Recently, I posted a meme on Facebook that drew the attention of some random woman from my hometown that felt it necessary to let me and the people of facebookland know that it offended her and that she thinks I am not allowed to have any kind of opinion on Indigenous culture because I am “Too White” and that I “don’t know enough about my heritage to be entitled to my own history.”
My grandmother was born in 1929 to a white father who was a race car driver and was killed on the track before she was even born.
When she was 9 months old, her mother, a beautiful Apache woman named Ifon, was cleaning her kitchen with kerosene as was common back then, and she somehow set herself on fire, running deliriously through the house and into the yard where a passerby wrapped her up and smothered the flames. My grandmother was given to her white grandparents, with no connections to the reservation for which her mother came from. They drilled into her head so severely that being indigenous was “worse than being a n****” and she grew up hating her olive skin, her strong Indian nose, her coal black hair.
She covered her hair with a wig as long as I can remember. When I was little she would take her hair down and let me brush it…so thick and not even a touch of gray. Eventually she would chop at it and bleach it wildly even though she always wore the wig. She hated the strength of those genes…that my Irish side wasn’t enough to kill the strong nose so she tried to get me plastic surgery when i was 12. She told everyone who would listen that she was black dutch, never acknowledging her history; always ashamed of it.
What would her story improve without that shame that racism bore in her? How free would she have been knowing what a great and majestic tribe she came from? All of her mothers family never got the chance to tell her their history.
I will not allow someone who doesn't know me to question my heritage and call me a racist for sharing my truth.
Go eat a snickers and fuck off.
