I Do.
It is October 1981, and I am standing in the middle of a snowstorm near Wibaux, Montana, a dying little town that sits on the border of Montana and North Dakota. I am part of an archaeological fieldwork–survey course scheduled to walk the private ranch today looking for sites under the three inches of accumulated snow. I’m cold and even the hot breakfast and hotter tea isn’t warming me up. It’s twenty-something degrees, and I had no idea how to work the ancient steam-heat register in my room, and the bed had only a sheet and a medium-weight cotton blanket. So since arriving here, I’ve never been warm.
“Ready?” asks Will, a fellow classmate and an ex-biker from South Carolina. He looks at me while he lifts his backpack over his shoulder and lights a cigarette, protecting the flame of the match behind a cupped palm.
I sigh and nod, as the cold air sears my lungs. We begin the walk of futility, holding our coats close against our bodies and pulling our hats low over our ears, as the wind seems to divide the cells of my body. The author James Herriot referred to this kind of wind as a “lazy wind,” blowing through bodies instead of around them.
Will is an easy guy to survey with, and I’ve gotten to know him well over the past two years that we’ve been students together. Our conversations have covered a wide range of topics. So while the wind threatens to take our words and blow them away, he asks, “What tribe are you?”
“Why, you want me to build you a fire?” I smile and wait for his reply. I am suddenly in unfamiliar territory. No subject has been off-limits in our conversations, but we’ve never talked about me being Indian. But for me humor is the easiest way to discuss the elephant in the room. It allows me a certain amount of control in the conversation: if I make fun of it, I won’t be taken off guard if someone else does.
He throws me a lopsided grin, but he is more serious, and I’m not sure where to go with this. “I’m Salish.” I add no other descriptors. I don’t know any.
The snow lies lifeless and silent beneath our feet, and when I look up the sky shows signs that the weather will break; chances are the snow will be melted by the middle of the afternoon. “Why don’t you sound like an Indian?” he presses. “You know how Indians talk in that dialect, that reservation dialect?”
I didn’t use to mind these kinds of questions, but lately this topic has a certain edge to it, a discomfort that slides beneath my skin like a surgical knife. Now it seems that every time it comes up, it cuts away a little piece of me. “I wasn’t raised on the reservation,” I explain. “I was adopted by a white couple.” I am beginning to hate that explanation.
He turns his head and studies me for a long time, his green eyes sizing me up. Then we continue to walk, in silence. That afternoon, when the sun comes out, Will resurrects the conversation.
“You know, you’re lucky,” he says, squatting down to light another cigarette. This time the wind is gone, and he doesn’t need to shelter the flame. He inhales deep and, throwing his head back, exhales long and slow. “You’ve got this great Indian heritage, but then you’ve also got this ability to walk in the white man’s world—it doesn’t get any better than that.” His voice is slow and melodious, almost soothing, and his South Carolina accent draws out his words so they pour thick and warm, like honey on an early spring day. He squints against the smoke as the breeze changes direction. Then something on the ground catches his attention, and he runs his index finger lightly into the black soil. After a few moments he pulls out a broken obsidian scraper. I write the description and mark its placement on the map.
“Why do you say that?” I hear the defensiveness creep into my voice, and I know where it comes from. Me against the world. Me pitted against the “other.” The Indians don’t want me; the whites don’t accept me. They push me into each other’s court, always away from them. I am isolated; I am in-between. But this, this thing he says, suddenly feels like a lifeline. No one has ever said I was lucky. My tone changes to one of curiosity. “What do you mean?”
“You can live anywhere,” Will continues, moving his hand to take in the world around us. “You act white and can move around this world really easy, but you’re a tribal member. You can go back anytime you want. They have to take you back.”
“Who says?” He is naive, and I can’t help but laugh.
“Just the way it is.” He pauses and kneels down, scratching the surface of the dirt with his fingernail, exposing a small broken piece of worked chalcedony. “Doesn’t your real family live up there somewhere?”
Now I’m really uncomfortable. “I dunno. Maybe.”
“Contact an elder,” Will says, drawing hard on the last of his cigarette, making it all sound so easy. “The role of elders is to help people in need. Contact one, and they’ve got to help you.”
