An interview with Sherman Alexie and a 1983 clip from comedian Charlie Hill

In class we talked about how many interviews there are with Sherman Alexie, yet since this one was on The Absolutely True Diary of the Part-time Indian and is from our local KTCS Channel 9, I thought you might want to check it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io9vRHYMiFM

While I was poking around youtube I found this piece from comedian Charlie Hill back in 1983. I wasn't sure about him when it first started, yet as he went on I was riveted and cracking up. Even though it is twenty eight years old, much of it is still funny and often powerful: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh6eCALFohY&feature=related

What is Sherman Alexie trying to say about_________?

This week my Cascadia ENGL& 102 students are writing an Analysis paper on The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian. We are starting with the question what is Sherman Alexie trying to say about any number of issues he brings up in this book, and then analysing it through what has also been said in the academic research body on these topics. We know academic research is not the be all and end all of knowledge, it is just what we have access to and part of the skill set students are meant to learn in this class.

While Mr Alexie is great at connecting his stories to the universal as well as personal and local, I've asked my students to try and focus on how these universals are affecting people in Native communities. Cascadia students are processing lots of information on all kinds of stuff, like the academic articles on multicultural/anti-racist issues, their position in US society, and now diving into to a whole new area of awareness, all while also trying to blog about it. This Analysis paper will be most people's first time having to do college level research in an area of Native American Studies, so we are mainly learning together. Everyone I've spoken with is looking forward to learning more and getting to hear/read from students at NWIC-Tulalip and other community members. We are working on educating ourselves, yet appreciate the chance to possibly hear/read other people's voices as well.

We spent a few hours in the CCC/UWB Library last week and looked at various sources in Native American Studies and Indian Country sources online in the UW library system. Students also worked in groups to create presentations on local communities using official tribal websites, with the caveat that these are just one public version of Northern Coastal Salish people and their communities, yet we need to start somewhere. They will give their presentations tomorrow in class.

I was at NWIC-Tulalip last Thursday and got to see people come in to pick up books and share the excitement about the read, it was so cool! The plans for the gatherings are also exciting, and it is great to see this read building momentum! Thanks for letting us participate!!!

Building and unbuilding a House of Racism

Many US suburban people of my age, heck even kids from the burbs today, are often taught a very white-washed version of history. When we do finally get access or have alternative versions brought to our attention, once we get past the shock and sense of guilt for our ignorance, some of us become hungry for the other sides of these stories.

I teach a class called US Multicultural History, as well as English and other classes, and I am fascinated by finding versions of history that challenge the official versions, as are many of my students. I am still privileged to be an American and appreciate that as a middle class white American I have access to clean water, food, education and other basics that 80% of the world's population do not. I would just like to see a more honest version or versions of our histories taught, because the struggles continue and we all need to heal- oppressed and oppressors- if we are ever to get past our very racist and violent history. Sure we have a lot to celebrate, yet when we congratulate ourselves too much we continue to practice what the ancient Greeks called "hubris" -overbearing pride.

Most countries, governments, people, groups want to show their best side when writing or recounting their histories, yet I believe we owe it to ourselves and our descendants to be honest about how this country was created, what we've done since and how we need to continue to work to make this place the one our long standing ideals point to, as seen in the Great Law of Peace of the Iroquois Nations and as listed in the Bill of Rights and other key documents. In joining the on-going work towards these ideals, I offer a stripped down version of US history, as an exercise of what was not meaningfully taught in any history class I attended until I got to college.

If the USA was a house, here is my version of what it would be, although it seems so simple I am sure others have said/thought it before me:

The first steps in our House of Racism are the land and the foundations: how many ways can you describe murdering people, stealing their lands, lying to them, repeatedly forcing them from their homes, more killing and on and on?

