Young, Proud, Black and Mvskoke Indian

Photo: Muscogee (Mvskoke) Creek Beadwork, by RDlogan05, Wikimedia Commons

As a younger child, my race never occurred to me that much. As far as I knew, I was an African American and Native American. But as I grew older, I came to realize that those words had no meaning to me, unless I gave them meaning.

All the schools I went to, I had little to no interaction with other Black kids my age, and absolutely none with Indian kids. I knew very little about my culture in my elementary school years. Even with the occasional powwow, I couldn’t soak in and be proud of who I was. Someone could ask me about my ethnicity, and I could answer, being completely oblivious to the stories about my peoples.

Being a person of color in school is hard, especially being Indian. It seems every new White social studies teacher likes to spend one week on a unit about our people with biased, and most likely unreliable, information. The first time I remember reading a book about Indians in school, the story started out with Christopher Columbus coming to America, and the book said that Columbus described that he saw “orange” skin.

As a kid, I was aware of the blatant racism, and then moved on. I didn’t understand how messed up it was that my teacher didn’t care about reading the class an inaccurate and inappropriate book. Things like these go untouched because my White teachers don’t care whether the picture books that they’re reading to their young students are racist.

The social studies curriculum doesn’t give us enough room. They only talk about the things on a surface level, like people who are White, and what they’re doing. Black people only get February most of the time, and only gets a few second worth of acknowledgement when we discuss the amendments that we come across. And in 8th grade, we talked more about Black history in English class than in social studies. But Indian peoples only get about a week each year, prior to the American revolution that is, because afterward, not a peep is heard about us. Even so, every teacher seems to have their own opinion about Indians. They differ in so many ways; it really makes me wonder how long people have been lying and spreading misinformation, and how many generations it will continue for.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard a teacher say the word “took,” or “stolen,” when describing the time when Europeans came to our land. They always used the words “welcomed,” or “unwelcomed.” They always meticulously choose which Indian peoples to talk about. We were never talked about as a whole. It would always be, “Native Americans killed buffaloes, and liked it when White people came over, but then didn’t,” every single time we learned about them.

The incorrect representation affected me in a negative way as a young Indian. It made it especially difficult for me to explain to other kids. Despite me being Mvskoke, of a large Indian nation, everyone told me they never heard of it. But now learning what my culture means to me, although it may not mean much to the people around me, I can call myself a proud Indian.

Kaitlyn is part of Indian Voices Junior Journalist program.