I am Indian. Whenever I have a decision to make, usually it’s pretty easy. I look inside me and get in touch with my Indian feelings. Of course, there can be many variables involved when making a decision. Still, you have to start somewhere and so I consult my conscience. If the decision I wish to make is in keeping with my Indian mind, then the decision will resolve itself readily.
On the other hand, there are times when the decision to be made is not so easy, perhaps because my Indian mind and my non-Indian mind do not agree. My non-Indian mind has less to do with inner feelings and instincts and more to do with logical reasoning and European-type values. Take, for instance, when it comes time to deciding where to go to school if I wish to continue with my education after high school. My Indian mind tells me to stay local, stay as close to the reservation as I can—the nearest community college will do.
My non-Indian mind tells me something else: to look at the quality of the college to pick the best one to attend. When my Indian mind tells me one thing but another part of me is telling me something else, that’s when making a decision becomes a whole lot harder. I suppose everybody goes through the same process: important decisions need to be reached carefully and never by fiery impulse or by simply succumbing to “the lazy way”.
We all have a hell of a lot of “character traits” as Ms. Bonnie calls them in my honors English class: good traits and bad traits and some nondescript traits as though they haven’t figured out yet whether they’re for good or evil in this world. The traits I watch out for the most in myself are laziness and greed. I believe once either of those two vices gets hold of a guy, he’s a goner. Lazy people lie and greedy people steal. Both lead to a life of crime in my book as all Indians know.
We saw these two traits first in the White Man, when they were rare in our culture. After the Conquest, we began seeing these traits among our own. I know among the white kids I play with, laziness and greed are not a big deal. The white kid believes he’s all right because these bad traits move more slowly than some other wicked traits. He’s “only a boy”, he reasons, and has plenty of time to get rid of them before he grows up and becomes a man.
What he doesn’t always get, until it is too late, that deep down inside the skin of a person these two traits will keep eating away at a guy’s insides until eventually there’s nothing left—nothing left of the original human being with all that noble potential for righteous acts and a clean way of living.
Greed has never been much of a part of my makeup so I only have to keep an eye on it now and again, but laziness and procrastination, those are the bad habits I need to keep away from me. To be honest, I do work hard on the ranch my grandparents own—there’s no other way to live on a ranch but with hard work, least wise if the family intends to keep it.
Still, there are days where I’d much rather like to go fishing or swimming or saddle up my horse Thunderbolt and go riding in the hills toward the far end of our property . . . and sometimes I do go but lots of times I tell myself:
“You’ve got work to do, Ian. You haven’t got time to be messing around or doing just whatever you want. You’ll never keep up your grades that way. You’ll never get to college or last a week on campus if you don’t develop better habits. You should be home studying a subject that will help the ranch and the town and your people; you got no busy going swimming right now!”
Sometimes I go anyway because my deep down Indian mind is very strong and willful and oftentimes it doesn’t wish to listen to any more bullshit from my non-Indian European-style mind at all. And I can’t say as I blame it; when your bones and blood run strong toward the Indian way of life by temperament and purpose, it’s very hard for me or anybody else to impose a different set of norms upon it.
The Indian mind is always ready to rebel at the drop of a hat at anything it perceives to be an injustice. We didn’t ask the goddamn Europeans to come to our land! We welcomed them but that didn’t make any difference, did it?
The historians still argue over this point, whether we were bloodthirsty savages (old school) or whether we had a vibrant culture with good moral values (new school). They debate whether we treated others, even ocean-crossing strangers, fairly. It’s funny, but they don’t bother to ask us about what we did!
They don’t have a feel for the strength of oral traditions among my people. We pass down stories faithfully going back countless generations from a long time ago. Whether the greetings we gave the Europeans was friendly or indifferent or “go away”, it never made a jot of difference with the boat people crossing the ocean: they were set on taking our land. They began conquering all Indian tribes right from the get-go and that’s the simple truth. They were content to kill us all as though they didn’t know that was wrong!
The European men represented to my people all the worst vices and all the worst character traits any one man or any one people could have. It didn’t even seem possible to us that one white man could be so evil or that there could be dozens and hundreds more just like him, or worse. We didn’t know that so many evil thoughts could exist with greed way up high near the very top of a man’s mind, so it’s definitely ironic when I have a tough decision to make. You may well ask me why? Well, I made it this far into this Honors English class, didn’t I?
I’m supposed to be smart enough to include European-style methods of weighing “pros and cons” in my mind. I’m supposed to be able to balance out different sets of ideals and motivations and reasons for why they did what they did. The only trouble is, my whole body is screaming No! How can I assess them fairly when everything that came from the Europeans to my people is associated with tragedy, horror, pestilence, beatings, kidnappings, rape, mayhem, murder, starvation, oppression, humiliation, and death!
Why should I even try? I don’t want to think like no cursed soulless white European-American at all; that’s not the great path forward others think it is. For me, it just means more of the same. It’s just another invidious way to whisper, “We are still kicking your ass”, yet another way in which the conquest continues: “Be more like us”.
Why should I? So I can learn to live without a heart? So I can learn to live without an honest character, live without listening to my inner voice? Sometimes I can see this rebellious mood of mine coming on, Miss Bonnie, and I’ll do what I can to head it off. I’ll try to relax by moving my mind around to a less painful topic or just try to stay focused on my work around the ranch, like putting in fence posts, or maybe just try not to think at all: yes, that’s a special Indian way out of pain, too.
Lately, though, my Indian side seems to be growing stronger and I have less and less patience with my own efforts to reason out everything in such a way it’s supposed to make the most amount of sense. I’m getting in one of those moods right now so I’m going to lay off writing this essay for class “What does being Indian mean?”
I’m going to saddle up my horse and ride over to the river. Some of my friends will be there and maybe I’ll see my girlfriend “Pretty Flower” which is her Indian name. I don’t rightly know about whether I’ll go swimming or spend time talking with Pretty Flower but that’s not a decision I have to make right this minute. Heck, maybe I’ll do both!
PS Ms. Bonnie, that’s as far as I got. I’ll try to complete this assignment by next week if you’ll let me. I hope you can understand.
Sincerely,
Ian Brave Heart
