This is Not My Narrative

Small Epiphanies: December 18

Back to the DNA for a just a moment:

I think the ways in which the discourses surrounding the idea of being of Native American descent have affected me in ways far more subtle than the idea of being Italian or German,because I wasn’t raised in any sort of Native American culture. This, at one and the same time, created in me, wrote on me, an awareness of being other–other than of some sort of Western European descent, like the rest of my family, other in the sense that we so often write Native Americans, culturally, ethnically, as other, and other in a third sense–other from very own my Native American descent, if that makes any sense at all.

I was Native American without ever really being Native American. And now I am not Native American at all.

But I think that doesn’t change the ways in which those discourses nudged and jostled and prodded my various subjectivities into certain shapes.

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