Urban Indian

We’re heading into our sixth year of being on our piece of land in the mountains. Some days it doesn’t seem like that long at all but then, as we’ve discovered, time has a different quality there. Things just move easier. I used to say slower, but over the years I’ve come to realize that it’s all the same pace wherever you are – only there it feels more elegant.
The land does that. Surrounded by natural energy, where my senses are keener and my awareness sharper, the land seeps into everything, every motion, every moment and I am lulled by it. Quiet. Reflective. Peaceful. Even when the seasonal chores are in full gear, the chopping, stacking, sawing say, feels less like work and more like ceremony.
It felt odd at first to encounter that. Both of us lived most of our lives as city dwellers. You get used to speed and noise and disruption in a city and you crave places and periods of unruffled calm. The things that life requires of you seldom feel like ceremonies. Rather, they become routines and you get easily lost in that relentless to-and-fro.
Looking back, I’m struck how cities stick to you, how they become the way you move and think and react, how they alter your perception of who you are. In the mountains with a shovel in my hand there is nothing of that past life that cleaves to me. Instead, I have become rural, rustic, a mountain man in everything but the fringed buckskin. I can live with a label like that.
But before we came here there was another label attached to me that I didn’t like at all.
They called me an urban Indian. It was the middle of the 1980’s when I first heard that term. It referred to an Aboriginal person who lives in a town, village, or any kind of settlement. Somehow, it always felt like a slur especially when it came from my own people.
See, when you’re a member of a culture that’s used to being labeled, any tag at all that comes along to add to the weight of all the other tags causes consternation. It’s like the old divide and conquer routine all over again – only this time we learned to apply it to ourselves. We used to use the word ‘apple.’ That charming little slur meant you were red on the outside and white on the inside. In other words, not really Indian.
That’s how the term urban Indian felt. It was paraphrased to mean sellout or someone less than ideally Indian, whatever that term means. My own step-father called me ‘whiteman’ in Ojibwa once when we were getting ready to hunt. He laughed when he said it and I never really got over that hurt. It meant I was separate, different, odd, the square brown peg in the round hole again.
It took some getting used to, the idea of being separate again. When I returned to my people after being vanished for 20 some odd years by adoption and foster homes, I thought being painted with the same brush was over for me. I was wrong. Insensitivity isn’t just the domain of settler folk. Native people have a claim to it too.
Being called an urban Indian shows insensitivity to history. It shows a denial of truth. Residential schools split the fabric of our families and our communities. A whole generation of First Nations people chose the possibility of cities and towns over the mind and spirit numbing desolation of reserves. When we got there we weren’t one less ounce native at all – in fact, it took a lot more heart to risk that move than not.
But being an urban Indian meant that I was different and lumped in with a lot of other different people. Apparently we all wore suits, carried briefcases, lived in condos, never spoke our language and had no idea of true selves. That was just the native view.
Other peoples could only ever see me standing at the corner looking through the tangle of one braid undone, the nest of it falling against my cheek while I toed the butts at my feet before stooping to pick one up, lighting it and sighing my day into being. Oh and there was alcohol on my breath too.
What’s seen with the eye is always less than the full story. We’re human beings first and foremost and that’s the only label that’s ever necessary regardless of where you live. In the mountains now, I am my history, I am my people, I am myself. I’m not an urban anything anymore. Rather, I’m closer to living with a native heart than I’ve ever been. Label that.