This time of year, I like to walk at sunrise, when the air is cool and blue-bellied clouds hang low over the mountains.
Today my thoughts are heavy saddle bags. I walk with my dog at my side, in the privacy of the wind, thinking about a workshop I was invited to attend, where I was asked to speak about being bicultural and what it is like for me living as a mixed-race person and calling two cultures home.
I’m walking faster than usual this morning. I need to wrestle down my thoughts holding me hostage. About the first day of the workshop, within the first hour, shortly after we received our orientation session and “before” the workshop began, we were given an icebreaker assignment. Asked to pair ourselves with someone we didn’t know. We were given a topic and asked to take turns and give each person five minutes to talk on the topic.
The white woman I partnered with went first. When it was my turn, something I said triggered this woman to begin asking me a series of rapid fire, deeply personal, questions. Each time I answered she fired yet another question and I found myself explaining that I didn’t grow up in a white community setting. Why not? She asked. Where did you live? When I said Southeast Los Angeles and began to explain she interrupted and said, But you don’t look like you are Native American. And you didn’t grow up on a reservation. How much Indian are you? She was asking me to tell her my blood quantum. It's an inappropriate question. Indian Blood Quantum laws in the United States and the former Thirteen colonies were used as a tactic to reduce the number of Indians and Native Nations and resulted in forced assimilation.
So, what you really mean… She said next. But I didn’t hear what she said. By now I could feel my hackles going up.
This scene and similar scenes play out thousands of times, over and again for me and for my brown skinned family members and friends, by white peers who think they know our lives and our lived experience better than we do.
My mind began to unsheathe my tomahawk. I wanted to chop her words to bits. Instead, I did what I always do when this type of micro aggression happens. I shut down. I could feel myself shrinking, getting smaller and smaller, fading away.
But her next statement startled me alert. She said. "What you mean is that you have some Native American ancestry, now I understand.”
But she didn’t understand anything at all. I grew up with my Indian ancestors, we sat down together for dinner every night. Grandma sewed beadwork on uncle Elmer’s deer skin leggings and my cute aunt Lydia, with her beautiful black hair, cried because the white men at work called her a squaw.
Suddenly, I felt a deep place inside me, rise. Immediately I was able to pull myself into the moment, into what was happening all around me. From a corner in the crowded room I saw a friend, a close friend. Her face tender, concerned and staring right at me. I began telling myself to stop shutting down. Climb out, I demanded of myself. This was my opportunity to learn a better way to deal with micro aggressions. It was painful but I stayed open. When the two-day workshop ended I felt something inside me stand taller in mixed-race America where nothing comes easy.
By the time I’ve walked the first mile, my morning thoughts are untangled. I look up at the sky; the sun is covered with high gray clouds. I shrug my shoulders and tighten my cinch on yesterday. The air is filled with birdsong and my dog is panting happily. Then I make the decision to set my weary thoughts free. In the second mile of my walk only the colors emerging in the scrub oak and the smell of mountain sage call me. Call me home.
