American Culture Made Me Believe Being Black Wasn’t Good Enough

3 months ago 9

“September,” an excerpt from Come By Here by Neesha Powell-Ingabire

YAHA

The tour guide calls our class’s attention to an alligator on a log, napping to a symphony of songbirds and swaying bald cypress trees. Y2K is around the corner, and we’re on a field trip at the Okefenokee Swamp. Our lives are in the hands of a tour guide captain, a middle-aged white man whose name I can’t remember. Since we are under twelve and got a children’s discount, the tour cost us each less than twenty bucks. During the one-hour bus ride to our destination, kids joked about who would get eaten first.

Mr. Tour Guide is expected to save two dozen of us from the whims of a thirty-five-mile-per-hour-running reptile with an appetite for small mammals. He is the only protector on our long white canoe in the middle of miles of black water. This 400,000-acre wetland, the traditional territories of the Timucua peoples near the Georgia-Florida border, is now his domain. White men claimed it as theirs hundreds of years ago, falsely believing land is intended to be owned as products of a feudal society. I am supposed to trust this man, but I don’t. He is a stranger with the same skin color as the kids who call me “nigger.” I can’t stop my foot from shaking. There are an estimated ten thousand alligators in the surrounding water, no known attacks, but I’m not privy to this knowledge. So I wonder if the reptiles are hungry for human flesh, hungry to conquer like those white colonizers.

Thirty years from now, a white-owned company will apply for a permit to open a mine by this swamp, threatening all the wildlife we’re here to see—and burial grounds of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.

YUCHA

If you’re curious about the Timucua, you won’t find anything about them on the Okefenokee Swamp’s website. You won’t find out what Okefenokee means either. It could derive from a Muscogee word for bubbling water, oki fanôki. Or, from a Creek word meaning “trembling land.” Timucua may originate from a term one of their enemy tribes used to refer to them, Thimogoua, or the Spanish mispronunciation of atimoqua, the Timucuan word for “lord” or “chief.” Before their extinction, the Timucua had thirty-five chiefdoms in southeast Georgia and North Florida. The last Timucuans are said to have either left for Cuba on a boat in 1763 or been taken in by other Indigenous groups.

Our tour guide didn’t share this information with us. Perhaps he thought it insignificant. I hope he didn’t withhold it intentionally. Native American history was rarely taught at my elementary school until Thanksgiving came around. I once graced my local newspaper in kindergarten wearing a pilgrim costume. Reading my picture book of Christopher Columbus “discovering” the Americas, I made no value judgments; although, I visually identified with the colorful, feathered brown-skinned people with jet black hair. The only Native Americans I knew at the time lived inside an electronic tube. From bed, Mama watched black and white “cowboys and Indians” movies on weekends. I saw Native American cartoon characters (usually voiced by non-Natives) far more than actual Native American actors. I didn’t know any Indigenous folks in real life, as far as I knew.

On the morning of my eighth birthday, Mama gave me my gifts by spreading them out on her bed: a smorgasbord of Pocahontas, the first Disney princess to look remotely like me with her sepia-colored skin. I loved everything about the rebellious character and found her attractive. Among the presents was a soundtrack CD with a book of lyrics, which included a song loosely based on an Algonquin language that implores the Great Spirit to help Pocahontas’s people “keep the ancient ways.” I boisterously sang the chant at the beginning and end of the song, pretending to dance by the sacred fire: “Hega hega yah-pi-ye-hega/Yah-pi-ye-he-he hega.” It felt like the cousin of the clapping, dancing, jumping, and shouting that shook my Black Missionary Baptist church each Sunday. It felt joyful.

HAPU

“Woahhh ohhh ohhh ohhh,” my cheer squad warbles to the tune of the band playing in front of us, our right hands making a chopping gesture. We’re cheering on our middle school football team, the red and black Needwood Warriors. I’m standing beside a friend who I consensually touch on during practice. We touch each other, not sexually but playfully. It gives me a rush. I’m crushing on her; although, I would never admit it because no one is openly gay at my school. I only see gay people on TV.

