APA Newsletters

Spring 2001
Volume 00, Number 2

Newsletter on American Indians in Philosophy

Ontology of Identity and Interstitial Being

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Ontology of Identity and Interstitial Being

Anne Waters

Introduction

This paper is about in-betweens of interstitial space, and cognitive dissonance of coming into being. In-betweens are not a nothing, though they sometimes appear this way. An interstitial gap, or space, when circumscribed with new defined angles (boundaries, or borders), creates a new interstitial identity. In these interstitial spaces (where being and non-being come together), we locate an American Indian metaphysics, where everything is, or rather everything is always, coming, into being some thing. This metaphysic can help draw an understanding of an apparent, or real, human cognitive dissonance. The dissonance may be a function of either indiscreet category classifications blending, a function of discreet category classifications clashing, or the bringing into being of new identity. These collisions and overlays of blended meaning are part of the creative process in what I call "The Land of Uncertainty." In the Land of Uncertainty, when new being categories are created from cognitive dissonance, the dissonance relaxed releases new meaning. This paper argues that unity, or identity, arises from these relaxed interstitial weavings that arise from being coming-to-be in this Land of Uncertainty.

Voice Shifts In Uncertainty

When I read poetry (or papers) I shift from one voice to another. I sing or shout, perhaps admonish or warn, and sometimes soothe or sound philosophically neutral. The inflection and rhythm of sound articulate my intent, as a speaker. Time span changes occur between the change of voice. In any given reading, my being-in-the-world rearranges and shifts from sameness to difference, and back again, with a same, or new, meaning. These shifts of voice, and new meaning born of cognitive struggle, interest me. My interest is as a philosopher, poet, lawyer, and most especially, as an American Indian. From this latter space of being, that is, as an American Indian, I focus my discussion.

Creating new meaning out of cognitive dissonance shifts my way of being, and fills interstices of coming to be. In this process my disposition toward indiscreet being enters the space of the discreet being, and change, or new meaning, happens. The interstitial gaps into which my non-discreet way of being moves are necessary in order to allow the shifting from a way of being holding one voice to hold another. This experience of shifting occurs sometimes as a willful shift, and at other times as an unknowing shift. Bilinguals and code talkers make these kinds of shifts on a regular basis and at an amazingly rapid pace.

My concern is how interstices of identity shifts carry potential to create an identity of what bell hooks would refer to as an insurgent intellectualism. In this paper, as I analyze the issue of identity in difference, I locate a place of conscience for people cognizant of identity difference. I discuss the geography of place as it is situated in identity formation. I then address the conscience that speaks to the interdependence of geographical space and identity formation as they relate to global resources redistribution.

Identity and Difference

I read the story of mixed race identity from the lives of particular persons. This method seems necessary to understanding, and is playful and fun, engaging me as a puzzle might. The trick is to locate the subject while retaining subjectivity. This emphasis of locating subjectivity in a particular exemplar of identity enables me to locate sites of my lived experience that do not fit fixed identity.

To the extent that identity theories are political, they are about power and oppression. Understanding identity helps me understand politics, and understanding politics helps me understand the interdependency of identity and politics for oppressive colonial action. Thus, understanding identity politics helps me articulate practices of identity suppression (and oppression).

Cultures that locate identity in a politic of ideas, e.g., belonging to Greek thought, tend to colonize other cultures, and rule politically oppressive states. These colonial social cultures link individual identity with linear time (of discreet human events and institutions) rather than a geographical place. Conversely, Indigenous cultures nurture individual identity formation with a communal interdependence and sustainability in a specific geographic location. Vine Deloria claims in God is Red the importance of geographical place identity for America's Indigenous people; and he clarifies the nature of our cognitive and hence practical struggles with a culture whose identity is found within linear time events.

Indigenous identity stories link communal identity to particular geographies, sometimes conveying patterns of hybrid beings. These hybrid beings sometimes interact with us in stories offering playful and humorous insight, or fearful and awesome insight! A hybrid being, going back one generation, has at least two original genetic blueprints, though there may be one or more cultural blueprints; the metaphor of a family tree of DNA, culture, language, or worldview can be understood as a model of grafted identity.

