On Native Identity: Their Story and My Story and Our Story

The Transfiguration, John Giuliani

After I wrote my last post, many of you reached out to me with words of encouragement, support, solidarity, and appreciation. All of this I am immensely grateful for, especially since much of what I wrote delves into deep, unexplored, and certainly vulnerable parts of my being. There is a challenge in writing to invite your readers into your journey, whether through story, song, or poetry, each form allowing the writer to share a larger narrative where our humanity is allowed to shine through a little more freely. So much of our culture, I lament, is focused on self-perfection and independence. Individualism is a gift; it is not wrong. Yet it is only part of the story. Paradoxically enough, I've found that in order to reach into the deepest parts of my unique identity, I must explore the stories of the many who came before me. As I learn more about my ancestors, particularly those Indigenous peoples of the American Southwest, something awakens within me that feels intensely personal, authentic, and wholly unexplored. This can be scary territory, especially since I have been on a journey of integration in my ethnic identity for so long, asking the Lord to reconcile the diverse and seemingly conflicting heritages from places as far away as Poland, England, Northern Mexico, Arizona, and New Mexico.

Although we struggle with language to describe this, I know that I am not alone in this journey. Many people I know carry an awareness that they belong to a certain cultural heritage, but have no practical understanding of what that means or how it influences them. This is a subtle journey for many of my friends and family from a White, Euro-American ancestry, where the diverse European cultures have been assimilated into the broader "melting pot" of what it means to be an American, particularly in the first half of the twentieth century. Sometime this connects to religious traditions, as is the case for two of my Dutch-American friends, rooted in a strong Reformed and Calvinist background. In other cases it comes to the fore in patterns of language and family expectations, apparent to my Italian-American and Eastern-European American friends. Although I can understand cultural assimilation in many ways, my nonwhite side of the family has always taught me in a deeper sense of what it means to be connected to a culture. It was no surprise that I felt at home, as a college student, among a group of Latinos who welcomed me with open arms and encouraged me to live out my identity as one of them. Of course I recognize my White-American heritage, but I had little means to celebrate it as I do with my Latin American brothers and sisters. Celebration is important in many cultures, and it can be a beautiful learning experience to participate in a community gathering where you are an outsider, at least culturally. Often, when we dig deeper, it can be an integrating, liberating experience, tapping us into the joy of who we are and how God built us. The paradox of the one and the many becomes tangible, which is a holy thing.

Yet the journey I find myself on these days does not feel like that. When I was exploring and celebrating my Latino heritage, I could do so in a community of available, supportive, and fluent people, eager to provide bridges and mentorship along the journey. As I delve into the stories of my Indian ancestors, the experience is one of polarizing distance: instead of the joy I described earlier, I feel confusion, anger, numbness, horror, and, ultimately, a grief that leaves me staring into the abyss of despair.

One reaction has been to armor myself against this pain through more critical understanding. I've shared a brief story of my people in the other blog, and so won't repeat it here. After reading more about the general history of indigenous peoples through archeological and critical, historical scholarship perspectives, I have a deeper well of intellectual resources to draw from. I feel better prepared to engage in the multidimensional and layered history of Native peoples in North America, most of whom have not been able to share their stories for themselves because of the effects of colonization, assimilation, and, at its worst, genocidal extermination. British historian James Wilson gives a refreshingly clear view of the distinct cultural regions that European colonists interacted with over the past 500 years in his book The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America. He uses beautiful Native oral traditions to frame each section of the book, and draws from primary sources left from the Spanish, French, and English settlers that interacted with and misunderstood the peoples who, ironically, often critically provided for their very survival through the introduction of staple crops like maize. Writing about the context in which my family finds itself, he notes that

[w]hile, in the Northeast, the Indian reality seems to have been all but obliterated centuries ago, in large areas of Arizona and New Mexico, the Anglo-American presence still feels often only skin-deep. (...) At Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico, you can glimpse what the first Spaniards must have seen when they first reached the area in the middle of the sixteenth century: a dense huddle of adobe houses - perhaps the oldest continually inhabited community in the country - crowded on the top of a sheer sided mesa rising dramatically out of the heat shimmer, where the people still follow the same annual cycle of ceremonies and festivals that their ancestors practiced hundreds of years before Columbus. (174-5)

