While visiting the Pow-wow on Sunday I felt tremendous pride and honor, but as I was walking home I was overcome with tremendous sadness.
It is incontestable, this country would be nothing without its indigenous history and peoples. It is the "native" who encountered the European, who in many cases gave the runaway slave refuge, whose culture refused to be divided even as boundary lines were drawn between American nations. The "native" discovered how to live in the various environments of this land. The plains, the tundra, the desert, the prairie, the woodlands, the riverside, the oceanfront and the glacial ice.
All immigrants who would come to work and build and realize someone else's "manifest destiny" walked through and on actual paths left by peoples who believed that they had a sacred connection to the land. The irony of this is that the children of these immigrants would many times feel trapped between two worlds, a parental one no longer theirs and a new one, not always welcoming or familiar.
Today the "native" is America's endangered people. While Black, Latino and Asian-American cultures in many ways are continually evolving for the sake of survival, the "native" faces a greater dilemma. In many cases choice one is either go far from "indigenous places," such as reservations, into a world that does not understand you, that in many cases has been trained to forget you and either assimilate -- sink to the bottom of the melting pot and get burned -- or practically kill yourself trying to preserve your "Indianess." Choice two is to go into or around those "indigenous places" and try to be the one person who can really make a difference in communities who live in third-world poverty, many times lacking immediate food supplies, proper electrical or plumbing services, and engulfed in alcoholism and depression. Imagine the difficulty in teaching people to be proud about who they are and where they come from when the world around them either hates them or ignores them and the world they live in gives them nothing to look forward to. "Native" pride is a special indomitable pride. Other American peoples have reason to feel that type of pride, but to me it is the "native" who must be most admired for it.
I feel compelled to say all of this because it is because of the "native" peoples of the Northeast that I can attend Dartmouth, and while at times it does seem as if the school is still unequivocally committed to its charter of "converting" non-white peoples into images of their theoretical dead white fathers -- who by the way are still behind in their alimony payments -- it does help to bring "native" students here from as far as Hawaii and Alaska. These students make the Pow-wow what it is. They are the reason it exists. In this way we benefit from them not only intellectually, but spiritually. The first real friend I ever made at Dartmouth was a Kiowa girl who reminded me of the realities of life on the "rez" and who made me feel welcome at Dartmouth at the very instant things began to feel very strange. While she is no longer my closest friend, she is and always will be the reason I am tied to this school; she linked me to this institution. I only wish I could find a way to connect her world and her people to the consciousness of US America.
Perhaps it is the intellectual body of Dartmouth students, professors, staff persons and community members that should help seek such answers. It is unfortunate that such questions are not asked as part of consulting interviews, investment banking opportunities and corporate recruiting, for I could conceive that more students would find it important enough to think about two million of the most historically significant but socio-economically poorest people in America.