Race theory in the United States generally classifies biracial persons as individuals having two original DNA blueprints (genetic parents), with variant racial markers. As Naomi Zack has illustrated however, more properly, these persons can be thought about as mixed race individuals. On this model, everyone is hybrid as a result of hypothetical race markers, and historical global colonization. Using this metaphor, Zack articulates the non-discreet borders of racial identity, and the subsequent political uses of them. Zack shares with Deloria a suspicion about unified and theoretically constructed identities that are not grounded in paricularity of real individual's lives. I feel an affinity with this position.

When we focus upon our Earth Mother and Sky Father around the globe, hybrid persons of nation and geography will be found; whether of different tribes or nations in Africa or Asia, India, Europe, or the Americas. Indeed, when Eric Von Sertima, in They Came Before Columbus, wrote about trade between Africa and the Americas, I don't think we need to assume he was just talking about trading cloth and food! Thus, around the globe, hybrids, whether by choice or force, assimilate to identities of cultural domination. This model of hybrid grafting helps me to understand how to teach a deconstruction of race, culture, and national identity theory. The extent to which an analogy can be drawn from exemplars of race hybrids to exemplars of cultural hybrids, may depend upon what we mean by 'culture' in the context of personal identity. And in this context of personal identity, to gather a meaning of culture, we can begin with the relationship between outer/inner cultural identity constructs.

Outside/Inside Identity

Vine Deloria, in several of his books, claims that for American Indians, our tribes live in and through us. Implicit in his understanding of tribal identity is that identity manifestations i.e. our ways of being in the world, may or may not be a conscious awareness. American Indian identity and worldview, a history of place consciousness, preserved through oral history, manifests discreet geographical place symbols within consciousness that provides a conceptual framework of identity as place. American Indian consciousness, and hence American Indian identity, is cognitively of, and interdependent with, our land base. Though many things may be inferred form this claim, I focus here first on what it means for inner/outer identity, and for consciousness and worldview preservation, by drawing an analogy to Asian identity.

Direct attention to an Asian American poet, Mitsuya Yamad and her poem "Mirror Mirror"," helps articulate the differences of inside/outside identity. Matsuda's Asian American son is having problems at school being accepted by non-Asian students. He believes this is because he appears Asian on the outside; he is upset because he believes that because he is American on the inside, he should be accepted as an American. Social acceptance is so important, that her son is willing to ignore, and wipe out, any Asian identity on the inside that he might otherwise own. Our poet cautions him, however, indicating that as she sees his identity, he needs to turn the outside in; he is both American and Asian on the inside, and this is what America looks like.

This poem illustrates how identity is beyond visibility, and much deeper than external markers. Here, cultural markers create identity, distinct from any DNA features. Moreover, we emanate who we are and are not both by our physical appearance (how we appear to others as an x, y, or z), as well as by many intangibles, such as language (syntax and semantics), worldviews, values, positional vision, ways of thought, ways of being, and motivating actions. These are the things of culture, eg., being part of an interdependent universe, that live in and through us.

Another analogy comes from the work of Annette Arkeketa, a Creek playwright and poet. Throughout her work, Arkeketa suggests a sense of knowing identity from within, from a placed being. Understanding this sense of identity requires knowing that a Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood (CDIB) card is not necessarily an identity marker. In one of Arkeketa's poems this is shown to us through the eyes of her son. It is the metaphysic of his communal existence, as a member of a group, and the blended identities from which his identity, as a tribal member, comes into being. He calls forth tribal powers that already live in and through him as he mocks the BIA identity police, "CDIB! CDIB! I know who I be!…CDIB!" All the while, as he mocks the oppressed external identity marker, he suggests nothing really has changed from inside, but rather that change has been forced from the outside. The importance of Arkeketa's identity portrayal is that her son knows who he is, and this knowing comes from a tribal knowing.

The reality of identity is problematic for us frequently when we do not know, or cannot discern, another's cultural identity. For example, we may not know or have the ability to recognize or name cultural markers, codes, or differences. This may especially be true for individuals who are culturally isolated, having only the dissonance of not-being to push up against in understanding another's identity, rather than an affirmation of a particular cultural trait or way of being. Cultural isolation creates cognitive dissonance with cultural difference. Important to understanding identity problems as they relate to communicative dissonance is awareness that our communicative pathways are ninety to ninety-five percent non-verbal! Hence, cultural behaviors such as human movement patterns and eye positions become important to intra-cultural communication. The ability to recognize the furniture of cultural communication assists to release initial cognitive dissonance.

