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8. The Meanings of Indianness
- University of Nebraska Press
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243 CHAPTER EIGHT The Meanings of Indianness TRIBAL, RACIAL, AND RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES AT BACONE I didn’t know a lot about Cherokee culture until, really, I went out to Bacone. — MARY KATHRYN HARRIS SMITH, 1995 While they were constructing ideas about what it meant to be educated , high school and college students at Bacone also were creatively negotiating their Indian identities. We have seen that students who participated in Bacone’s art program tended to accentuate differences between tribal groups. In this chapter I consider how peer relationships, campus life, and extracurricular activities shaped students’ definitions of Indianness. To understand both what attending Bacone meant and came to mean to its students, I utilize student writings, alumni writings, and alumni interviews. Alumni today continue to assess the significance of their Bacone experiences and the relationship between these experiences and their adult identities. While they differed in the degree to which they participated in fund-raising activities or formal programs in Indian culture, former students all agree that attending Bacone was a formative experience in their lives, and they credit Bacone with shaping their identities as Indians. The chapter is divided into three sections. The first section Meanings of Indianness 244 examines the creation of new tribal and regional identities among students on campus and discusses the ways that students juxtaposed their own Indian identities to whiteness and blackness. The second section explores the relationship between Indian identities and the production of new religious identities among students. The final section examines how alumni today assess the meanings of their Bacone experiences. THE MEANINGS OF INDIANNESS: TRIBAL AND RACIAL IDENTITIES AT BACONE After students arrived at school, their tribal backgrounds became important markers of identity. At the beginning of each semester, the Bacone Indian published the tribal backgrounds and hometowns of incoming students. The tribal backgrounds of students from more than one tribe were often listed in hyphenated form, such as “Creek-Seminole” or “Quapaw-Cherokee.” At times they were creatively described as “Comancherokee” or the like.1 As a result, students were well aware of other students’ tribal backgrounds, and they reinforced these identities in their peer relationships. Although they shared dorm rooms with each other and were friends, students from different tribes often teased one another. Their words were often sharp, and at times their remarks were offcolor . Students gamely poked fun of the historical tribal customs of some groups. For example, Kiowa students were sometimes called “dog eaters” by other students.2 Moreover, students who knew a tribal language often teased students from other tribes who did not understand the language. One female Cherokee student recalled being teased by a younger Creek girl because she knew neither Creek nor Cherokee: “There was one little elementary girl that went there. Of course, I’m not dark, and she used to tease me and she’d [54.234.184.8] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:26 GMT) Meanings of Indianness 245 tell other Creeks—oh yeah, she had a little dirty word for me. So, I didn’t know what it was and finally one of the Creek girls told me what it meant . . . ‘stink butt.’”3 Teasing was only one part of the informal exchanges that occurred among students from different tribes. Living on campus, students picked up portions of many different Indian languages spoken by their classmates.4 They also learned about the cultures of tribes they had never heard of before. Many students from tribes that had historically been enemies found themselves becoming best friends. According to alumnus Scott Harjo (Seminole), the opportunities for intertribal exchange that residential life provided broadened his views of other Indian people: “It was a tremendous learning experience! ’Cause back home I used to think: God, Sac ’n’ Fox, Kickapoo—they’re strange people! [laughs]—Shawnees. I said ‘Are we still enemies?’ I never did know.”5 One of the most important sources of intertribal exchange among high school and junior college students was the Indian Club, where students met weekly to practice dance steps, exchange information about tribal ceremonies, and make costumes for their fund-raising performances. While students from many different tribes joined the Indian Club, according to Dick West, the group became a particularly important source of new information for students from the Five Tribes, who “had little or no knowledge of [culture], because they’d almost lost all of their [traditional ways].”6 Students from the Southwest and the Plains—many of whom lived in Indian communities and...