Nativity

I am Native

But, I did not receive any check, nor have I ever worn a casino as my clothes. I breathe generational trauma through every breath.

I am aware of the insanity of being called “Indian” and calling one another such fallacies. I am not from India.

I never heard my Grandmother sing in our native tongue, nor planted a seedling in my native soil.

Those of us millions abandoned, were raised into abject systems that divide our ancestors, always moving with a sense of the end nearing.

Blood quantum cunningly crafts aberrations of placement and belonging.

We are forced to relinquish our Nativity, and remain to be confused by our own reasoning.

As the human tail ends of a real diaspora, we face and unwillingly accept this reality as rejected children of manifest destiny.

I am Native

But I cannot track an animal, speak "Indian", or mystically call upon spirits. I undersatand I cannot find anyone capable of this.

Such a great many of us have adopted these mistaken identities as our owned stereotypes of shared theft. The low hanging fruit of belonging.

The new Native endures an 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’ve wriggled with entitlement in a deeply held sense of my own imposter.

Within a cathartic mechanization of western culture, I work tirelessly to overcome the idea that I need permission to be indigenous.

I am Native

But I am also an unwilling racist, hounded by a typified caged perception of the reservation Indian.

Mcdonaldization of Native people. We marginalize one another. As adopters of the system that helped along our cultural demise.

The drowned are now teaching the drowning to swim.

Success is to escape this indigenous culture. As it lays down to die.

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.

Adopters of mistaken identities have silenced the story.

It is there on the Jumbotron of the casino wall.

It suffocates on the black ink that colors over enlarged photos of Natives gathering Salmon, scattered around the slot machines.

We have learned to act as our own predators, as we unwittingly push the last grains of sand through the hourglass of tradition.

We are forced to accept and greasily guide the last nails pounding into the coffin of our own Indigeneity.

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 evolve apart, ever more.

A terrifying, disparate, and angry endgame of the native soul.

Chrissa Chorvat (Penobscot, Passamaquoddy)