Assume some person wants another to know and/or respect cultural difference. From an epistemological perspective, the subject knower must have a reference point of culture recognition. Because these differences can and do go unrecognized frequently by a subject knower, the phenomenon of passing occurs (intentional or not). In this way, culture markers, both internal and external, matter. False identity assumptions may occur unknown to either the subject or the subject knower. When this happens, potential communication slips past speakers.

What all this seems to imply is that if a person is to arrive at the ability to see, hear, feel, and appreciate that cultural difference, they must have the key to unlock a cultural conceptual framework. What seems obvious to Mitsuye's, son, being Asian on the outside rather than the inside, clearly shows how he focuses (has been taught to focus?) on his external and internal being in the world. And Arkeketa's son, for those who yield power over him, is Indian only because he has met the qualifications of his colonizers; yet for himself, his family and community, the BIA CDIB card is irrelevant to his being Indian, and this Being having a heritage and culture. What the child knows intuitively is that who he is, is not who the card says he is, but is a lived relationship to those who share his place. He is who he is only as he lives relationship with all his relations in the universe. This worldview of an identity construct is a gift of coming into being by acting in the world. The gift of identity, the learning to see through his mother's eyes, is also a part of who he is, and is a creative force informing his nondiscreet identity.
The playful outer reality in these examples, is that cultural identity neither begins nor ends with physical appearance, promulgations of a national citizenship, nor discreetly unified categories. The lesson to be learned from these analogies is that identities of people are about a culture or about a relationship, in a way that we cannot presuppose to be true about discreet nationhood. In conclusion, whether or not the Asian American child is recognized by his peers as American, or the American Indian Creek child is recognized by a dominant colonial government as a Creek citizen, no one could seriously deny that they are these things, and that these things also create nondiscreet ways of being that are essential to (children's) cultural identity.

Hearing as Being

I recall a conversation that took place several years ago relative to the issue of music and volume. Central to my musings about this conversation is the extent that music, or what and how we hear sound, is a function our being in the world, as cultural specific beings. The conversation I mention flowed from the process of listening to classical music with a colleague, and then listening to African-American music, and later American Indian music with that same colleague.

When African American music began playing, my visiting colleague asked me whether I had just turned the volume down. She then asked me to turn up the volume, to make the music louder. I complied with the request, wondering if perhaps my guest had a hearing difficulty (since I thought the volume was already sufficiently loud). After a bit, the musical selection changed from African American music, to American Indian music. Almost immediately my colleague asked me whether I turned the volume up; and claimed that the music now sounded disturbingly and uncomfortably loud to her. I politely informed my guest that I had not subsequent to the initial request, turned up the volume. But try as I might, I never did get this person to believe that I had not surreptitiously changed the volume higher when playing the American Indian music.

My musings about the effect of the cultural music selection suggest to me that how we hear volume may also be, at least partly, a function of culture. In response to sharing this amusement with my partner, I was reminded that Harlem, New York, is a community of communal music on the streets, and that it is not played with a low volume! And I now recall that after my partner's child returned home from her first visit to Harlem, as a young African American college student, she seriously entertained the thought of packing up and moving to Harlem, so enamoured was she with the sweet sounds of street music!

Music is rooted in, and is about, a way of sharing. In a community that affords not much else by way of commodities, music can be sacred. Music takes on a special cultural meaning, just as the sharing of "fry-bread" takes on a specific cultural meaning, when we could afford nothing but a few bread makings in American Indian communities. Both music and frybread are intimately a part of the lifeworld of our American Indian communities. Both have played a role in bringing and holding people of a culture together.

More recently, American Indian are seeing our ways of music and dancing, as commodities, seep into dominant mainstream American culture, in much the same way that African American music has found itself co-opted by dominant cultures. Yet the ways of being from which these sounds and songs have come, are heard by the mainstream not as voices of the mainstream, but rather, as dissonant, and for some, discordant voices.

My point here is that many times, totally unknown to us, we emanate who we are by our body language as we move, as we talk, as we perceive the world, and also how we hear the world, through the sounds and rhythms of our environment. We may sometimes cringe at what sounds to others as carefully orchestrated musical harmony. These sound rhythms emanate from our body movement. This is how deep are our identity markers. For American Indians, the voice of the drum, the heartbeat of Earth Mother, in harmony with Sky Father, is a voice of our being, a voice of knowing our place among all our relations.