I’m hopeful and reluctant. I’m curious and resentful—right now, mostly the latter. I look at this blond-haired, green-eyed, freckle-faced ex-biker and note, with a certain amount of frustration, that he sure seems to know a lot more about being Indian than I do. He has the road map of where I should go, who I should contact, what I should do. I know he’s talked to elders and played Stick Game, and suddenly I feel so inadequate. I feel so inadequate in my race being Indian.
And I wonder, how is it that he knows so much more than me?
Lesson 5: Just Because You Look Indian Doesn’t Mean You Are Indian.
It is the fall of 1982, and although I’m in my senior year of college, I’ve taken a graduate seminar on social theory. Twelve of us sit at the oak table, surrounded by oak bookshelves in a room that screams academia. The question is palpable: how difficult is this class going to be? We eye one another and wonder who is smarter than whom. I know there are a lot of people here far smarter than I am; I don’t see myself as particularly bright.
The professor, when he walks in, seems to be a brilliant man, whose demeanor indicates he’s far more uncomfortable walking around this world than I am. He sits down, shuffling his papers, and mumbles his greeting with a shy smile. His voice is soft, and he avoids lengthy, if any, eye contact. “First thing we’ll do is take roll, so I can learn your names, and you can learn one another’s.” His voice is gentle, and there’s that reassuring smile again. “Let’s see . . . Anderson, Becky.”
“Here.”
And so it goes. My turn is coming, and my anxiety heightens. With wearisome familiarity my face grows uncomfortably warm, and my hands grow clammy. My name is the fifth one he calls.
“Devan, Susan.”
I clear my throat and raise my hand, my voice not obeying my command to speak.
“Devan . . .” He peers at me over his glasses, and I feel like I’m a specimen under a microscope, illuminated, bare. “Devan,” he says again, feeling it on his tongue, swishing it like a nice glass of red wine.
And I know what’s coming. I close my eyes, just for a moment, and feel my heart race. When I open them all the students are looking at me to see who this creature is that has captured the professor’s attention.
“That’s French?” he says, not really asking. It’s more of a statement.
I swallow and want to crawl away, because we have entered the “Guesses.” I’m so tired of the guesses, those endless predictions of “what” I am. Usually they are based on my looks: Japanese? Korean? Hawaiian? Taiwanese? Eskimo is always the last resort. It’s my Cree blood that creates those Asiatic eyes, but few guess, or perhaps want to guess, American Indian.
His guess is based on my looks as well, after taking account of the name. So many members of my tribe, as well as others along the northern boundaries, have surnames that trace the lineage of the French fur trappers and traders that roamed the vast plains and timbered areas of the northern climes. What they reveal are relationships with Native women and the children they produced. So when he guesses French, he is essentially asking whether I am Indian with a French surname.
“No,” I reply. And I’m silent. Being Indian is not cool.
“Not French?” he asks, prodding in the politest manner possible.
I shake my head. Being Indian is not romantic. My face is flaming.
Silence. And stares. And shame. Because I’m beginning to fully appreciate the burden of my skin and the assumptions that are made.
“Can I ask you what nationality your name is?”
People giggle at my insistence at anonymity. His insistence at knowledge wins.
“It’s Czechoslovakian.”
His eyebrows rise to the crown of his head, and I’m silently angry. Not a single person in this class or any others have been asked their heritage, based on name, based on skin, based on anything. Once again I am singled out. And now, in my set-apart role, I refuse to tell him I’m Indian. And I refuse to say I’m adopted. I refuse to explain my in-between status, because I can’t explain it.
Lesson 6: Just Because You Act White Doesn’t Mean You Are White.
The most powerful lesson I learn, the one that stays with me the longest, happens in the winter of 1979, when I returned to Montana State University to visit friends. We are standing on the downtown sidewalk. The bars have closed, and a stiff spring breeze starts us thinking about what we want to do next. But we stand around, like we have before, with our hands in our pockets, shooting the shit, telling stories, and laughing at antics, our own or someone else’s. The familiar lull in the conversation makes time for the jokes, and they are pulled out of our memory like stuffing from a favorite toy.
