In the spring of 1988 everything seemed to be happening all at once. Ronald Reagan was winding down. George Bush I was winding up. I had just gotten into Princeton, and for the first time in my life, I imagined, I would be happy — unencumbered by my Indian past, fully embedded in an American future. (“Indian,” rather than “Native American,” is the word we use with one another and that I use in my writing.) Everything about my life up to that point had carried the taint of mediocrity, and according to me, being Indian was most of it. But no longer. In the fall my mother would drive me and all my belongings to New Jersey, where life, I imagined, would actually begin. I wanted to escape my family, none of whom — I was convinced — understood me. I wanted to escape the horizons established by many of my teachers, based not on my abilities or effort but rather on what they saw Indians as being capable of, which appeared to be not much at all.
I wanted to leave my fellow Indians behind as well. No one at Leech Lake, the reservation in Minnesota where I’d spent my life until this point, seemed all that interested in me. I am not even sure I was legible, as an Indian, to them. My father, from whom I inherited my looks, was white. I wasn’t dark enough or wild enough to count. If I could put words in the collective mouth of the reservation, I think it would have said: “He’s not from here. Just look at him.”
The indifference was mutual. To my mind, Leech Lake Reservation was entirely unnoteworthy. It was neither the biggest Ojibwe community nor the most populous. Its only distinction was that it was probably the poorest. It seemed to me that our reservation had been abandoned by the government, by our neighbors and by history itself; nothing happened there except a perpetual conveyor belt of suffering, like those sushi restaurants where the food comes clunking past, except in our case it wasn’t salmon, crab and cucumber but poverty, alcohol abuse and cultural erasure at boarding schools, to which many Indian children were once sent to be coercively assimilated. The reservation was, to me, a nothing place where nothing happened. How else to explain how seldom the outside world had heard of it?
At Princeton I felt I was stepping out of my mom’s Dodge Caravan and onto America’s shores. I had gone from a non-place where I didn’t feel like I belonged to a real place that seemed to welcome me. Welcome, it said, with a stony embrace of split-stone walls. Welcome, it said, with its austere brick and obnoxious ivy. Welcome, it said, to the place where things happen.
Princeton was — in its own mind and in mine — a place of possibility, where I might participate in history rather than be steamrolled by it. The college encouraged this illusion. We freshmen were shown a cannonball mark on the walls of Nassau Hall left there during the Revolutionary War’s Battle of Princeton in 1777. We were told that one cannonball (aimed by none other than Alexander Hamilton) passed through a window and destroyed a portrait of King George II. We were told that Princeton’s motto was “in the nation’s service” and that seventy-some senators, two presidents and Aaron Burr (killer of Alexander Hamilton) were alums. We were told we were special. That we were lucky. We were not told (but it was implied) that we should hide our poverty and our sweat, and to always wear shorts and untucked blue button-down Brooks Brothers shirts. In essence: We were told that America was made there. And the places we were from, the place I was from, was in comparison less important, less interesting, less vital.
But of course I hadn’t left this lesser place, the reservation, behind; I had brought it with me without even knowing. There I was at Princeton, in the nation’s service, and indisputably Indian among a crowd of non-Indians. The indisputability of my Indianness was largely a matter of contrast. I realized that my classmates and my professors seemed to be shocked that I was there at all.
During the first couple of weeks, as I bonded with classmates, I’d announce that I was Ojibwe from the Leech Lake Reservation. Often the news was received much like the gift of a wounded bird — gorgeous and vulnerable and not long for this world. I’m so sorry, I heard more than once. You’re so lucky to have made it out, I heard as well. As though leaving the rez was a lot like John Carpenter’s “Escape from New York.”
Somewhat defensively I would offer the fact that it wasn’t so bad. We had two video stores. A supermarket. Enough racism to make you feel alive. But when I said so, my classmates were visibly disappointed. When it was clear I didn’t have a drinking problem (except that I was a lightweight) and that my family home did have running water and electricity, the attention I was coming to rely on would evaporate. I, to an extent, would evaporate. I felt this chasm between me and my classmates almost immediately. If there was no reason to pity me, there was less … of me.
I was coming to realize that in this country Indians were not supposed to be happy or to pursue happiness. We were supposed to suffer and to pursue suffering. Our social utility, as Americans and as Indians, was to define the outer margin of happiness and define it by opposite example. Evidently, if you didn’t suffer, you weren’t Indian. Everyone seemed to want — what the nation and my tribal nation seemed to want — was (a) for me to suffer (b) to serve them with my excellence and (c) to regale them with stories of my suffering and my excellence. It was confusing. I felt as if I were in a trance. When my dorm mates asked me, Who are you? Where are you from? What’s your deal? I would close my eyes and incant:
I am from a far away land.
I am from a remote Indian reservation in northern Minnesota.
We don’t have electricity.
I just met a car for the first time and it wouldn’t talk to me.
Our tepee gets incredibly cold in February.
We are so poor I can’t even afford a spirit animal.
I could tell you my Indian name, but I’d have to kill you.
Things are so hard on my rez that Kevin Costner won’t even visit.
And let me tell you: It is a cold thrill when your bull turns into truth. People ate it up. They were ravenous for stories about how hard my life was. How “my people” suffered. The bigger the lie, the more extreme, the more believable.