A white male teacher with a brown ponytail wearing Native American garb stands in the distance, and nobody questions whether it’s cultural appreciation or appropriation. Native American costumery is ubiquitous here, and we are all blissfully ignorant or at least we behave that way. A group of parents and students voted for the Warrior to be our mascot to channel the spirit and strength of “Georgia’s first Americans.” The Warrior’s side profile graces a wall of our cafeteria: a chisel-faced man with red warpaint across his nose and a red and white headdress.

I cringe when I see myself tomahawk chopping on the morning announcements, a goofy grin spread across my face. I wish I could hide inside of my shirt. We all look terribly silly. None of us are Native American; I know of only one Native American kid in the entire school. Nevertheless, I dutifully chop whenever I hear those familiar notes. We chop and chop and chop away, never knowing we’re cheering on Timucua land.

Native American costumery is ubiquitous here, and we are all blissfully ignorant or at least we behave that way.

CHEQUETA

I stretch my legs out, resting them on the back of the seat in front of me. It’s the mid-2000s, and I’m sitting in a college lecture hall with my friend, Alexa, waiting for class to start.

Alexa examines my legs.

“Your skin is red like an Indian’s… you got Indian in your family, girl?” she asks.

“Who knows?” I reply.

I am tickled by the question, a little flattered even. I’ve been asked if I was mixed with white before, but this feels a whole lot cooler.

Almost every African American at some point wonders whether our great-grandmother with high cheekbones and straight black hair hanging down to her butt or whether our own loose curls mean we got “Indian” in our family. I think it makes us feel better, like at least not all our ancestors came over in chains. Being Black and Native American is seen as infinitely more special and exotic than being plain old Black. Black American guests on Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s PBS genealogy show, Finding Your Roots, are always surprised when family rumors of Native American ancestry are proven wrong via DNA. Gates tells them Black people with Native American heritage are a lot less common than we think.

Still, the myth of the Black and Native great-grandmother persists. When another Black girl at school had long, straight hair without putting a chemical relaxer in it, I thought to myself with a tinge of envy, “She must got Indian in her family.” She had won the genetic lottery because she didn’t have to waste hours with smelly paste burning her scalp like most of us fully Black girls.

MARUA

I am on the phone in my rundown office on the southside of Seattle in 2014, chatting with an elderly white activist. We’ve met once or twice at meetings. Our conversation about organizing public housing tenants drifts to other topics, like the Duwamish tribe, whose land Seattle occupies, and their fight for federal recognition.

“By the looks of it, you’ve got Native American blood in you,” the lady says.

I tell her she is mistaken. I have my suspicions, but I don’t want to be misconstrued as claiming an Indigenous identity. I am more aware of whose land I’m on than ever living in a state with twenty-nine Indian reservations, a stark contrast to my home state Georgia’s zero. It’s easy for people in Georgia to talk about Indigenous Peoples as if they’re all gone. Not here though. Here, I attend events where land acknowledgements are spoken first, brief statements made in respect to the Native American tribes whose land we inhabit. The city is named after a Duwamish and Suquamish chief who befriended white settlers, who in turn expelled Chief Seattle’s people from their ancestral home. I wouldn’t dare say, “I might have Indian in my family,” in this achingly beautiful environment. I literally cried as Jojo and I drove on the edge of Washington state’s snow peaked mountains dotted with evergreens on our trek from down south. The Duwamish are the rightful keepers of these lush, enchanting lands. It infuriates me to think about their tribe being denied their right to self-governance and federal funding for decades.

Being Black and Native American is seen as infinitely more special and exotic than being plain old Black.

