D E F I N I N G
F R E E D O M
16
My Indigenous existence
I
By Quinn Smith Jr.
was born and raised away from the reservation, like the vast majority of Native youth of my generation. However, my grandfather grew up on the family allotment near Ada, Oklahoma. Papaw was the biggest cultural defender in my family. He was a Chickasaw artist who could draw, paint, sculpt, and carve with equal beauty. When I was a toddler, Papaw carved me a bow and set of arrows so I could accompany him during archery practice in the garage. He told me that we must always use a bow to hunt because it wasn’t fair to the animals to hunt with guns. Papaw’s lithographs of Geronimo and Sitting Bull smiled down upon us as we practiced. Papaw passed away when I was just nine, and even now, his death remains
my heritage, or receive accurate information about other Indigenous people, until much later in life. I shouldn’t have had to go to college to learn that the U.S. allows approximately 65,000 Diné (Navajo) people to live without tap water—I live only a few hours away from the Diné homelands. I shouldn’t have had to wait until college to learn about the Trail of Tears—I am a Chickasaw person. I didn't learn until much later in life that my Grandma Great, Papaw’s mother, had been forced to attend a residential school, along with her sisters. My Grandma Great worked as a cook, and she would steal food for her sisters so they didn’t starve. They all tried to run away but didn’t know the way back home. Since Grandma Great died just a few years before Papaw, I didn’t know her long enough to ask her questions about our family. I didn’t even learn about the true horrors of residential schools, or that the last one didn’t close until the early 2000s, until I attended LINEAGE: Smith college. with Papaw I wish that the U.S. government, schools, and the media gave me the tools to become a well-adjusted Indigenous person in the twenty-first century. There are few burdens heavier than having to justify your Indigenous existence to a non-Indigenous person. As an Indigenous person, it is impossible for me to do anything without feeling intense internal turmoil. Above all, freedom for me as an Indigenous person means freedom from this shame. I wake up every day with the guilt that I am living on another Indigenous peoples’ land. As I walk into the kitchen to pour a cup of coffee, I grow angry thinking
I only learned about Indigenous people in the first chapter of my history textbooks and from works like Disney’s Pocahontas and The Lone Ranger. the most traumatic loss of my life. It became my father’s responsibility to teach me my culture. Sadly, my father wasn’t a very good teacher. He was an alcoholic, and his lesson plans included repeated physical, mental, and emotional abuse. School and the media didn’t help much either. I only learned about Indigenous people in the first chapter of my history textbooks and from works like Disney’s Pocahontas and The Lone Ranger. While I was lucky enough to grow up in a place where Native culture is visible—Albuquerque, New Mexico—harmful depictions of Indigenous people had the biggest influence on my childhood. I didn't begin to piece together the broken shards of
48 www.alumni.duke.edu/magazine
Courtesy Quinn Smith Jr.
