Not Even Sure What to Call This...

I’m not sure if it’s the level of stress I’m dealing with this semester, the conflicting aspects between how I often feel and what I've been reading, or the current state of the world, but it seems as if everything is just too damn complicated. No matter how you feel, what you think, what you do, what you read, there always seems to be an element of struggle in any given area of focus. We are at war with the world, with each other, with ourselves, with everything it seems. And it is all of us. It’s not just one group of people, or one “race,” or even one class… it’s just all of us, together… How could it not be confusing? I mean, come on, we’re essentially talking about billions of people that are all individuals in their own right, yet all are members of one or another of the thousands of unique cultures, speaking different languages and possess different histories, religions, customs, understandings of the world and their place within it, as well as telling different stories to explain all of the above; how could it be any more complicated and confusing? I mean, cultural clashes are simply inevitable in this set of circumstances.

I’ll admit it, this class has certainly shown me that even though I thought that I was a supporter of Indigenous peoples, I was just another foolish American who had been indoctrinated in the stereotypes of the Native American. Yes, I may have known that the Indigenous holocaust was one of the greatest if not the greatest genocide in world history; however, I bought into the ideal that true Native American society was shamanistic, environmental, and above all spiritually balanced with mother earth. What can I say, I grew up in the woods; this seemed appealing to me. I wanted to believe that this is what all Native Americans were. When Paul Chaat Smith says, “Today the equation is Indian equals spiritualism and environmentalism” (20), he is talking about me. Reading that was tough  that realization of, “damn… not me too…” Haha. It’s hard to stomach at first. I never really thought of the fact that I simply amalgamated all Indigenous peoples into one homogeneous grouping of spiritual warriors. I never thought of Indigenous peoples as “vastly different cultures, which occasionally fought each other, no doubt sometimes viciously and for stupid reasons” (19), like Smith explains. How often do we not think of the pre-Columbus Americas in the following way: “If some Indian societies were ecological utopias with that perfect, elusive blend of democracy and individual freedom, some also practiced slavery, both before and after contact” (Smith 19-20).

Of course, it’s not as if I didn't realize they were humans; it’s not like I thought they were perfect little angels. But for the most part, my concept of a Native American was the typical stereotype that Paul Chaat Smith presents. This brings me to the notion presented in much of what we read about Indigenous Peoples discussing non-indigenous peoples reading, studying, and writing about Indigenous Peoples and Indigenous issues. It would seem that as non-indigenous peoples, the best thing we could do is just stay out of it, or at least stop talking about Indigenous peoples and their issues as if we know anything about any of it. But there’s the problem. What am I doing now? What am I doing in this class? How do I write about this topic? I have no real understanding, the kind that comes from experience, of Indigenous peoples, their true history, their culture, or the issues they deal with on a daily basis. But of course the answer isn't simply to ignore the topic of Indigenous Peoples altogether, and they don’t state that either. How could that be the answer? In today’s world that simply isn't possible. We’re all to interconnected at this point. There’s no going back to a world without contact. It could never be that simple; it’s much more complicated than that.

But no matter how stressful school gets, with all the work and the complicated, confusing, and often depressing subject matter, I just can’t relinquish the idea that it is possible for us to live together in harmony. Not the kind of Utopian harmony where everything is perfect, because that just seems a little far-fetched from any standard, but the kind of harmony where we at least try to be open minded and respectful towards one another. And of course many of us already do this; thus the reason I know it is possible in the first place. If race is the big lie that divides us, then some kind of notion of unity would be the obvious antithesis to this lie, right? Doesn't Paul Chaat Smith state that, “we do have a common history, that there really weren't any Indians in 1492, there weren't really any Europeans either, that everything was so fabulously complex and so different from how were taught to think about it” (74)? I mean, we are all humans, aren't we?

So, isn't it like Paul Chaat Smith says, “What really matters isn't the numbers of particular outcome, but whether  we can build new understands of what it means to be human in the twenty-first century” (86)? It’s about humanity, isn't it? Collectively, we've all been losing it on some level for a long time, right? Yes, some of us may have had our humanity stolen from us through the application of colonial ideology, but like Fanon argues, both the colonized and the colonizer suffer in such a relationship. Today, the colonial descendants have seemingly lost every aspect of their humanity; indeed, they lost it through their active colonization of human beings in both the past and as they continue to do in the present.

So how can we regain this lost humanity? All of us, not just some. Once again, there seems to be no easy answer. No, the contemporary world is much too complicated for easy answers. Maybe part of that answers is in the realization of the lies we tell ourselves on a daily basis in history, in society, in politics, etc… Like the “imaginary line between ‘East’ and ‘West’ (63) that Tuhiwai discuses in “Colonizing Knowledges.” “They continue to be redrawn” (63) she states. We do it every day; we’re constantly drawing imaginary lines all over the place… This just complicates things further… I’m not sure what else to say. To be honest, the more I learn the more I find that I’m just not sure… not sure of anything…