An "It's Complicated!" post by Debbie Reese, assistant professor of American Indian studies at the University of Illinois
When Nancy Mercado invited me to submit a post for CBC’s “It’s Complicated” series, I was pleased to have the opportunity to speak to the audience of CBC’s Diversity Blog. In her invitation, she wrote that CBC defines diversity in terms of “cultural/ethnic/religious/class/sexual diversity.”
I’m complicating the definition by adding “nation” because while American Indians have specific cultural or religious ways of being that mark us as diverse from the mainstream, the most significant marker is our political status as sovereign nations. Within an Indigenous sovereign nation, you could find people who don’t have the hair or skin color, or other features commonly—we could say stereotypically—attributed to American Indians. I’ll complicate the discussion even further by saying that there are people who are citizens of sovereign nations, and, there are people who are descendants of someone who was/is a citizen of a sovereign nation. Going one step further in complication, there are sovereign nations that are federally recognized, some that are state recognized, and some that are not recognized at all.
Most people don’t know anything at all about tribal sovereignty and what it means. Without that knowledge, it can be difficult for outsiders to write stories that ring true to our experiences as American Indians. In fact, it can be difficult for someone of a sovereign tribal nation at one end of the country to write about a nation at the other end, but someone who knows their nation, its history, its ways of being, and the ways it has been misrepresented has a leg up on anyone else. They know that there is a lot they do not know, and they know that standard sources aren’t the place to go for the information they need to write a story that holds up to the eye of someone of that tribal nation.
People often talk about their touchstone books, stories from childhood that had a lasting impact on them, changed their life or worldview, etc. One of the books I remember most from my childhood was Felita by Nicholasa Mohr, and it wasn’t because it changed the course of my life or even because it was my all time favorite. The effect of this book was much more subtle and at the time it felt mundane. Felita was the first and only book I read as a child where the protagonist called her father Papi, which is what I called and still call my father today.