This reality was always a part of my experience when traversing the great, open, and breathtakingly beautiful landscapes of New Mexico. I knew enough to not call those who dwelt at Mesa Verde Anasazi, but rather Puebloan people. I knew the significance of Navajo rugs (enough to spot a fake), pottery, and Hopi kachina dolls. My exposure to these people and their stories was nothing new. But the invitation that the stories of these people are somehow a part of my own story is something very new. The overwhelming sense of the culture's wholly other worldview messes with my primarily Western sensibilities. Of course I am pluralistic, sensitive, and aware of my multidimensional makeup. But I often process these disparities through a framework of critical reasoning and analysis wholly indebted to Western systems. The challenges, upon breaking open these stories, hearing the history, and looking within, has left me with a dizzying array of new challenges to these conventions I had previously assumed. The analogy is that of a wave crashing over the parched landscape of the desert, an image that the Aboriginal peoples of Australia interpret as signaling the end of the world.

But this isn't the end of the world. This is the beginning. In the midst of what feels like death, something new emerges.

And, as so often in my experience, this newness heralds a life that leads me into a fuller picture of myself, my identity, and how I fit into the world. Drawing from an increasingly non-dualistic body of teaching from mystical and contemplative traditions, I learn that as we discover ourselves (often through such traumatic and humbling circumstances as this), we connect with what is True: the transcendent Identity that connects us with God, and ultimately is more important and stronger than what we could ever create for ourselves. As I delve into this Native heritage, I can begin to see that this is a part of my story. It is difficult to carry the overwhelming tragedy of the story, and still more to integrate this into the larger narrative that is held together with my Polish, English, and Mexican ethnicity. To our Western eyes, especially those of us who have strong Christian convictions, Native oral traditions are suspect because of our fear that the message of the Gospel will be compromised should it accommodate a worldview that is imbued with a very different way of relating to the natural world, other sentient beings, the seasons, and time itself. The Church feared that the message of Christ's salvation would be lost amidst syncretism. Turns out, our fear of heresy might tarnish a natural, and even healthy, process as Native peoples attempt to integrate the truth of Jesus into their own understanding. The Sicangu Lakota author Richard Twiss writes that theologians and church leaders with objectivity, yet

...the conversation is situated within, and thus prejudiced by, Western reductionist categories. (...) [But] syncretism is not the undisputed end of the process, although it might end up that way. (...) I think we would be better off if we considered syncretism to be the exploration of the synthesis of faith, belief, and practice in a dynamic process of blending, adding, subtracting, testing, and working things out. This process does not take anything away from the authority of Scripture or Orthodoxy. (Rescuing the Gospel from the Cowboys: A Native American Expression of the Jesus Way, pp.31-3) 

These are ideas that I have that challenge and confront my perspective as someone rooted in a Western, Christian world. Tradition is associated more in my mind with liturgy, use of language, and sacramental offices as a means to interpret scripture, than as the gift of a people whose blood still runs through my veins. Yet Twiss and other elders confident in Jesus' way give me reason to hope. In the midst of the tragedy and significant challenges confronting Native peoples, the courageous few have sought the hand of the Creator and the guidance of His Great Spirit into new consciousness. Listening to the drums, the chants, and whoops of these people, and my heart feels something that I only feel in few places: with my family, at Mass, with trusted friends. It is being known by God, and feeling no insecurity or shame, putting aside the brokenness for once, and experiencing the Great Love that precedes all things.

I do not know what all this means. I do not know if I will ever be comfortable identifying as Native, Indian, or Indigenous myself, let alone as an Apache of the Chiricahua people. I am left with more questions than answers, especially regarding the integration of my own faith tradition. But I cannot ignore this invitation any longer. The violence suffered by these people is a story undergirded by a proud culture stretching back into the endless story that Creator continues to speak into being. It is their story, and they have taught me, that it is my story as well.

Jesus and the Disciples, John Giuliani