During the winter I was born, my family was living with my grandparents on a hill overlooking the river that flows through Nagachiwanaang (Fond du Lac Reservation in northern Minnesota).

This was a very different time than today. It was the pre-self- determination era. It was pre-tribal casinos, pre-tribal schools, pre-government food commodities, pre-tribal colleges, and pre-American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC). We had no running water, no electricity, and no car. The toilet was outside. We heated with wood, cut by hand saw and double-bladed axe. When it was time to take the newborn me home from the hospital, I was loaded on a toboggan and pulled through the woods down the old trail that paralleled the river.

UNITED COLORS. In January 2003, high school students from the Wind River Indian Reservation organized a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day protest march because a white supremacist organization had threatened to move its world headquarters to Riverton, WY, and the tradition continued for several years. This 2005 photo shows Riley Tallwhiteman (Northern Arapaho). Photo by Sara Wiles

Some time ago in a school improvement class, I told that story to my students at Winona State University. I said I could not have even imagined then the world we live in today. I could have never envisioned myself standing in an interactive television (ITV) classroom, working simultaneously with students at several distant sites as they explored web links, shared PowerPoint slides, and viewed video clips on YouTube. What we need to do as educators, I reminded them, is prepare young people for a world they cannot even imagine, for a world that does not even exist.

Not a “chief ”

My grandfather lived off the land by snaring rabbits and catching catfish from the river. There were no jobs on the reservation, no burgeoning tribal infrastructure in which to apply for work or services, no tribal college to attend to gain the skills we deem necessary to live the American dream.

We were poor before poor became part of the social and economic lexicon. My grandfather lived culture before it was considered cultural, before we had made a curriculum out of it and taught it in our tribal schools and colleges. He lived treaty rights before we knew it as treaty rights, when it was simply a way to live. He knew nothing of lobbying Congress for more appropriations for Indian education, nothing about applying for scholarships or grants. He didn’t own a three-piece suit. He wasn’t a professional Indian. He just was. He was part of an era and ancestors I admire. It was a difficult period, and people made do with whatever they had in front of them, and they survived. And they kept our stories and language and ways inside them so it could be passed to us.

During summers, to make money for smokes and cheap wine, he hunted for golf balls on the nearby private country club that adjoined the reservation. The country club was built on land illegally taken from his grandfathers, my ancestors. Sometimes as a young boy I would accompany him when he approached the local mill executives who were golfing, to sell them the golf balls he had found.

I remember they called him “Chief.” And when they said that he would look down at the ground in silence. Even as a young boy I knew the word was mocking and denigrating. Even then I knew he was shamed that they would call him that in front of his grandson and that he did not protest in anger. In my dreams, however, he says that is not his name, that we have a name for our leaders, Ogema, and the word is sacred and powerful.

My older brother (Robert ‘Sonny’ Peacock, former president of White Earth Tribal and Community College and current head of Fond du Lac Tribal College) recently gave me an old photo of our grandfather. I am now the age of my grandfather when that photo was taken.

And like him, I too have lived my life having to deal with the everyday denigration of ignorance and racism. When I was a young golf caddy, these same men also called me “Chief.” Their children called me other names as well— redskin, wagon burner, “injun.” Even the ones who adopted me as some kind of pet, whom I thought were my friends, called me an honest “injun.” One Halloween a group of us reservation kids, too poor for masks or costumes, went to town to trick or treat, only to return with what we thought was a popcorn ball wrapped in tinfoil. There was a note inside: “Go on home to the reservation.”

I wish I were there now.

The legacy continues

YOUTHFUL INNOCENCE. LaDawn Smith won a footrace during the 1989 Arapaho Language and Culture Camp. Other participants included (left to right) her brother Tyson, unidentified, Nolita Wallowing Bull, and camp counselor Darlene Whiting Conrad. Photo by Sara Wiles

Each of us deals with racism in our own way. For my part, I became a teacher. A particular incident that I recall in my recent book, To Be Free: Understanding and Eliminating Racism, led me to the teaching profession.

