Perhaps the commentary about “Who is an Indian?” (Herald, May 26) missed the generational context of what it is to be a Native American. I am all too familiar with the “my-great-grandmother-was-a-Cherokee-princess” folk myth. I, however, grew up in a time not long ago and in a home where my Yaqui Indian father would tell me and his other Yaqui Indian children, with self-hatred in his voice, that it is “better to be an (n-word) than to be a Yaqui.” I grew up hating myself and wishing that I could just cut that part of me out – the tribal part – because as a child I perceived that simply being a Native American was the source of all the problems I experienced, from poverty and violence to all manner of social ill faced by native people then and now.
I grew up being told by family members that we are “just a Mexican Indian, we’re not real” because we are not “real” in the eyes of the government. As I grew into adulthood, I saw my Yaqui people transitioning from being “not real” to being “real” as the Pascua Yaqui Indian Tribe of Arizona was formally acknowledged as a federally recognized Native American tribe. Today, I watch as my Yaqui Indian people are being accorded status in the central valley of California, where we have always traveled to and from the deserts of Arizona in search of work in the agricultural and construction areas.
I completely understand the visceral argument by the younger generation of tribal people to not want to be associated with the follies of the European colonialists. I also understand the blood and tears of being a “real” Indian American during a time in history when it was neither fashionable nor prudent to be so identified. I know that I am a tribal American. I do not need a piece of paper to tell me who and what I am, and I own many pieces of paper that tell me who others think I am. I am an Indian.
Julie C. Abril
Durango