While trying to distract some people with your talk of liberty and equality for all, you legally codify racism throughout all areas of society. The people whose land you are taking getting treaty after broken treaty, while you continue a campaign that eventually kills 90% of their pre-European contact populations. Enslaved African-Americans are only 3/5's of a person, and that concession is only to give white slave owners more votes in government. Along with other privileges only "free white person's" are allowed to become citizens. These and the "psychological wages of racism", including the illusion of superiority, help the average white person ignore/deny/justify the cultural genocide and the buying and selling of human beings. These foundations built on land soaked in blood lead to the building of the structure of our House of Racism.

This analogy is getting complicated as it seems everything from the land through the foundations are also part of the framing. Well, let's say the framework for the walls are all proceeding laws, continuing oppression of Native Americans and African Americans, adding oppressing most anyone else who came here in large enough numbers to get attention (even people like the Irish, who would eventually be considered white), and using racism as a way to divide and conquer people (especially white people) from voting and working for their class interests.

Our House of Racism building project is repeatedly and nearly constantly being challenged by non-white people, which occassionally cause some changes to be made, yet these often changed one bad set of laws and traditions for another. The ending of slavery was one, African Americans were no longer being bought, sold and owned, yet this was replaced by Jim Crow laws, the rise of the first KKK clans and later to the Eugenics Movement. The Eugenics Movement used pseudo-science to try and prove white people were superior to everyone else. Eugenics was popular in all parts of the US, even taught in schools and universities, until Hitler used Eugenics as part of his argument for killing Jews, then suddenly Americans dropped it like a hot potato.

Meanwhile, back to the people of the First Nations, once the majority of indigenous groups were bound by treaties and left with small percentages of their orginal lands on reservations, whites were taught they no longer existed and/or were not out problem. Scholars call this "The Myth of the Vanishing Race" or the "Vanishing Race Myth", and it can be seen in imagery we use, as well as implied in our history books, movies and other media outlets. Seattle is considered to be one the major players in this, using not only the name of Chief Seattle (Anglicized though it may be), yet also Native art and imagery to sell itself, while at the same time one of their first laws when the city formed was to make it illegal for Natives to live in Seattle City limits. While many Americans continued to go on with their lives, forgetting or trying to forget whose land they were living on, government officials, doctors, educators and religious folk continued interacting with Natives in ways that most often point to a continuing policy of cultural genocide, and these were people supposedly put there "to help." Alright, this post it getting too long, so I apologize for moving on when there is so much to say here, yet others have said it better, so I will let them do so.

The crowning achievement on our House of Racism is the roof, known as "The Civil Rights Movement" and "Civil Rights Laws". This roof provides great cover and comfort for some, definite gains for some, and has generated a whole lot of denial in many parts of our society. I am amused/frustrated by white people pointing to Civil Rights as proof that we are no longer racist. While I was born in 1966, so I do not personally remember that time, I've seen enough pictures, documentaries and history books to know that it was not white people doing that work.

White people did NOT stand up and say "Wow, we have been so racist, we are truly sorry, what can we do to make amends?" The way I have read/seen it most often is that African Americans in the South agitated for their civil rights, which the whites reacted to violently, and it shocked white people living elsewhere when it came on the news to see how African Americans/their fellow citizens were being treated. However it seems nothing was seriously done about it until it went on the international news, then many history books/documentaries say that white Americans were so embarassed that their stated liberty and freedom for all was such a lie, that then they insisted something done by the feds. The way it reads to me is that whites were forced/embarassed into the civil rights, and when you read primary sources from history, you can see it has usually been that way for most of the anti-racist gains made in this country.

A side note to this is that Seattle has an earlier and much more diverse civil rights story, check out this site created by a UW professor and his students: http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/
"Seattle has a unique civil rights history that challenges the way we think about race, civil rights, and the Pacific Northwest. Civil rights movements in Seattle started well before the celebrated struggles in the South in the 1950s and 1960s, and they relied not just on African American activists but also on Filipino Americans, Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans, Jews, Latinos, and Native Americans."


Alright, so that is my version of the House of Racism, not the only one, yet here it is. What trips me out is how do we make things right? How do you make a society built on so much pain and oppression into one that is free and fair for all? How do you get some of the people to see that the benefits and privileges they enjoy are not always enjoyed by their fellow citizens? How do you get some people to understand that after 500 years of oppression, you can't just pass a few laws and say now, can't we all get along? How do we all heal, if so many can't see they/we and our institutions are still sick?

