This wasn’t the first time I 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 Dungeons & Dragons or listen to Styx or 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 been only 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 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.
