1 post from October 2009

Is the glass half full or half empty? It depends on how thirsty you are. After a run, on a hot day without shade or upon awaking after a night of too many drinks, well that glass seems mighty empty. Can this be applied to the ancestral composition of a human? When you are 2% Indian does that even count? Can I call myself any part Indian at all? I don’t remember even knowing I had any native blood until sometime in high school when some family member told me we had Cherokee ancestors. It wasn’t until later that I questioned the Cherokee bit. I didn’t recall learning about any Cherokee tribes in Wisconsin. In this case, I think Cherokee was used in relation to the word Indian much in the way Kleenex is used to refer to tissue. Without details it seemed like I might be as lily-white inside as my outward appearance indicates. Perhaps it was just a family myth - if there was any basis, how could I make it to my high school years without knowing this?  A distant relative’s family tree changed this. Ah, internet…all this family I didn’t even know I had! Now I have the names of these French traders and voyageurs, native ancestors and their Métis offspring. Now I know that I am this tiny bit Ojibwe and an even tinier bit Ottawa. Now I wonder if this is why I keep coming back to Wisconsin despite a couple serious efforts to establish my life elsewhere. That or the crappy economy that made it hard to establish the expat life I wanted, and subsequently the life beyond the Wisconsin state line that I attempted in Chicagoland… Okay, fine – it’s the economy but that’s not half as poetic.

So now I’m  here pondering this 2%. As best I can figure I am as much Native as I am Irish/Scottish which is the lineage one might guess to look at me. I like to wonder what parts of me might be holding latent Indianness.  I’m roughly 135 lbs – 2% off that would be 2.7 lbs, easily lost in a couple weeks of regular zumba class attendance, or gained equally easily in a weeklong vacation. But of course this sort of thing can’t be so easily quantified. I purchased a book on the Ojibwe culture after a google search turned up my great (x5) grandfather’s name in its’ contents. If I am keeping my family lines straight, I believe it was written in the late 1800s by a descendant of  a sister of my great (x4) grandmother. There is a photo of him inside the jacket and I search his face for some sort of similarity. And I’m probably just seeing what I want to see in the form of a resemblance. I have a great capacity for finding patterns and coincidences upon which I assign meaning (ask me about my last couple “soul-mates”).  What traits of the Crane clan might I still posses? As I ponder my identity, I wonder if my 2% feels annoyed at being romanticized by my other 98%. I do know my 98% will feel ever so much more comfortable wearing my minnetonka moccasins. I know I don’t want to be that annoying white person who shows up at the Lac de Flambeau reservation all, look at me I’m Indian too. No I think my path will be quiet visits to the places that figure in my family history.

I was in my local library returning CDs and grabbing a new stack of them, I decided to wander through the stacks. And at the beginning of the fiction section, there’s a small group of books on display racks facing outward towards me. I pick up Sherman Alexie’s 10 Little Indians. In typical romanticizing white fashion, I am going to believe that my
ancestors or the universe somehow made sure I saw this book. I almost set it back in it’s holder and exchanged it for “Reservation Blues” which I found in the shelving section to it’s right. But then I thought “no, I ought to take this one. It might be something I need to read.”  There are some parallels between my finding the book and the character in the first story’s relationship with a book. Also a jack of clubs card and a long skinny piece of paper folded lengthwise and stuck together fell out of this book. If that has any meaning, I have yet to divine it. And all the ways to be Indian, 2% or otherwise, I think this book might give me a start in figuring out this identity or why I shouldn’t be dwelling on this at all and just keep being my awesome self.