There’re the eastern European jokes, the Scandinavian jokes, the Irish jokes, the Asian jokes, the Mexican jokes. But then someone starts telling an Indian joke. And it’s not as if I haven’t heard a million of these. I have. From just about everyone around me. And I laugh, just like everyone around me. I don’t want to make waves. I suck it up and take it; I know the rules. So I listen and the joke continues.
And everyone’s laughing, and I’m laughing too, but then suddenly, without my permission, my laughter turns into something else. It turns into sobs caught in my throat, and tears begin to fall, large tears, heavy tears, tears that I’ve held onto my whole life so people wouldn’t know how bad all this hurts. . . . It hurts that that they don’t see me as the butt of the joke but rather as one of them, pale skinned and golden haired, but I’m not. . . . I see the world in shades of red, angry, angry shades of red. Someone catches sight of me, because now I’m turned away, and my shoulders shake of their own accord, and I’m so, so embarrassed. That person says, “Oh my God, what’s wrong?” and I can’t talk because my throat is closed, an allergy to shame, because if I let loose the sobs, they will be loud and endless until I’ll want to scream.
Then I feel arms around me, hugging my shoulders, pulling me close, and I want to bury my face in the jacket, the wool jacket that scratches my skin, now wet and delicate. Then I notice that the voices have stopped, the Indian joke has stopped, and someone, a male, takes my face in his hands, cradles my cheeks in warm, soft palms, and gently forces my face up, forcing me to look at him, his eyes wide, his brows pulled together in concern for me, this friend who suddenly seems like an unknown. He says, through the storm in my ears, through the storm in my head, he says, almost in a whisper, his lips very close, “Why are you crying?”
I feel his breath, gentle and quiet, and I answer through a clenched jaw that suddenly starts shaking when I’ve relaxed it enough to allow words through; it shakes uncontrollably, like me, like my words as they spill out of the mouth I can’t close, and I answer, “I don’t know, it just started.” . . . As if “it” was a mound of cans in grocery aisle number three that has fallen, and everyone has stepped out of the way except for me. . . . But the tears don’t stop; they continue, they continue to come up from the depths of my soul and empty out onto the earth, splashing on my clothes and my shoes, one after another until they run together, united . . . and I cover my mouth with my hand to stop the words, the words I can no longer hold safely behind closed lips, and I so badly want to reintegrate my disintegrated self, a self that is like a sugar cube coming apart under a stream of water, but I can’t do that. . . . I can’t do that with people here, with people watching, a game tied in overtime. . . . I want to be who I was just moments ago, before the joke; I want the lips to go away, the hands to go away, the coat to go away, the people to go away and leave me here alone and frozen and isolated in my shame, but they don’t. . . .
“Was it the joke?” another voice asks, as soft as the first . . . and I gulp air and wonder in horror, why I can’t just seem to just let it be okay. . . . I don’t know why, but I can’t, and I find myself nodding, unable to look at anyone. I close my eyes to the man who holds my face. . . . “I’m sorry,” he says, and I can hear his words, but I can’t see his lips move. “I’m so sorry. I had no idea you felt this this way. I wasn’t thinking.” When I look up, I want to smile; I want to put him at ease, want to be okay with being the butt of yet another joke, but I can’t . . . and the disintegration continues, and they’re watching; they’re all watching, and the man once more takes my face into his hands, and my chest feels like it will explode with the anger and the shame I have boiling up inside of me, a geyser that has become tapped. “You know,” he says, looking deep into my eyes, “you have the right. You have the right to say ‘stop,’ to tell people when something hurts or when you feel uncomfortable with what’s being said to you or done to you.” He pauses and the geyser is dangerously close to the surface. “Do you understand you have that right?”
Oh God, the tears come, new rivers of tears; my chest heaves, and I fall forward, hands on my knees, unable to stand straight any longer, and the tears have less distance to fall. I can’t move because I am lead, and as I bend over myself, into myself, I curl my fists into balls, and what is left of my badly bitten fingernails bites into the softness of my palms. His words make it through the storm in my head, the storm in my ears, and I realize finally, finally, I have permission. I have finally been given permission to say, I have the right to say how much it hurts to be Indian in the world in which I live.