Seeing as Being

In a 1992 "American Philosophical Association Blacks in Philosophy Newsletter" article titled, "An Autobiographical View of Mixed Race and Deracination" Naomi Zack, speaks of her experience having an African-American absent father, and being raised by a very present Jewish mother. Zack, is a culturally grafted person (as we all are in some sense.) As such, she claims that warps of her psychology of identity are the effects of warps in her external social reality. As a person of mixed race identity, she is appalled at the racial theory in our country that dictates each person shall have a race, and that they must choose between Black and White. The problem, as Zack sees it, is that there is no place for mixed race persons.

Though I sympathize with Zack's position, I'm not sure whether I favor her overall thesis that a new universal be developed having a bias in favor of raceless races. (Though this may only be an indication that I am not clear about her meaning.) On the other hand, Zack recognizes that we must block the privileging of race via the use of racial designators. This makes some sense to me. I cannot help but wonder if such counsel could bring us culturally closer to a place where persons would be judged not by our racial affiliations, nor cultural contributions, but by the content of our character, our moral character, as Martin Luther King would imply, and our cultural moral character, to which Deloria frequently alludes. Blocking racial designators however, will not bar cultural dissonance, and ultimately I think, race theory is also about cultural dissonance and cultural domination.
Important for my work in critical identity theory, and my thesis here about the metaphysics of identity, are the reasons why Naomi Zack claims she identifies with her Jewish mother, and not her African American father. She says her mother was not an observant Jew, nor was she (Zack). Nevertheless, she says
…my mother saw the world with (what I take to be) Jewish eyes and felt the world with (what I take to be) Jewish fears, and I have never been able to avoid (what I take to be) the same apperceptions. In other words, I believe I 'identify' with my mother.

By analogy, I recognize my Jewish ancestry and heritage of my father, and I do believe I see the world with (what I take to be) a particular type of Jewish consciousness.

More important for myself, however, is that I understand the world with (what I take to be) and feel the world with (what I take to be) an American Indian, specifically a Northern Florida Seminole matrilineal consciousness. Thus, I have never been able to avoid (what I take to be) the same apperceptions of my mother. Or, as Zack would articulate it, I believe I 'identify' with (the worldview of the apperceptions of) my mother. But this identification is not a racial one so much as a cultural one that embodies racial dispositions. I believe I share much the same metaphysical and ontological understandings of the world that my mother inhabited, and that this sharing has led me to a similar skeptical epistemological position. I want to flesh this out a bit, to see how this might inform my understanding of the hegemonic world that surrounds me.

Over five hundred years of cultural seeing of the resistance of American Indians to colonization, assimilation, and genocide has informed our hearing of a different drum. After over five hundred years, our resistance, metaphorically speaking, is as much in our DNA (whatever DNA may ultimately turn out to be by some theory or another), as our heartbeats are resonant in our drum. Our seeing is a cultural seeing of resistance to dominance as shared from the eyes of those closest to us.

Organizing as Being

I feel it is important for all people to recognize (especially in the U.S.) that indigenous people of color, and especially peoples of more recent tribal descent (500 years or so), really are, in some ways that matter significantly, sometimes different from the dominant culture. In the ways that we cognitively structure how we exist in the world we are already at home in the Americas, and have a sense of belonging in our own lands. We have no need to return to a lost continent over the waters, or to study a "golden age" of scholarship. This sense of belonging is crucial to our abilitiy to relax cognitive dissonance. [An important (moral) question is whether this difference ought to make a difference in the world, and in global politics. I will return to this question later, in the section "Politics of Being.".]

The process of discovering identity formation, it seems to me, is to first detect how our frameworks of recognition comprehend only what these frameworks have been trained to comprehend. I differentiate here between conceptual frameworks of understanding we use to interpret an outsider's world, and conceptual indigenous frameworks that give rise to worldviews and ways of being in the world, that complement particular cultural conceptual frameworks of understanding.

For philosophical clarification of these conceptual frameworks I refer to a German philosopher's framework, Immanuel Kant. I draw an important philosophical marker between my view and Kant's view. Kant held, and I do not, that universal concepts of space and time organize cultural conceptual categories. Kantian categories would admit of universal (and hence natural) categorical classifications of time and space, as part of the fundamental apparatus or tools of the human brain.

The conceptual frameworks I discuss are acquired ways of being in the world. They are socially transferred from one generation to the next; they are socially secured by defining identity place specific categories; the frameworks apprehend a worldview situating the identity of a person in a community; that community shares the place specific worldview; and hence share a (partial or complete) worldview about identity as nondiscreet. Moreover, it is the worldview that arises from the geographic place specificity, and events that take place in that space, that enable communally apprehended nonlinguistic communication to emerge. Some of this communication is nonverbal; it is behavioral. Some of what is communicated builds upon communally accepted beliefs about the world and our place in it.

