I Will Never Be Tiger Lily
Image credit & original art by: Robohontas/Fox Spears
(Originally published in the Taking Back Tiger Lily e-zine by Four Winds Literary Magazine, which is unfortunately no longer online.)
Content note for mentions of racialized sexual assault.
I will never be Tiger Lily
I will never be Tiger Lily
I was a pale-skinned child easily burned from five minutes in the sun, adopted and raised by a white couple who had adopted a white daughter first and later adopted my brother and I together. They said he was Indian but didn’t know what I was. Other people shook their heads and said “I think they got it mixed up… look at her dark eyes, her heavy dark hair, those cheekbones!” My parents too conceded, either the adoption agency had gotten mixed up or we were both Indian. I stood silent, I had no identity to argue for or against. I did not know who or what I was as adults discussed me much the same way people now discuss my dog’s breed. (Later we found the paperwork that showed we had the same father who said his parents were both full-bloods. Much later we found most of his quiet family who denied being Indian had tell-tale boarding school backgrounds. Later we found the aunt who wasn’t in denial, who was not silent.)
I used to lay in the living room or my bedroom, my ear pressed to the floor hearing a drum beat that reminded me of the twice-a-year pow wow my adoptive parents religiously took us to. I did not know it was my own heart I was hearing. Did not know the saying that the drum is the heartbeat of our nations. Something of it calmed me though, made me feel at home, drew out visions I didn’t have names for at that age. Though we went to the pow wows we never got close and I was too short to see through the crowds to where the dancers were. Bits of small floral print cottons, ribbons and feathers would flash by but I don’t think I ever saw a traditional woman dancer, fancy dancer or jingle dress dancer in their fullness to give me a clear image of a contemporary, living, breathing Indigenous woman. I had only the sounds of drums and the smell of fry bread and descriptions from my tall white sister.
I loved Peter Pan, that white boy with a white fairy who spoke of never growing up, fought pirates, played in the forest and with mermaids in a cove. I loved that the movie had an Indian girl - look! We were represented! I had never seen an Indian girl anywhere else on TV. I didn’t like the chief, her father. There was something about him I thought seemed a joke at his expense, making him seem foolish, just like the Indian boy in Looney Tunes cartoons. The only other Indian women I saw conformed to Tiger Lily - in western movies where the men said “how” and fought but the women were seen from a distance, silent, demure, props. Tiger Lily had a bigger role, she was wanted. Men and boys fought for her. She too was silent, demure, big-eyed in a way I was not.
I knew one other Indian, a boy at school who had sad eyes, brown skin and only stayed two years before moving. Later a girl came for only one year and I learned the word “Blackfeet” as the teacher told us about how the name referred to dirty unwashed feet. I also learned Indian girls could be tough, not silent and demure, and maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t a failure. I was sort of in love with her for being a different example.
But Tiger Lily was the model. Tiger Lily was the dream. Tiger Lily was the impossible goal.
What might she have said if she’d been given the chance? Was she kept silent to silence us?
I had a doll my mom had bought me to add to my collection. This one was special even though she was crudely made. Her plastic skin was that dark chocolate with red tint I re-created later on my teenage lips with Revlon’s Blackberry lipstick. She wore a sloppily sewn fawn colored dress with tiny seed beads and casually cut fringe. Her black hair sat in two stiff braids, a headband wrapped across her forehead. She was too chubby and dark to remind one of Tiger Lily but the basic ideas were there. The body was stiff, unposeable, she could not even sit, such a rigid vision of Indigenous girlhood while all my other dolls were more flexible and baby-like.
Around this same time my friend’s mother managed a ceramics shop, full of figurines and wall plaques to be painted as a hobby. She let me choose what I wanted and I took a small figure, a little Native girl or woman huddled in a blanket, just her face and hair peeking out. I painted her and kept her for years, though my painting was sloppy and I gave her bright blue eyes I myself did not have. My older more skillful sister selected a plaque in the shape of an Indian brave’s head and painted him with bright feathers in his hair, solemn stoic face. When I see team mascots now they make me think of the Indian brave plaque my sister still had on her wall when she died, this romanticized and commercialized image.
I was silent when the neighbor boy asked if I wanted to meet his friend Christopher Columbus. Silent and rigid when he pushed me down on the bathroom floor and called me a squaw while Christopher Columbus explored my body, pierced me, tried to kill me. I stayed silent, told no one.
I had been taken like Tiger Lily. It was no victory for me. I wondered what had she benefitted from the pirates and Peter and her father trading her back and forth. They tie her, untie her, shuffle her from hand to hand. She is a prize but not a person. I did not feel like a prize or a person in that moment. I felt like my doll, able to be laid down on the floor, done to but certainly not consenting or able to stop what was done.
In school when we studied Native Americans we learned very little and only men’s names were taught. The women cooked, made beadwork and packed and set up camp over and over. They had no names, no defining characteristics, no individuality. They were silent and remained in the background even in paintings reproduced in our textbooks. There was passing mention of Pocahontas and Sacajawea, women who we were told welcomed the white people and married white men, blending communities. Their job was to make white people comfortable. I was pointed to as an example of their success - the light-skinned Indian who blended Indian and white. I was silent and felt dirty because at home I had been taught how the white men had brought sickness, war and death to Native Americans.
I went home to my father and asked, “what does it mean to be an Indian girl?”
And this is how I learned of White Buffalo Calf Woman, Yellow Woman, and Buffalo Calf Woman the warrior sister who saved her brother’s life. Women were the leaders, the healers, the seers and even warriors of our nations. I learned of Cynthia Parker, who we call Nadua, the white woman who bore a great chief of the Comanche and silently starved herself to death rather than live with the white people again when she was captured and taken back.
I shed the myth of Tiger Lily, a white man’s creation, a white man who had never even seen a real Indigenous person in his life. I shed the myth and vowed never to be silent again. I shed the myth and vowed to be the storyteller, the healer, the seer and the warrior. The one who rescues herself.
I will never be Tiger Lily
I will never be Tiger Lily
I will never be Tiger Lily
I will never be Tiger Lily
I the storyteller & spell weaver
titsay
turnnoffyourmind
stormborns
germansingergirl
tangentwithtanner