Tonight, my husband and I watched the movie, "Black Robe." In case you haven’t seen it, the film is about a 17^th-century Jesuit priest and the Alqonquins who take him to his new post in the wilds of North America.

It was especially relevant to watch having recently learned that my husband’s grandfather, whom he never met, was Mohawk.  The Mohawks belonged to the same Iroquois confederation as the Algonquins, and were known to have many traditions in common with them.

I've seen the movie ten times, but by the end, I'm always railing against the whites who brought illness, alcohol, and environmental havoc to the native people of this land--but who were most likely my greatgreatgreatgreat grandfathers and aunts and distant cousins. In other words, I'm railing against my heritage, for my heritage.  It's a weird feeling.

It’s not as though the movie—or historians in general—paint a picture of Native Americans as lambs before slaughter. We know that they had their own hang-ups.   But can we blame them for having misgivings about white guys with big egos offering whiskey and beads for their services, not to mention their lives???

I've seen pictures of my Indian forebears--mostly Cherokees, Choctaws, and Catawbas--in their suits and hoops, posed stiffly in their middle class tableaux. But I also detect a shrewdness in their eyes: If you can't beat ‘em, join ‘em, they seem to say. It was a tack Indians were taking in the mid- to late- 1800's. Who could blame them? They saw what was coming, they knew what had been. Still, I wish sometimes they hadn't gone over so easily.

In the case of my husband's grandfather, born one hundred years ago next month,  it was more assimilation by default than choice.  As a young child, he was taken from his home in upper Michigan to be properly "civilized."  He ended up working as some family's extra back and pair of strong hands, an adopted laborer. This was common practice at the turn of the century. Later, as was customary among physically skilled, shrewd, and woefully under-educated Mohawks, he became a bridge worker for Bethlehem Steel. He was killed when a steel girder cut him nearly in half. (Well, not killed right away: He lived for a week.)

Of course, all of this was some sort of improvement over the mistreatment and dishonesty, not to mention downright violence, committed on this country’s native population in the two previous centuries. Some tribes got to avoid all that by conveniently dying of smallpox and other diseases, or by learning quickly that they couldn’t fight firepower with wooden arrows and so donning the clothes and the attitudes of their conquerors. Tribes like the Cherokee were famous for fitting right in. I just have to wonder why there was no happy medium between dying and forsaking your identity. 

I often wonder what was going through the minds of the whites as they wholeheartedly manipulated treaties, dislocated hundreds of people, and broke the spiritual collective of an ancient culture. I need to understand because the blood in my veins does indeed flow in different directions. In "Black Robe," the point is made quite convincingly that there was a lot of trans-cultural misunderstanding going on. At times, it was simply a case of My superstitions are holier than yours for both sides. But whites clearly understood their technological advantage over the natives, and used that advantage to advance their own particular value system. Frankly, I am ashamed of such a heritage.

I nearly laughed out loud when I heard about the recent legislation to prohibit the use of Native American tribal names and mascots for sports teams. Nice try, folks, but that’s a no-brainer.   Fifty, even ten, years ago, such a gesture would have been brave.  Now it's merely symbolic, a courtesy rather than a reckoning.  No one is shaken or inspired by it.   

Rather, what would shake and inspire would be the same sort of repugnant reverence we express for the Holocaust and African slave trade as a matter of public, everyday discourse in this country.   

But it doesn't seem to happen.  Some Indians got rich with gambling rights and perhaps use this outcome to rationalize their history.  Others carry on their traditions through environmental or social activism, or express their culture through the arts.   After all, there's something to be said for marching onward.  

I can't begin to dissect or judge how Native Americans have or have not "adapted" to white culture.  But sometimes I just want them to get peeved, to remind us that we walk on land acquired through deception,  land that nurtured a people who are now, at best,  marginalized.  Sometimes I want my Native American cousins to ride down from the proverbial mountains and make us give it all back.