One of my first Thanksgivings in Seattle, Jojo and I eat dinner with two friends, another couple. One of them is an enrolled member of a Coast Salish tribe, but we don’t discuss the irony of him being here. He’s here to spend time with friends, not to celebrate. Somehow, we end up watching Pocahontas on VHS after dinner, and when I hear the familiar Algonquin chant of my childhood, I instinctually belt it out. A sharp look from my wife stops me mid-chant, and my face burns. Our Coast Salish friend doesn’t say a word, but I am still ashamed. I’m not an eight-year-old nor a middle schooler anymore. I now know Pocahontas’s story is about colonization, genocide, and trafficking, not a romance between her and the Englishman John Smith like Disney portrays. I know you shouldn’t wear traditional Indigenous clothes as a costume. I know Indigenous songs aren’t meant for me to sing—they’re for the descendants of those who fought and died to preserve them. I know they are sacred. I know you shouldn’t adopt another culture’s customs without their explicit permission, and even then, you walk a fine line between appreciation and appropriation. I ask myself, am I no better than the “white man”?

I silently vow to do better. I act unbothered as we watch the rest of the movie, even jeering at John Smith, but I’m secretly disturbed by my own ignorance.

MARECA

Sitting in my office chair at the tenants’ union, I spit into a tube with vigor. This tube and this spit hold the key to reconstructing lineage lost in the Middle Passage. This is redemption for the times in school when I couldn’t answer, “Where is your family from?” As a Christmas gift to myself, I forked over $99 to 23andMe for an ancestry DNA test.

My mother gets excited when I tell her about the test. “You know we have Indian in our family, right? My grandmother who you never met, my dad’s mom, used to tell me her grandmother, September, was an Indian with long hair down her back who lived in South Carolina.” Mama never mentioned this before, but I’m not surprised. Every Black American family has a September.

A month goes by. I hungrily scan my DNA test results as soon as they hit my inbox: 75.6 percent West African, 9.4 percent Congolese and Southern East African, 12.1 percent European, one percent Chinese and Southeast Asian…and 0.4 percent Native American. This means 0.4 percent of my DNA matches Native American samples in 23andMe’s database. Being this percentage Native American means my most recent fully Native American ancestors roamed the earth two hundred to three hundred years ago. September was probably more white than Native American.

When Mama hears the news, she sounds disappointed. We got “Indian” in our family—but it’s extremely distant. Just enough for the Americas on my 23AndMe ancestry composition map to be colored in yellow. Across the Atlantic, Africa is colored in purple. My DNA comprises 31.5 percent Nigerian, 29.9 percent Ghanaian, Liberian, and Sierra Leonean, and 8.6 percent Angolan and Congolese, among myriad other African ethnicities. I felt a smidge of disappointment about lacking Native American ancestry because I grew up believing it would make me important and special. I’d internalized anti-Black beliefs in our culture that say being just plain Black isn’t good enough. But I quickly shifted my focus to the pride I felt in being majority African. I like thinking about how my ancestors have found intimacy and companionship in their own communities for thousands of years, even after being stolen and displaced to another continent.

I’ve had conversations with my Rwandan spouse where they say, “African people are always left out of conversations about indigeneity in the United States, but we are Indigenous, too. We are indigenous to our different regions of Africa.” I may be an Indigenous African, but still, I have no claim to the native dances, songs, food, and customs of my ancestors. I am indefinitely unmoored. When I wear the mushanana of my wife’s culture for special occasions, a sash draped over one shoulder and a wraparound skirt, I’m not sure if it’s an act of appreciation or appropriation. But I am sure it makes me feel beautiful and makes my wife happy.

PIQICHA

It’s a drizzly day in Atlanta, where we have moved back to from Seattle. Jojo and I are both on holiday break and want to do something outside our norm. We decide to visit the Etowah Indian Mounds less than an hour away. Etowah is a Muscogee word for town or trail crossing. It is afternoon when we walk into the building at the historic site, where we are the only visitors. We pay our six dollars each and go on our own private tour of the museum. We read the stories of the prehistoric ancestors to the Muscogee Creek, the Indigenous peoples of the South Appalachian Mississippian culture, who are responsible for building the site’s six earthen mounds between 1000 and 1550 A.D. A thousands-years-old culture and society vanquished by Europeans’ smallpox, measles, and violence.

