Having mixed blood, Yellow Robe said, "has created a psychology that no one has dealt with. People go into this panic of being too native or not being native enough."
Yellow Robe, who is both Native American and African American, described the difficulty of being biracial during his discussion, "Claiming Our Relations."
While Yellow Robe identifies more with his Native American ancestry than his African American ancestry, he is not ashamed of his mixed race.
"I honor it and I never deny it," he said. However, he cautioned that people of mixed race should not "straddle both paths," and that he has never regretted identifying with his Native American side.
Yellow Robe's play, which will be performed in Spaulding Auditorium on Thursday, addresses this difficulty by showing characters who are "struggling with humanity" rather than defining themselves by the color of their skin.
"What the play does more than anything else is expose hatred," Yellow Robe said. "You can't really heal yourself until you know that you're wounded."
Yellow Robe drew upon his own experience as a mixed-blood Native American to create the play. Living on a reservation until he was 18 years old, Yellow Robe learned by interacting with other Natives that his racial identity significantly influenced his view on life.
"Even though we were from the same tribe, our perspectives were so different," Yellow Robe said about his conflicts with a white and Native American friend.
Although being biracial makes the formation of one's identity difficult, Yellow Robe said that it has also offered him the opportunity to represent the people of his tribe.
"You've got to stand up and speak for yourself so you can speak for your people," Yellow Robe said.
Yellow Robe discussed not only the uniqueness of having mixed blood but also the importance of maintaining one's identity. Through colonialism, he said, people have modified their cultures to make life easier without thinking of the consequences.
In a different vein, Yellow Robe read several poems to the audience about his wife, who passed away of breast and liver cancer. One poem, entitled "Prep Work," particularly emphasized Yellow Robe's Native American philosophy because it stressed the importance of release by encouraging his wife to "Just let go."
Yellow Robe's diverse discussion of racial issues had both personal and wider implications.
"He was dealing with a lot of concepts that have been left out of the historical explanation of this country," said James Novakowski '09, who first encountered Yellow Robe in his Native American Studies class. "I even felt resistance to some of the things he said. It was interesting to listen to him and to observe my own reactions."
The discussion, while centered on Native American and African American relations, also applied to other ethnicities.
"I thought a lot of the conflicts he mentioned for America are the same as those for China," Erin Gu '09, who was raised in China, said. "It's always a question whether you are too resistant to westernization and therefore not advancing technologically. It may shed light onto some of our problems and make the transition easier."