This wasn’t the first time I’d encountered the expectation to suffer. I’d grown up with it; I’d thought it myself. On the reservation, we felt the expectation to fail from teachers, from society and even from ourselves. To drop out. To show up drunk. To show up with bruises. We were expected to get pregnant or get someone pregnant. Expected to get D.U.I.s. Expected to do crime. Expected to be bad at crime and get caught. Many of us met and exceeded those expectations spectacularly. But I was a failure at that, too. I didn’t drink. I got decent grades. I didn’t drop out. And my suffering — and I did suffer — was of the internal I’m-so-misunderstood-I’m-an-artist-OK? variety. As such, it didn’t scan. To be understood as Indian required that you be traumatized, poor, dark and enrolled in the tribe, and I hit only one of those marks. By failing to fail, failing to suffer, I became not-Indian among my own people.
It was confusing for outsiders when they met Indians who were relatively happy. Or had enough leisure time to play D&D or listen to Styx or to really want to see the musical “Cats.” All of which were true of me. What a pity to learn we weren’t clinging with red claws to the fabric of life. One white Princeton professor advised me that I couldn’t be both an academic and a “medicine man” — one had to either adhere to tradition or abandon it. Some time or another, I was asked directly how bad life had been. Not so bad, I said. There was never a follow-up. Relative happiness, modest success, a kind of pleasant humdrum, was not for us. I could see the outsiders’ eyes glaze over when confronted by a so-so Indian. If you seemed like a so-so Indian and withheld stories of your trauma, you began to lose your material substance.
But in the 1980s there were beginning to be lots of Indians doing so-so. Casino gambling had come to many reservations. Some were becoming rich. Leech Lake not so much, but the standard of living was getting somewhat better. My mother called to tell me she could now get a decent prime rib on the reservation. And then I was starting to understand that I hadn’t only been telling lies about who Indians were; I had been consuming lies as well. Where I had grown up and how I had grown up weren’t a separate place or way of being at all. The impassable frontier I had perceived between a Princeton and a not-Princeton, and yes, between civilized and savage, wasn’t drawn out there in Leech Lake; it was created in here at Princeton. The biggest lie seemed to be that places like Princeton are the opposite of places like Leech Lake Reservation, and therefore separate, distinct, unrelated.
It feels like common practice, among reservation Indians and everyone else, to imagine that reservations are the antimatter to the matter of America, unmeltable in the crucible of the American melting pot; dark in contrast to American light; hopeless in comparison with American hope; a ruin in a valley staring up at the city on a hill. But that lie hides a paradox: When Indians were included in the Declaration of Independence only to be excluded from its provisions (mentioned only as “merciless Indian Savages”), this gave us a kind of backdoor reality, a kind of legal existence defined by negative space. So, too, with the flimsy binary that had till that point ruled my life: By suggesting that Indian life was the opposite of American life, it accidentally suggested that we were, in fact, alive.
After my first year at Princeton my stories of suffering began to wear thin. For outsiders, sure. But for me as well. My lies had an ancillary, refractory effect: The more I created a story of the place I was from that wasn’t true, and the more I told stories about myself that weren’t true, the more I started to see what was true of my reservation and myself. And I began to miss both my community and, well, me.
What I missed wasn’t the suffering and poverty and beer bellies and Pendleton vests and half-tinted glasses. It wasn’t our broken English and our fractured Ojibwe. The longer I was away and the more stories I spun, the more Leech Lake felt like a real place with complicated people. It was in our ordinary complications, rather than the extremity of our troubles, that our personhood existed. In our affairs and subsequent divorces, in our inability to win the state championship, in our need for co-signers for car loans and in all the many good and bad decisions we made. I became a person, an Indian person, when I drank warm Coke rolling around the bottom of the canoe, or when my friend Sean flipped the Risk board before storming out to check our nets. There, at home, no outsider could erase me. I began to miss home when I came to realize that Indian life is its own pursuit. There were so many forces, veritable legions, arrayed against Native people and places. So many opportunities for suffering. So much effort spent on our erasure. So many clear messages that the “pursuit of happiness” was for others, not for me. At Princeton, age 18, I pursued pursuit. It was the next best thing.
It has been said that Native people have a great future behind us. Our cultures and our dominance figure as the past. I am ashamed to say I grew up believing this. After college, with a prestigious degree in hand, I spent a couple of years in grad school. It was the life toward which I had been led. But I was being pulled — in the manner of filings to a magnet — back to the reservation. I realized I didn’t want any of the roles that America would have me fill. I didn’t want to be an emissary from the past greatness of Indian society. Nor did I want to be a super-Indian whose story was all the more super because of what I had overcome. It seemed to me that the mediocrity of becoming a so-so Indian was the best way to avoid capture.
I quit graduate school and returned to Leech Lake to pursue work, real work, and the connections to real Indian human beings on my reservation who I didn’t know existed until I left them behind. I got a couple of unglamorous jobs and reveled in the luxury of doing downright uncool Ojibwe tribal work: hunting, trapping, fishing, making anything I could out of birch bark except wastebaskets destined for the tourist trade.
It was on the reservation, during a mediocre meeting at my unglamorous job, that I checked my home answering machine and learned I had an offer on my first novel. I remember everything — the light in the room, the Indians in the meeting doing so-so Indian things. I have never again smiled quite as much as I did that afternoon with my ear pressed to the landline. A friend looked up and was confused at how contorted my face was. “You OK?” he asked. Never. Better. And now that I’ve been doing it for a while — by “it,” I mean my so-so Indian life and my so-so writing life — it has, much to my surprise, made me deliriously, ecstatically, brashly so-so. In a word: I’m happy.
David Treuer is the author of “The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee” and “The Savage Mind: An American Legacy,” which will be published in October.
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