(CW: Anti-Indigenous themes mention, racism, genocide)
This is basically a ramble about the effects of how my grandmother did not grow up in the Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma
We're doing a weaving project in my art class and I'm feeling this emotion that I can't describe-
It's a positive emotion, I know that, it comes whenever I'm beading, smudging, learning Ponca, or at Pow-Wow's.
I can only describe this emotion as a mix of euphoria and feeling like I'm floating.
Is this emotion positivity? Joy? Or happiness that I'm reconnecting with something that was stolen from me.
My grandmother and her brother, my uncle, could have grown up in the Ponca Tribe, could have been adopted by a family in the tribe, yet my grandmother was born a year before ICWA was passed, and my uncle two years before ICWA was passed, so they were adopted by a white family. They were a good family from what I heard, but that doesn't change that we were robbed from growing up in the Ponca Tribe, our tribe, our family.
My grandmother and uncle wouldn't know about their biological family until around 2018, when I was eleven.
My grandmother and my mother took DNA tests, and that's how we found out.
My grandmother had a Ponca father, and a white mother, and many siblings and cousins, all of whom were still alive.
We would be able to meet up with them, although my uncle only met them via video call.
At first, I thought this was normal, didn't think anything of it.
I realize now exactly how much was stolen from me.
I should have grown up with my culture. I should have been beading, and weaving, and learning the language, and attending Sundance, and going to Pow-Wow's, yet I didn't.
When I attended Sundance last year, I ended up crying. How couldn't I cry? After all, I was doing something I should have been doing my whole life.
I should be able to enroll in the Tribe, yet I can't, neither can my mother, because of blood quantums. My grandfather is a white man, so is my father. Although the elders are discussing letting people of lineal descent enroll.
... Then there's this other side of me.
Every time I wear my ribbon skirt, or smudge, I have this voice in my head, it says to me "You will never be indigenous enough. Look at your skin, you're too white, Rian. Your name is also too white. And look at your hair! You have your father's hair, and he's white! And that ribbon skirt, it's just cosplay! And you only bead because you just like the colors and textures!"
Would I still have that voice if I had grown up with my culture? Definitely not, this voice is the result of having the life I could have lived stolen from me.
The white people, the land stealers, they wanted the Indigenous Americans gone, so they took our children and tried to force us to be like them.
... They can try to apologize for the things they done, but no amount of apologizing will change the fact that they stole from us, and how we are still digging up the bodies of children at residential schools.
When they say "America is the land of the free!" Don't forget the Indigenous Americans, and how we're still being oppressed, and never forget how what the white people did still affects the children that didn't grow up in their culture, and how it affects their children, and their grandchildren.
And don't forget, the genocide of Indigenous Americans is still going on.