Deloria once indicated, and I agree, that an American Indian identity could be grounded on a common "response to" the colonization of our land (God Is Red). In addition, I believe it could be grounded on a common response to the genocide of American Indians and our worldviews. This genocide has significantly influenced our contemporary relationships with one another, to the federal government, among indigenous nations around the globe, and amid all our relations.

Thus, apperceptions of a communal world are transferred through generation to generation, by a communal sharing of that worldview. As Annette Arkeketa and Vine Deloria have portrayed in their work, for American Indians the concept of space organizes; I refer to this cognitive organization as mindspace.
A mindspace is an idea about belonging to a place. It is formative to the worldview infrastructure of American Indian thought, and can be tangibly recognized in our cultural productions. Being attuned, consciously or not, to the sights, sounds, smells, and breaths (air) of that space, where our ancestors live, is as fundamental to American Indian identity as are the sounds of the drum. Understanding mindspace is fundamental to understanding an American Indian standpoint, position, or worldview.

Second, all our relations (all living things) have a strong influence on the shaping of our identity. Thus, I see the world from (what I take to be) my mother's eyes, and that means my mother saw the world from (what she took to be) her mother's eyes. So also, then, I see the world from (what I take to be) my grandmother's eyes. And so on down through our mothers' lives, the transitive relation glues together the generations. For many American Indians, because we have been raised primarily to see the world from (what we take to be) our grandparents eyes, we reach back at least two generations for our early visions.

The question of what types of ontological relations exist in the world for American Indian thought, is perhaps best be understood by considering how ontological differences operate at the epistemological level.
Epistemology occurs when infrastructures of cognitive and affective frameworks, or worldview, come together in apprehending the world, or reality, as we come know it. Reality then, comes to us and is made by us in the world through all our relations including ourselves as part of that of which the world is made. This framework organizes schematic components of indiscreet concepts that originate out of our experience. The originating experience is a function of relaxing cognitive dissonance found in our experience of the world.

In this way, what I see when I look in a mirror, or hear my self speak, is not only what is in the playful mirror or voice, but it may be radically different from what you see or hear. I, and not you, am in the place of experiencing self-reflection on my identity in the present, the very moments as I live the experience. This is one way we can be tricked in the game of identity-for what we appear to be to ourselves may not be what we appear to be to others. We need to continue to think about this trick, as Maria Lugones might admonish us, playfully, with a sense of discovery, and also, with a sense of intellectual rigor.

Humans generally have some similar as well as differently organized schemata. Some cultural groups of persons have developed similar organized schema because of similar group cultural experience. Thus, although the ability or attentiveness to recognize others like oneself may sometimes be a difficult and complex task, like a game it may also be fun to play. Recognition is possible via cultural perspectives that live "in and through us" frequently at unconscious levels. We need only remember how we marvel when we learn things about ourselves that we did not previously know, to see why some folks do not grasp the same things we are experiencing when we experience them. Developing an appreciation for schemas of recognition however, for where our indiscreet conceptual borders get played out, might give others the ability to see by joining the dance of cognitive dissonance "as a subject knower from the other's perspective." The difference betwween theory and practice remains, however, and although I can articulate the theory, I do not know if this can be in practice.

What this means pragmatically, is that some of you may perceive what appears to you as an anglo woman, while some may perceive what appears to them to be "one of ours" as we say in Indian Country. Those who would identify me as the latter would have to know and recognize clues that may or may not be obvious to the perceiver, in order to correctly identify me. The reality before each is similar, but the schematic of recognition organizes according to indiscreetly boundaried concepts of differences. It may be that relaxing cognitive dissonance is an acquired skill. I don't know, and the jury is still out on this one!

Before moving on to the political issues of this analysis, a final word. What we see, and hear, and know, and how we organize in the world is dependent upon what is programmed into our computers upstairs. As two persons look upon a third person, the third person's identity may be detected differently by observers. Of course, this happens every day. The important philosophical question of identity here then, is how some things going noticed, while others going unnoticed, creates value judgements about that third person in the world.

