Nativity

I am Native

But, I did not receive any check, nor have I ever worn a casino as my clothes nor did I endure the generational traumas of Stick game. I am aware of the insanity of being called “Indian” and calling one another such a fallacious determination. I am not from India.

I never heard my Grandmother sing in our native tongue, or plant a seedling in my native soil.

Those of us, the abandoned, were raised into a religion that divided our ancestors. An aberration of placement and belonging, we are forced to be confused by our own reasoning. AS th tail ends of the quantum, we face, and unwillingly accept this reality as the rejected children of manifest destiny.

I am Native

But I could not track an animal, speak "Indian", or mystically call upon spirits. My only vision quest is this emotional toil of distinctions between white guilt and genetic memory. Every time I check that box asking me what race I am, I have to consider the consequences of my choice. DNA is a luminescence that lights our way and blinds us at the same time.

I wriggle in this deeply held sense of my own imposter. Throughout the mechanization of western culture I work tirelessly. Surviving the self-doubt that I live as Native, and an unrequited notion that it is all an internal fantasy to justify a perception of some hidden and unceasing need for attention.

I am Native

But I am also a racist, hounded by a typified caged perception of the reservation “Indian”, and the seemingly complex ways that Native
people marginalize one another. The drowning are now teaching the drowned to swim. Elders push the propagation of a generalized story that shrouds us in stereotype, because there is simply nothing left. These assumptions run through every camp, effortlessly supported by concerted networks of misrepresented mockeries of who we once were.

We have learned to act as our own predators, as we unwittingly push the last grains of sand through the hourglass of tradition. Census is but a penultimate machine that covers the tracks of calculated genocide. We are the last coffin nails of what was termed by our own European ancestry as the final solution.

I am Native

But, all of my names and faces have been changed to protect the guilty, and to entrap the innocent. Our own tribes, locked into this
estrangement, have abandoned us. We live as dissidents of a biological order. We are shown that only real Indians can play along, and that through our tainted blood we no longer exist.

We are expected to live through this banishment without protest, forgetting that it ever existed. The mixed blood Native lives and breathes this forgetting.

Assimilation bears a shame of secrecy that bleeds through our hearts and washes over what is truly there. We, the abandoned millions, are the evolving, hidden, and latent consequence of blood quantum, and the disenfranchised endgame of the native soul.

Chrissa Chorvat (Penobscot, Passamaquoddy)