Back in July, through a weird chain of events, I ended up at the Natural History Museum of Utah in Salt Lake City. There were exhibits with glittering crystals, massive dinosaur skeletons, and the conservation of native species, including tanks with neon frogs and a sleeping ferret. The one that captivated my attention the most was the Native Voices exhibition. Intricately beaded and stitched baskets, regalia, and articles of clothing from Native American communities across the United States were organized neatly in cases. Along the walls were quotes and images highlighting the deep memory and contemporary presence of Indigenous communities.
This exhibit was incredibly compelling to me because of my Indigenous heritage. After viewing the display, I went to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I took a picture of my reflection in an attempt to see myself better, to maybe even see what the world sees. Because while I know that my Indigenous heritage is a part of me, it is something I sometimes feel confused about.
A while back, my sister took an AncestryDNA test and the results showed we are more than 50% Indigenous from a very specific part of central Mexico where most of my family lives today. A large majority of individuals of Mexican descent have Indigenous ancestry, so although this did not come as much of a surprise, we now knew what we had only assumed before. A small part of me was a little embarrassed that this was how I learned about a substantial part of my ancestry — a trendy DNA kit. It took me a while to fully understand where this embarrassment was coming from. I traced it to a subconscious feeling of personal deficiency for being unaware of an important part of who I am and was.
This feeling, I learned, is not uncommon. “History has shaped our society exactly so that we do not identify with our Indigenous roots,” says Raymond Two Hawks Watson, a Narragansett educator and cultural practitioner I spoke to for this article.
I have memories of that history still rearing its head. I have memories of my grandmother getting mad at the mention of the ways in which parts of our everyday lives are derived from our Indigenous ancestors. I remember “indio” being used as an insult growing up, even shouted by one of my teachers in elementary school at a classmate who wasn’t moving fast enough in dance class.
What does it mean to be Indigenous in the context of a culture where so much of the history has been erased, both in my personal ancestry and on a societal level?
In retrospect, I haven’t been entirely unaware of my Indigenous heritage my entire life – a better way of putting it is a lack of recognition. One of my favorite memories growing up was visiting my grandparents’ home in Mexico. My grandpa would take down his machete to forage for prickly pear cactus — nopales in Spanish — on the outskirts of town. As a seven-year-old, I had a certain fascination with this routine: that the nopales grew on their own, that my grandpa knew which ones were the tender ones, how he’d cut them for us to eat, and that all of this was free. To me, this was part of being in Mexico, part of being in my parents’ hometown; I didn’t fully make the connection that it was because we had been on this land for generations and our knowledge of the terrain, of the plants and the routines, was an unspoken part of us.
In all of this, I continue to ask: What part of this is still in me? What part of my Indigenous roots am I allowed to embrace as part of my identity, as someone who didn’t consciously grow up identifying with my Indigenous culture? I am coming to terms with the fact that I don’t have any answers, except that maybe it is a continual and necessary process.
Part of that process has also been understanding that my search for my own identity doesn’t end at me. “This need to preserve our roots is not only for what we as individuals can gain or about reclaiming what has been lost, but so that the generations that come after can have a connection, too, to the culture that was taken from us,” Watson said. “History is history — we can’t change it. We can acknowledge how we allow history to direct our past and present, and work toward deciding on what we want for our future. It is now up to you to direct your own experience and connect with your culture and knowledge moving forward.”
Watson also gave me one word: Eniskeetompoag, Narragansett for “We still remain.” •