I was a little kid, and the playground at my school was a big, scary place. And it seemed that at every recess, a group of town boys would tease a Native girl who rode the reservation bus with the rest of us “injuns”, as they called us, into school each day. Their words were sharp as knives, incessant. “Hey, squaw! You gonnum scalp us?” She would plead with them to stop, but they would continue their taunting until she cried uncontrollably and chased them all over the playground. Ultimately, she would tire and then cower in a corner like a wounded fawn, and her tormenters would encircle her like jackals and kill her spirit with the sharp spears of their tongues. Only once do I remember she caught one of them and beat holy bejesus out of him. When I saw this, the inside me, the part that never showed, rose and gave her a standing ovation.

Most of the time, however, she would suffer the poison of their words. I remember as I watched and listened to the daily, awful scene, my stomach muscles would tighten and sometimes I would almost bend over in pain. I wanted to say something to them, to yell at them, beg of them. “Leave her alone. Please leave her alone, she has done nothing to you.”

But I never said a word. I was stopped cold by fear. Fear that they would turn on me, that I would become their target.

So the years passed, and the unrelenting torment continued. And then one day, in the 6th or 7th grade, the girl just quit coming to school. Myself, I grew in stature and confidence and became good with my fists.

I was not teased.

Some years ago I was reading the hometown newspaper and noticed her name in the obituary column. She died young. I don’t know the circumstances. Her former tormenters are now the city fathers—city councilmen, business owners, bankers, and teachers all. Hopefully they have learned from the folly of their past.

I know I have.

My sons are both dark skinned. They can’t pass as anything but Native, although every once in a while they tell me someone will speak Spanish to them. They too have lived with the everyday indignities of racism. The oldest, now nearly 40 years old and already a grandfather, recalls encountering everyday racism because of having “rez” plates. Rez plates are supposed to empower a sense of pride, self, and belonging to your reservation. But they also empower an underlying racism:

Having been pulled over more while having rez plates than without, and having my car impounded because, “We’re not sure which country these plates are from,” I opt out of having them, this without being ashamed and still holding on to my pride. Unless you never want to drive off the rez, the headache of having them is something one chooses if and how they want to deal with this side of racism.

This legacy of racism continues beyond the generation of my children. When Cyan, my beautiful granddaughter, told me she gets teased because she is dark skinned, I had to look away. As she spoke, I wept silently on the inside and did not want her to see me as weak and powerless, or furious knowing that she, too, will have to carry the burden of racism into her generation:

I closed my eyes. I was a little boy standing in a school playground and a group of town boys were teasing a Native girl about being a “squaw” and an “injun” until she cried. I closed my eyes. I was standing among a grove of old trees at Auschwitz- Birkenau, the Nazi death camp in Poland where nearly 2 million Jews died at the hands of the Nazis. There is a story about a little girl who survived the gas chambers there, who was pulled from the masses of bodies by other prisoners and nursed back to health. How when she was discovered by the Nazis and tried to run, she was gunned down.

I closed my eyes.

“Grandpa,” she said.

Racism’s many forms

BRIGHT HORIZONS. "We need to prepare young people.... for a day when freedom will ring from every tribal center in every one of our villages." Photo taken after the powwow at Fort Totten Days 2010 by M.A. Pember

We are confronted with racism on an everyday basis, though it manifests itself in different ways.

There is unintentional racism, unconscious racism. This manifests itself, for example, when White women clutch their purses when a group of Native kids come near them. Why do some White men flinch at getting in an elevator full of Black men? Why do so many Whites have involuntary negative reactions when flashed subliminal images of Black faces? What is “White privilege?”

There is also institutional racism—in schools in particular but also within governments, art, history, music, and language. Why are the collective lies of Columbus still taught as history? Why do we continue to have to deal with the absence of teaching of our tribal languages, history, literature, or stories even in schools on or near our reservation communities? Why are we forced to adopt No Child Left Behind when maybe the saving of our languages should be our first priority?

