in the course of using this digital journal to chronicle the development and sundry crises in my life, i realize i have neglected to incorporate (or at least acknowledge) a much more grand narrative of context that circumscribes my day to day life in every discernable way. it is of identity, this conflict of being american indian, but also white

i am reading books by sherman alexie and ray a young bear. as you might infer from the above quote, young bear's philosophy is much more straightforward, much more confrontational than alexie's... whose stories seem to pander to the romantic delusions about american indians held by american society at large

young bear's confidence has awoken in me a skepticism that has heretofore been buried by the banality of day to day life: papers to write, deadlines, taxes, alarm clocks, midterms. this skepticism has above all things shaken my confidence in atheism, science, historiography, theory, the theory of theory and the history of "evidence"


are not all of these arguments bound by an occidental lexicon? it is challenging for me because the english language is my first language. how can i permit myself to speak in the tongue of a people who have visited a cultural genocide upon my ancestors? yes, i could quickly dismiss crimes of blood on grounds that warring tribes have committed similar violence upon each other, and these crimes are comparable to the horrors visited upon indians by the french, english, spanish et al.

but the colonialism of europeans is a new kind of malefaction that transcends time and place. colonialism is a fantastic weapon that permits the descendants of its perpetrators to wash their hands of responsibility, while the descendants of its victims still suffer. that obliteration of culture, history and language i still feel today, its absence is a phantom limb: the cause of the spiritual wandering and wasting pessimism of a people in this age.

but i am also white, so whom do i hold responsible? there is an easy answer, one that seems remotely plausible, but its ugliness makes it seem absurd: if european colonialism was a "rape" of a people, what if i am a bastard child that had the misfortune of being concieved in the act?

i feel the metaphor is far too simplistic to be practical, but this is the language i know and this is the closest i can come to describing the feeling. it alludes the emotional and culture essence of who i am.

yes, i come from a privilaged position in society: i grew up with electricity, food, running water, an education, a male, a skin color that passes as white. i am in college. you can say i live comfortably



but what i am saying is i also feel uncomfortable, because i feel i am walking upon the rotting corpses of my ancestors

and there are those who are comfortable: they are not obliged to acknowledge that horrifying carrion terrain beneath them. they are not filled with the same horror as i am, because they do not percieve this mountain of bodies as i do. because i know that those are my dead relatives, those are ashes and bones that belonged to my family, whose history, religion and language i can never fully understand because it has been taken away, and can not be given back


this is what it means to say i am a mixed-blood who mis-interprets history, to be part of the genocide