Author points out not all Native Americans same

Not all Native American tribes are the same, and not all Native Americans within a tribe are the same, according to Anton Treuer, author and professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University.

Treuer presented on his book, “Everything You Wanted to Know About Indians But Were Afraid to Ask,” and about the history of Native Americans on May 5 at the Arvid E. Miller Library and Museum on the Stockbridge-Munsee Reservation. He noted that many people who encounter Native Americans for the first time are still thinking that they remain in the small communities, wear feathers on their heads and live in squalor. That comes as a result of many books about Natives being written by non-Natives.

“Most of them haven’t spent time in a Native place or talked with them really, but they were the authorities on all things Native, which is kind of weird,” Treuer said. “By the way, it’s not just a problem for the historians, but also for the people developing our school system and wondering why it’s not working for our kids.”

That is changing, though. More Natives like Treuer are writing books and getting degrees, he said, so that they can go out and teach the world about the real history of Native American tribes.

“It’s still like a work in progress. We’re not done,” Treuer said. “We’re still fighting for our sovereignty. We’re still fighting for all of our rights and still trying to be seen. There is a lot of exciting stuff that’s happening, though, and I have a lot of hope we may be able to take things forward.”

He held up his mother, Margaret, as an example. She was born and lived on a reservation, but her mother had been taken at age 6 to the boarding schools, where many Native children were forced to assimilate into the American government’s way of thinking. Margaret moved past the cultural assimilation and became the first female Native American attorney in Minnesota, Treuer said.

“That was very powerful for me, watching her,” he said.

Healing the hurt is still something that Native Americans struggle to do. Treuer said that, in childhood, he had a chip on his shoulder, and many other children do as well due to the European-style of education that exists in America today.

“When somebody feels assaulted, it takes you right back to your old caveman impulses — like flight, fight or freeze,” Treuer said. “People are asking, ‘Why do we have truancy problems with these kids?’ In some ways, we’re still doing education for assimilation stuff instead of empowering everyone to be exactly who they are.”

Native people walk a tightrope between their ancestral heritage and what the American ideal says they need to be, according to Treuer. They have to figure how to live in the world but still hold tight to the values of their people, he said.

“That’s what colonization is,” Treuer said. “It’s about erasure. You have to worry about becoming the other instead of being true to yourself.”

During his presentation, Treuer showed the financial information on his home community of Bena, Minnesota, on the Ojibwe Reservation, although he said he hesitated to do so. The naked numbers that show the average person per capita makes $8,693 annually with a household income average of $24,167, but that doesn’t show the community’s full picture, he said.

“The problem with stereotypes isn’t so much that they’re incorrect as much as they’re incomplete,” Treuer said. “They give you one, single, narrow little story and leave you to understand a whole group of people by that.”

The problems of perception have grown over millennia, so the resolution is not going to come overnight, Treuer said. He hopes his book and other efforts by Native Americans will make some steps forward in realizing that the big picture needs to come into focus.

“We need to keep planting the seeds, and then it can transform the entire landscape and ecosystem,” Treuer said. “That’s what we do in education, and that’s what we do when we work to rebuild our ceremonies, language and culture. That’s even what we do when we’re having a conversation like this. It’s important work you’re leading into in your own way.”

Treuer hadn’t even planned to write about Native American issues and ways of life, but fate had other plans for him.

“I stumbled into this book entirely by accident,” Treuer said. “My goal when I finished high school was to get out of town and never come back. I got into Princeton University and thought, ‘Yes, I’m now escaping the brambled racial borderland of my youth.’ That was just naive of me.”

Once Treuer got to Princeton, he was riddled with questions about his Native heritage, like “Where’s your tomahawk?” That led him to want to go back home and never leave. However, it also motivated him to move forward and help one person at a time understand that not everything about Native Americans fits into one box.

“I realized that even I didn’t have the answers to a lot of questions,” Treuer said, noting he’s learned as much as anyone else about Native Americans working on the book. “It didn’t fall out of the sky just because I was Native.”

lpulaski@newmedia-wi.com