Sometimes racism is right in your face. Overt, “in your face” racism is raw, angry, and uncompromising: “I hate Blacks! I hate Indians! I hate Whites!”

Other times, there is what is called internalized racism. This is perhaps the most debilitating characteristic of racism in our Native communities. It is also the most difficult to confront because it requires that we confront ourselves. Internalized racism shows in the troubling way we as Native people sometimes treat each other and in the way we treat our own selves. Internalized racism is a form of self-hate.

The question is, of course, what do we do about it? What is our personal role in the struggle to forever eradicate racism from American society?

There are, of course, no easy answers.

Racism is deeply engrained in the American story—a story replete with the genocide of our ancestors, slavery, lynchings, the confinement of Japanese-Americans into camps, the denial of voting and housing rights, and the list goes on.

And that story doesn’t end. Racism today is more sophisticated and covert. It rears its ugly head as “immigration reform,” the “English only” movement, anti-Islamic hearings before Congress, or the utter absurdity of questioning whether President Obama was really born in this country.

As individuals, we need to first assess our own beliefs about racism and determine our roles. As an educator and writer, I use the gifts I have been given—teaching and writing—as an avenue to expand the discourse on race. Each of us has our own way, our own path, our own purpose and reasons for being.

The role of tribal colleges

What roles can our tribal colleges play in diminishing the effects of racism? Tribal colleges can be places to openly talk about race and racism. This is hard, emotional work. People of color often become angry and emotional because they have experienced racism their entire lives. White people sometimes feel guilty or sense they are being blamed for the sins of their ancestors.

Putting race on the table, however, is a necessary first step to ending it. And taking the first step requires courage.

Perhaps one role tribal colleges can accept is to prepare a new generation of Native leaders who will be free of all the vestiges of racism, particularly internalized racism.

When developing a curriculum for Minnesota Indigenous Youth Freedom Project, I wrote that tomorrow’s leaders will need to be unshackled by the remnants of oppression—the collective trauma suffered by our ancestors as a result of genocide, boarding and mission schools, epidemics, physical displacement, and the banning of languages, cultural practices, spiritual beliefs, and ways of being.

Collective trauma manifests itself in multi-generational grieving being passed down from generation to generation, a kind of lingering sadness many Native people wear like a cloak around them. In addition, many Native people continue to suffer from ongoing multiple traumas in all its manifestations—abuse in all its forms, poverty, accidents, and the untimely deaths of loved ones.

Moreover, tomorrow’s leaders will need to become liberated from internalized oppression [racism], perhaps the most crippling characteristic of collective trauma. Internalized oppression manifests itself in the oppression of others. Examples of this phenomenon include the intensely negative, personality politics that characterize tribal life and the high rates of abuse in all its forms, drugs, crime, and gangs that plague our communities. Internalized oppression [racism] also manifests itself in the oppression of one’s self, the abnormally high rates of chemical abuse, suicide, mental illness, and other forms of individual and community disintegration.

Coming to critical consciousness and addressing internalized oppression [racism] may determine our fate as Native people, for history is replete with civilizations that disappeared because they did not, or could not, confront these issues. They literally imploded on themselves.

Free at last

I dedicated the book, To Be Free, to my granddaughters, knowing that the struggle for equality will continue with their generation, that they will need to actively fight racism and all forms of intolerance. I know that they need to take Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream, our collective dream to be free at last, and make it real, that we will hold these truths to be self-evident that all people are created equal.

That is what we need to do as educators. We need to prepare young people for a world they cannot even imagine, a world that does not even exist, for a day when freedom will ring from every tribal center in every one of our villages, and throughout our tribal nations.

“Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, we are free at last.”

Tom Peacock is a member of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe. He teaches educational leadership at Winona State University (Minnesota) and educational psychology at Troy University, Tampa Bay. He has authored seven books on Native education, Ojibwe history, and racism, including his latest, To Be Free: Understanding and Eliminating Racism.