After circling the entire museum, we step outside to face the towering mounds. Ten-foot-high Mound C is the only one that’s been completely excavated, offering clues on a way of life full of arts, games, worship, and ceremonies. The tallest of them, The Temple Mound or Mound A, stands sixty-three-feet high, equivalent to a six-story building. It was likely a platform for the home of the chief. We walk up the stairs of the Temple Mound, taking care not to slip on the slick steps. Pleased with our mini workout, we snap a selfie at the top. We take another with the Etowah River in the background. Unlike in Okefenokee all those years ago, I am my own tour guide now. I choose which displays to engage with and read them critically since they were likely written by employees of our racist state government. I interpret what I’m seeing for myself. I’m no longer reliant upon a white man.

I may be an Indigenous African, but still, I have no claim to the native dances, songs, food, and customs of my ancestors.

We are browsing the gift shop about to leave when two Black men with locs walk in the door and buy tickets. I wonder why they’ve shown up less than an hour before the site closes. Jojo and I give them a nod of solidarity as fellow Black people appreciating Indigenous culture. Maybe they, too, recognized the links between people indigenous to the Americas and indigenous Africans—how both groups lived in harmony with nature before being colonized and are currently reclaiming ancestral land and cultural traditions. The more we learn about each other, the more empathy we can foster for our different but similar struggles.

Back in our car, we start planning trips to other nearby Indian mounds.

PIQINAHU

I come across an article about gender-variant and queer Timucuans on Twitter. I already know Indigenous tribes have included gender-expansive people and same-gender relationships since their inception but never thought about them living on the land of my hometown. I can’t find much on the topic, but an academic article by Heather Martel in the Journal of the History of Sexuality enumerates the differences between how the French and the Spanish interacted with the Timucuans when they arrived on their land in the 1500s. Spaniards perpetrated physical and sexual violence onto them, while the Huguenots, French protestants, enacted a policy of “allurement” with the tribe, performing love and friendship. As the Huguenots cultivated this amiable relationship, they also wrote lies to people back home about the Timucuans being perverse while also rejecting “hermaphrodites” and “sodomites” in their society. To them, a culture accepting of queerness was inherently savage and depraved.

I wish I could’ve learned about gender-expansive and sexually diverse Timucuans growing up, how their culture viewed loving the same gender as natural and normal, how I was far from the first queer person on Georgia’s coast. I wish their legacy wasn’t strategically left out of history books. Since I rarely saw myself in history lessons, learning about Timucuans who diverged from sexuality and gender norms would have been affirming. Maybe I wouldn’t have repressed my queerness until college if I’d known queer people have always been here. It would have shown me Indigenous Peoples aren’t as “other” as my teachers made them out to be.

I resonate with Indigenous cultures that acknowledge more than two genders exist, that a person can embody more than one gender, and that intimate relationships between any gender are valid. How I love and who I am will never be fixed. My identity can change with the weather, the season, the location of the planets, the alignment of the stars. But the western world is too rigid to accept this way of being. We’re forced to label ourselves and to then stick to those labels. We’re taught particular identities are attached to shame. The Timucua knew of no such thing. We have a lot to learn from Indigenous peoples throughout the world about how to live without shame. Colonialism teaches us to do the opposite quite literally by dictating school curriculum and controlling our culture, our media narratives, the very stories we internalize.

Sometimes I feel like I’m drowning in this country’s puritanism. I wish I could be free. But is freedom attainable in a place founded on bloodshed and plundering?

* Note: Each section header is a number from the extinct Timucua language. They are in chronological order from one to eight. I use them here in an effort to resist the erasure of my hometown’s Indigenous peoples. I consider this an act of cultural exchange.

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