When I was little, I pretty much thought Diabetes was a consequence of being an adult. Sticking your finger with a plastic and metal device that went "sproing" and depositing a glistening pearl of blood on a little strip in a machine that went "beep" seemed to be just something you had to do when you grew up, like paying bills and folding towels. I'm told this is common for American Indian children. In fact, in my mom's Being a Responsible American Indian with Diabetes (BRAID, which is also the name of a video game about time travel) class, the facilitator asked everyone how they felt when they were diagnosed, "Did you feel sad; did you feel angry, cheated?" and the general response was that no, they were expecting it. They felt relieved because they had been waiting for it to happen since they were little and now they didn't have to worry about it anymore. The facilitator was disappointed.
My grandma is a Cherokee woman whose father despised whites (if family legend is to be believed, white men on horseback were chasing the wagon his mom was riding in as he was crowning and his first cries were drowned out by gunfire), but knew that whiteness made things easier. My grandma and her sister weren't allowed to speak Cherokee and attended a federal Indian boarding school where both majored in Home Economics. In fact, going through their yearbook I noticed that the dudes all had different majors like Power Plant Operation, Painting, and Baking (Incidentally, my grandparents went to school with the founder of Krispy Kreme. Makes sense, doughnuts are like sweetened frybread in a specific shape). Of the four women I found who majored in something besides Home Economics, three majored in weaving, one majored in Arts and Crafts, and all double-majored (three guesses what their other major was - yes, that's right, Carpentry! No, I'm just messing with you, it was Home Economics).
Anyway, my grandma fell in love with the only blond-haired, blue-eyed Indian in the whole school (half Chickasaw, half Irish) and they got married and had three children, one of whom was my mom. My mom married first my brother's father, and then my dad, both white men. That's how we got to me, five-eighths white and five inches taller than any of the other women on my mom's side of the family, with blue eyes like my dad's and long, narrow feet that would be swimming in a pair of Air Natives.
Pretty much everyone on my mom's side of the family has type 2 diabetes. I don't have it (yet), but I also don't take any chances. I stay away from sugar and white flour and get regular exercise. When I was about ten I asked my grandma when she thought I would get it. She said I wouldn't, because I have my daddy's good blood. Apparently, if you dilute Red blood with enough white blood, it'll stop being so full of glucose (and also turn pink, HA!). Obviously the entire point of Indian boarding schools was to "civilize" Indians and assimilate them into (white) American culture, so of course I don't blame my grandmother for coming to the obvious conclusion that if emulating whiteness could make her life easier, having the genuine article in their genetic make-up would make her descendants immune to all diseases of Redness: Alcoholism, Poverty, Diabetes.
But sometimes I do blame myself for continuing the trend of marrying white men. I know this is stupid. Both my father and my husband are wonderful, kind, funny people, and I wouldn't trade them for the world. Even so, sometimes it bothers me that my children will only be 3/16ths Indian. I feel guilty, like I am contributing to the genocide of Native American peoples that has taken so many forms over the last few centuries, from germ warfare to forced sterilization to this voluntary extinction by intermarriage. I wonder if, by taking advantage of the programs and services that will be available for my children as tribal citizens, I will be doing a disservice to kids with bigger numbers on their CDIB (Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood) cards. I wonder if my kids will be "Real Indians," as I was once told by a Caddo boy I wasn't.*
I privately think the same about people all the time, people who find out later in life, whose families keep their Indian blood a guarded secret or a treasured anecdote about a long lost great-great-grand-something, people who tell me as though it were some huge bond we share, "Oh, I'm part Cherokee, too!" when they've never learned a word of the language or danced to drums in blue jeans and a shawl or been to a funeral where there was wailing like singing and singing like wailing or listened to their mom make treaty jokes or their grandma stumble over the explanation of a tradition she absorbed but was never really taught or, or, or. I think these things, as though I were the arbiter of Indianness, as though people whose past has been willfully obscured have any less right to it, and then I get the fuck over myself and say, "That's great!" and encourage them to look into what clan they are, find out their family history.
I guess to me, the important thing isn't blood quantum, but culture. And that's one of the main reasons I'm moving back to Oklahoma, so my children can be part of their tribes, and part of a loose association of city Indians of all tribes. I want them to participate in a dance troupe like I did, visit the Chickasaw cultural center, study Cherokee and Chickasaw, and go to lots of festivals, reunions, and powwows.
Pretend I wrapped this up in a really interesting, insightful, and above all conclusive way. Thanks for reading, and thanks, Arwyn, for linking to me on your twitter!
*That others may learn from my mistakes: it didn't make me feel any more genuine to drunkenly yell at him about it when I ran into him in a bar years later. In fact, it made me feel like a drunken asshole.
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