Autochthonous= Greek for 'self from the soil', 'originating from this soil', aka native or indigenous

Years ago I learned a marvelous word: autochthonous ( a-ta-k-thon-nos). The way I first learned it was that the words in Greek meant "self from the soil" or "originating from this soil". In most of the online dictionaries I've found they just list the more Anglicized definitions of native or indigenous, yet I think the actual meaning of the Greek words have a special feeling to them.

autochthonous (not comparable)
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/autochthonous

1. Native to the place where found; indigenous.  [quotations ▼]
2. (biology, medicine) Originating where found.
3. (geology) Buried in place, especially of a fossil preserved in its life position without disturbance or disarticulation.

What do you think? Once enough people could pronounce and remember the word, we could flip certain conversations with it and the underlying concepts.

Loving on Sherman

Sherman Alexie dropped out of the sky and bitch-slapped me out of the "Myth of the Vanishing Race" with The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven sometime in 1995 or '96 while I was a student at The Evergreen State College (TESC) in Olympia, WA. While the book was an assigned reading, it was more like an exploding dose of cognitive dissonance followed by a paradigm shift, leading to questions, leading to more cognitive dissonance and so forth.

Instead of hearing/seeing/reading about Native Americans, Mr Alexie was himself speaking on the page, through the book in my hands, his words and ideas invading my mind. I'm trying to express why and it is all mixed up with what happened later and is happening now. I think I will skip ahead and talk about Mr Alexie being the keynote speaker at my graduation from TESC in 1996, a speech I still think about from time to time. He spoke about the importance of knowing about your ancestors and knowing where they came from before you try to understand others, especially if you were white, which my friend and I had stenciled in Celtic knotwork on our graduation hats as an expression of our fascination with our Irish/Scottish/Welsh ancestors and so we were happy with that idea. He also spoke of being at the Vatican in Rome and being in lines with all these white people snapping photos and otherwise acting like the church was Disneyland. He said it was at this moment that he realized why white people couldn't respect Native-American sacred spaces, because they couldn't even respect their own. It struck me as true at the time and something I still think about when I am in various spaces.

In the following years I was lucky enough to see him speak at a couple of other venues. Now I am thinking of the scenes from the movie The Business of Fancydancing where Seymour the author is dealing with white people at bookstores and laughing at myself. Alright, well it was probably much better for me than it was for him, yet I did appreciate his willingness to be frank and not let us off the hook as an audience or a nation.

Friends that have seen him speak in recent years have said he has gotten more intense and opinionated, yet perhaps he is just in a place where he can express these ideas more like he wants to- he doesn't need to be Seymour for us anymore.

Questions we are afraid to ask and other random thoughts

If we are going to participate in a community read that has the possibility of creating healing in our communities, then we will eventually have to get past any enforced or artificial politeness and find ways to be respectfully honest with each other and ourselves.

While I do not speak for the students at Cascadia or anyone except myself, I can say I know white people who get uncomfortable around non-white people, and part of it is being worried about saying the wrong thing. I've come to see it isn't a simple matter of saying something insensitive/ignorant/racist, yet going deeper and seeing that those words are connected to thoughts inside your head, which are connected to other actions and behaviors in your life-whether you are conscious of it or not. These actions/behaviors do affect others, whether we intend them to or not.

I have also heard from a few non-white people that it takes a fair amount of energy to deal with white people who are uncomfortable around them (and again no one elected me to speak for them, just telling you what I've heard). First of all you want to decode whether they are uncomfortable because they are unfamiliar with someone who looks like you, because they are worried about saying the wrong thing, because they are indeed racist or some other reason? Then you may have to decide on how to act in terms of trying to help them feel comfortable around you. I cannot imagine how frustrating this is, as even if you decide you don't want to worry about anyone else feeling comfortable around you- you still have to expend energy to hold onto that as you walk through this world.

