Introduction to Native American Studies

essay

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Back in college, when I was still an active alcoholic, I sat in a bar and got drunk with two other Indian students—a reservation Nez Perce from Lapwai, Idaho, and a Lakota who’d grown up in Spokane, Washington, 932 miles away from his tribal homeland.

I was dressed in my usual T-shirt, jeans, and basketball shoes. And my black hair was short. But my friends wore their black hair in braids and had Indian-designed jewelry shining on their wrists and fingers.

We were two obviously-Indian Indians and an ambiguously ethnic dude who was probably Indian because he was carousing with the overtly-Indian drinkers.

Two white guys approached us. Their dark clothes and darker demeanors combined with their incipient leftist politics marked them as Gothic Hippies.

We’d run out of money. They were generous and treated us to multiple pitchers of beer.

And we talked politics.

The white guys bemoaned colonialism. They apologized to three drunk Indians for all the stereotypes about Indians being drunks. They valorized Native wisdom, courage, and spirituality.

My Nez Perce friend said he wanted to start an intellectual chapter of the radical American Indian Movement.

He said, “The struggle for tribal sovereignty must be fought with ideas not guns.”

The Indians and the white guys toasted and cheered for non-violence.

We toasted to justice.

We toasted to brotherhood.

We toasted to love.

We toasted to the land—to the very earth beneath our feet.

My Nez Perce friend said, “I am the dirt and the water. I am the good mud that has fed our soul for all of eternity.”

Then one of the white guys said, “I wish the United States would burn. All of it. Just burn right down to the ground.”

He raised his glass to toast that immolation but my Nez Perce friend rose from his seat and punched that white guy in the face. Knocked him off his chair.

It’s never a good idea for an Indian to punch a white guy, even a Gothic Hippie, so we ran.

And, as we three Indians hustled out of the bar, the Nez Perce yelled, “Fuck you! Fuck all you! Ain’t nobody talks shit about my country except for me!”

Trust this. There are very few Americans more patriotic and more devoted to American soil than a reservation Indian boy.