This was my own personal journey on Thanksgiving Day. When I first was introduced to Nikki Crow’s project, Fix Your Side of the Feather, during the AWBW Durational Art Symposium I was moved to tears. I can remember my maternal grandmother, who was the third generation to be raised on a reservation, talk about the poverty and the despair, but that was all she would ever say–she never even shared which tribe, what state, anything other than telling me. ‘You are English now– that’s all you need to know!” All my life I felt like I was missing a huge piece of who I was. I looked nothing like my mother or my sister, and my mother always told me she did not believe I was her “real daughter’, but that I was swapped at birth. I always thought her comments were just the meanness that came with the alcoholism that affected so many indigenous people. I studied and searched for information to try and trace my roots but could find no one alive in our family who knew any of these secrets. I advocated for tribal rights and was even granted a fellowship to Dorland Mountain Arts Colony to continue my pursuit of this past history through poetry. I felt in my heart of hearts that I was truly indigenous, even though my fair skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes said otherwise. I blamed this on the “English assimilation”.
When all my family were long gone and at home DNA tests finally became affordable. I decided to utilize one to see if my ‘Indian blood” could be determined. I was anxious to see what tribe I might be related to and recover that sense of loss. The results were shocking–not only did I not have a single drop of Indian blood of any kind, but there was also barely any English–I was primarily Iberian (Portuguese and Spanish) and French! So being swapped at birth was a definite possibility, and not only was I non-indigenous, I was from the European groups who had come to the “New World” to rape, pillage, and destroy the very culture I had imagined was mine.
I think it took me so long to get myself to work on this project because I did not know where to start–which side of the feather was mine. To grow up thinking you are one thing, only to find out you are the enemy that destroyed that thing is very, very difficult. I am filled with sadness, shame, and confusion. In seeking the truth, I lost my connection to the generational past that I thought I belonged to and now I have to learn to forgive the generational past that is really mine. I feel this will be a long and arduous journey, but at least I am finally able to set my first step into it. Thank you, Nikki Crow, for helping me get started.