Alright, so now I am not exactly sure where I was going with this post. It was mainly thinking about how do you get past what can initially be awkward and really get the conversations starting.

We talked in class at Cascadia about how local tribes did NOT live in tipis, they used cedar planked longhouses. It is a painfully small step, yet hopefully one in the right direction. Where shall we go next?

Inclusion does not mean belonging

When Zacchoreli told me that "Inclusion does not mean belonging" would be the first prompt for our blogging, I immediately thought of the inclusion model practiced in the US schools, businesses and governments since the 1960's. The idea is where once non-white people were excluded from these places, we now open the door and include them.

It might sound like a good idea, until you consider that schools, businesses and governments in the US were formed in thoroughly racist times and were part of ensuring white privilege passed from one generation to the next. Take schools for example, publicly supported education came about as a way to assimilate people into the dominant culture. So, testing, classroom practices, schedules, etc were all set up to make children learn to be good workers and good Americans-which meant acting like the white-dominant culture, forgetting your ancestors roots and so on. The Boarding School experiences of Native Americans were even more harsh, they took children out of their homes and communities, forced them to speak, learn and act in dominant culture ways, and the discpline and routines were unforgiving. Since we did not fundamentally change the institutions of learning we just invited non-whites in, we ask them to join a system that is still promoting white cultural ideals of language, clothing, time management, etc.

What can happen with the inclusion model is that the message given to non-dominant culture people is they must change who they are to fit into white institutions in order to be accepted. Furthermore this acceptance is conditional on the person making white people "feel comfortable" around them. All this adds to the message of you are included, yet do not truly belong and don't you forget it.

How do we change our institutions to make honoring diversity more than just an empty phrase? How far are we willing to change our institutions from the ground up? How about at least examining them to ensure that we do more than just include people who are willing/able to follow the dominant cultural models? Can we institutionalize respect in institutions built on disrespect?

INTENT versus IMPACT

As we begin our work this term I want you to think about how our interactions can be looked at from a lens of "Intent versus Impact". You may say something that you intended to mean one thing, yet to the person who heard it there was a very different impact.

Many interactions can get stuck with the first person insisting their intent is more important than how it impacted the other, yet I want us to do it differently. If you read the article on Racial Microagressions or look on youtube or a search engine for that term and/or for "Dr Derald Wing Sue" you will see one perspective on how intent versus impact plays out in dominant culture and dominant-target interactions.

Communication skills are something that can always be improved or expanded, especially in a setting like this where we are coming from a number of different places and backgrounds. So, I hope you can do the readings, the work, the interacting and the learning in that spirit. We have an amazing opportunity to really hear each other if we choose to, so please take your part in this endeavor seriously.

ENGL& 102 and Community Read introduction

"Life is a constant struggle between being an individual and being a member of the community." — Sherman Alexie The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

ENGL&102 is designed to increase your confidence with a research-based writing process. It provides practice with: generating ideas; forming hypotheses and arguments; locating materials from libraries, internet, experts and other sources; organizing notes; using evidence; incorporating sources; and avoiding plagiarism. You will strengthen your understanding of rhetorical strategies, group process, close reading and critical thinking. You will further develop a composition process of brainstorming, discussing, drafting, revising and editing, and you will continue to make stylistic decisions that develop and showcase your individual writing voice. 

In this course, we will focus our research and composition around Native American Studies in general and specific issues brought up in Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian.  We will be joining the community read between students, faculty and staff at the Northwest Indian College-Tulalip branch campus, community members of the Tulalip Tribes and other interested individuals.

These blogs will be where we do a lot of commenting on the Alexie book, as well as what we find in our research and personal experiences. As was mentioned in class and on the syllabus, the guidelines/rules of "netiquette" and multicultural communications apply(posted on Angel and you can also find some by using a search engine on those terms).  We hope to have meaningful and even challenging conversations, so having at least some recent exposure to these guidelines can help us through any rough spots. Please feel free to email me if you are having any concerns about yours or someone else's posts during this community read: mestelle@cascadia.edu