graduate school first semester: so here I am writing about Indians again

“The conquest is not sustainable . . .” —Winona LaDuke thanks for bringing that to our attention she said the first time to my response to a history text about a famous painting of the Battle of Quebec that never mentioned the French and only mentioned Indians twice, once as nuisances, once as the noble savage kneeling by the dying English general this was during the French and Indian war I said, soon thousands of French and Indian people would be displaced, sold into indentured servitude my own family among them there would be bounties on the heads of Abenaki people in Maine, and the English would sow the fields of the Mohawks with salt thanks for bringing that up, she said the next book mentioned cannibals in the Caribbean, Indians who believed the Spanish were gods, Indians killing themselves, Indian women in love with Spanish pricks, Indians whose names, even when known, were passed over in favor of the ones given them by the Spanish stop writing about Indians she told me you’re making everyone feel guilty but the next book was back in Maine home territory the diary of a midwife right after that same French and Indian war and she was using herbs not found in English herbals and wrote that a “young squaw” visited her over a period of three weeks, but the famous historian said only that there may have been Indians in the area, while she wrote at length about white men dressing up as Indians to protest against the rich stealing their lands stop writing about Indians she told me again only louder as if I was hard of hearing you have to allow authors their subjects, she said stop writing about what isn’t in the text which is just our entire history this week, she said I’m really upset you’re telling the same story three times because there’s only one story about Indians and we all know what it is so I asked her if there are an infinite number of stories about white people and she told me to stop being racist so I stayed away from class for a week because they were reading a book about a mystery in the Everglades and I knew there had to be Indians in that swamp and I didn’t want to have to write about Indians again it was on to the next book written, she said by a Cherokee writer, which Leslie Silko, who is Laguna, will be interested to find out because the book was Ceremony but that is a small mistake sort of like saying that Dante is Chinese, so I overlooked it now, she told me write about Indians and I might have done that except she went on about Indians putting on a mask of whiteness like white people put on black face, and some of the students wrote it down in their notebooks and everyone started talking about minstrel shows then she wanted me to tell her if there is such a thing as an Indian world view and I said, well, yes and no, which I figured was safe since I would be at least half-right whichever answer she wanted, but when I mentioned the European world view, she said there isn’t any such thing which was quite a relief to me, I hate to think there were a whole lot of people thinking in hierarchies and as if the earth is a dead object and animals and plants and some people not having spirit then she said I’d better stick to what I know, that is, Indians, which is what I was trying to do in the first place, and that maybe European philosophy was too much for my primitive brain in spite of its being my undergraduate major and I pointed out that the oppressed always know more about the oppressor than vice versa, so she just glared at me and told me that I look Scandinavian which was a surprise to me and I wondered why I never was a prom queen since it was always the Scandinavian girls who got that honor, maybe they never noticed I was one of them. Exactly how much Indian are you anyway? she asked. I told her I guessed I was pretty much Indian. I suppose she wondered why I wouldn’t accept that mask of whiteness she kept talking about as myself