Letter to my People

I've spent most of my life being a part of two different cultures. Never fully being in either but being a member. Being of mixed heritage makes things difficult for any who have had to deal with it. Makes no difference what cultures, or background they are all different to a certain extent; even if you're just from a different side of the tracks but the same color.

The difference I’m talking about has to do with something else entirely. Being African American and Native American. Two cultures that are different but with some similarities. Being indigenous to this country and having a culture that was brought here against their will makes an interesting life for a child.

My mother tells me stories sometimes of my grandparents wanting me to live with them because she couldn’t teach me everything I needed to know after my father passed. But her love for me wouldn’t let her hand me over. Honestly I’m happy she didn’t turn me over to them. This didn’t mean I felt that I belonged with them or with my mother's side of the family. After all none of them looked like me. They still don’t. The only person that I truly did look like was my father and he was gone.

I lived the life of an outsider though I was the only one that truly knew I was an outsider. Interesting isn’t it. You live but it's like being in a glass case. Life is happening on both sides of you. You belong to both but you don’t. You understand both, but they don’t understand you. It is a feeling of being incomplete but complete only when you step outside of that box for the short periods you are allowed.

It’s not that they know you feel separate. They don’t even segregate you. The problem is you have no relation to them. You're darker in color, you're lighter in color, your hair is long and straighter than theirs, your hair is kinkier than theirs, your speech is different than both. Where do you fit in with those differences. You would think it would matter but to a child and a teenager it is everything.

You have both thought processes running through your head at once, and think on both levels. So you create two personas. You become two people in one body and you bounce back and forth between the two different cultures being apart but still separate from both. There is no real way around it. It is just the way it is.

You must be wondering why I am telling all of this. It is because of everything that is happening to my people. It is because of the lives that are being lost, threatened, and stolen. It is about the land being stolen and the treaties being broken yet again. It is about the people that are hurting that I relate so much to and wish to help but have no idea how to. It is about my life that I feel being closed in on all sides. Not by the glass that I normally see through but by my people. By their tears and cries for help.

How do I do that? How do I help them? It is all so perplexing. There are no answers to these questions except to be real with myself whether I am accepted or not. So with that being said there are a few things I want to say.

The lives lost to this country is deplorable. The fact that African Americans have no place in this country's natural society unless we get there by getting famous even worse. The same goes for the Native Americans. One people that only wanted to live in the land they had claimed and another that wanted nothing to do with this country but had no choice in it.

Both sides of this fence going through similar issues, fighting similar fights yet fighting alone. Why? Don’t we all have the same claims against this country. Aren’t we fighting the same treatment. If the Black Panther’s and AIM don’t have the same goals then someone please tell me what we are all fighting for. Aren’t we all tired of living in fear and want better for ourselves as well as our children.

But, I don’t see that. I don’t see us working together to fight for what is right. To stop what is wrong with this country. We allowed them to keep us separate and in our own little boxes so we wouldn’t come together and fight together. They made it so there is no united front. We all fight our separate fights. And let me tell you; from someone who is fighting both fights because I’m both people it isn’t easy. I see where the line is drawn because the line was drawn within myself as well.

A line that I crossed last week. I crossed it when everything going on with the pipeline in south dakota took a turn for the worst. I crossed that line when I felt like Travon, Tamire, Sandra, Altin, and Philandro were happening all at once. I felt it disappear because I am not one I am both cultures and I am loosing my people. I am loosing my heritage to it all.

Gentrification isn’t just happening on one side it’s happening on both. They want to scrub this land until all you see is one not both. Forgetting that none of us asked for any of this. No one asked to be on a reservation. No one asked to be made a slave. No one asked to be treated like less than a full human being. That the constitution stated would give human beings the rights it promised.

They want us to disappear. And become a memory. They want to lie in their history books and downplay the parts we played in both making this country and what making this country made us into. They want us to get over everything like it was nothing, “Yeah you were slaves once but you're not anymore so get over it.” ; or “Yeah we took your land but we gave you a place to stay get over it.”

Does anyone see a problem with this. That it isn’t so simple. That if we don’t stand up together and say it's wrong then all we’ll be thought of is the minority that is having a problem at that time and not the majority that is having a problem with everything they are doing, everything they are taking.

In the end one voice voice means nothing but combined with more it becomes overpowering. It becomes all you can hear. All you can see. But we aren't doing it. Why?

I can’t live a life with separate sides any more. Did anyone notice that all the groups of minorities are called minorities. But we were all indigenous to a country. Some may have come by choice others were already here and others were stolen without a choice in the matter. But together we are not a minority. Together we are what makes up the majority of this country. Together we can change the face of what they want to call America and actually make it great by standing together and saying we are here!

We didn’t ask for any of this but we are here and we belong. It’s a fence I refuse to try and straddle. It’s a line that I will no longer allow to keep both sides of myself from crossing. I am who and what I am. I am both sides of this fence. I am two. Love me or leave me.