I Used to Make Bows and Arrows in My Backyard

I'd shoot them from one end of the lawn to the other. And I used to play the Indian in Girl Scout Camp games, and hold 'cowboys' hostage with bungee cords wrapped against redwood tree bark.

More recently, as a camp counselor at Skylake, I helped the Indian-themed team put on a war-song skit, painted dozens of faces, and came up with a chant (I steered the group away from "savages, savages, barely even human.") I didn't feel completely comfortable with this last bit, but I never thought of myself as part of "a system of oppression," or anything extreme like that.

As of yesterday, I have changed my mind.

It happened while I was catching up on the Native American poetry section of P4P. When I read Chrystos' poem "Contemplating Racism" (page 52-53,) it finally hit me, meaningfully, that Native peoples are real people -- not a myth to romanticize and act out and forget about the way I have been taught to all my life.

I don't think that most of us today want to be racist or oppressive. We're just reflecting back what we've learned about Native American people. But if this is what you've learned is anything like what I've learned, or like what's portrayed in Sherman Alexie's poem, "How to Write the Great American Indian Novel," then we need to question it.