Worldviews embed value judgements. Values arise from particular places and historical events/experiences in those places. Value judgements are markers informing subjects about which aspects of the observed are important, and which are not important. Value judgements are markers informing the subject which attributes are to be paid attention to, and which are not; which attributes are to be recognized, and which are not. Perhaps most important, they mark which attributes are acknowledged as being (having existence) in the world, and which are not (to be).

Earth Being

I am a person who generally enjoys interviewing. I am also a person who has done a good share of interviewing (both formal and informal) at philosophy conferences. Through these experiences I have come to realize that the colonization of the institution of matching job huntees with job hunters is fraught with cultural (mis)interpretations of behavior. The interviewers (like the Wizard of Oz), generally grant cordiality to job hunters only after all of the hoops have been jumped, hurdles crossed over, articulations of thesis dissertations made, and proper cultural innuendos asserted. Like the institutions of racism, sexism, and classism, there are protocols to be enacted to pass the tests of inclusion as a potential colleague (nonverbal secret rites of passage). My point, quite simply, is that there is no room for difference to be asserted. One either belongs or one does not belong according to sameness of affiliations. This difference makes a difference institutionally.

Given the context, and the situatedness in which I move through the world, I must be a person of shifting identities in the world to function successfully. Hence I have collected a variety of shifting identities from which I select an appropriate one at any given time or place. As a being with many shifting identities, one method I use to understand this complexity of living identity shifts within my "self," has been to write poetry. For me, poetry creates a space of story, and so it is with my poetry as with my stories, they embrace stories about my ways of knowing my place space in the world.

I mentioned earlier that when I read poetry I sound (I voice-I hear) very different at times, depending upon what I am reading, and who is in the audience. I hear an academic voice when I read academic papers; and sometimes, I will change this academic voice for effect. In the context of voice shifting, I have a special relationship to an indiscreet space within my being that recognizes all of my voice shifts among different audiences. What intrigues me, as a philosopher, is how this shifting of voice correlates to shifting identity. For an answer to this, I turn to the historical context of my coming to be in the world. In doing so, I will tell a story.
Living in an extended family, my primary caretaker was my grandmother, my mother's mother. My mother's mother was a Northern Florida Seminole woman, who said she would never live south of the hurricane line, which meant Tampa Bay. It was as clear as pure water for her that this is the way things were to be; there were certain things people were meant to do, and living below the hurricane line in Florida was not one of them. Hence, she would travel East and a bit North, but never travel South nor West. She would not travel west because, according to her, her people had always been from the East, and it made no sense to travel to a geographic place that was not home. She was willing to go as far as Georgia, where she had kin, but no further. I remember the year when we moved to Massachusetts, she said we had no business being there and ought to go back home as soon as we could manage. Manage-that was the word our elders used for being able to pick up, financially or emotionally, and move to where things might be better, financially, or emotionally. To manage was to find a place to be.

Fundamental to my mother's identity (apperceptions of the world) was that "real" Seminoles, which we were, had never signed a treaty with the U.S. I grew up with a consciousness that our U.S. citizenship had been forced upon my family, and that we were still, in some surreptitious way, at war with the U.S. And for this reason, we were told never to sign any membership rolls for Indians. Not that it mattered much to me, because there weren't any for me to sign. But the stories, and the admonitions, were powerful; they created a space of being, of identity, of knowing my "place" in the dominant world, that remains with me today. Moreover, because of the removals that separated and brought death to so many of our relatives, I was told about how our relatives migrated away from Florida, and how many still lived with fear of government power. I was told how some of our relations lived in hiding, and how some members passed when they could to survive, and how sometimes we did not survive when we couldn't.

As a child, my being Indian was to be a Seminole. My family was not just Indian, but a people with a long and serious history in the Americas. To be Seminole was to still be renegade, tergiversator, an insurgent presence in our own land. And to us, that land was everything that we had been and were still. Always, it was about the land. To be Seminole also meant my family had been forced by the government to live away from our community of origin. Our relations had dispersed throughout the southeast, some as far as Mexico and Texas. We had been forced away from a culture of fun loving games, and people loving groups, embracing and embraced by all our relations of the southeast who had taught us how to survive, and how to treat all beings in our world.
Our old stories were stories of what it meant to be human and what it meant to be Seminole. They were stories about understanding ourselves in relation to those who shared and those who came to share our place. These included European immigrants and African Americans. And so, when my grandmother's, six foot five, brother would come up from Florida to visit us, to make sure his sister and her family was being well taken care of, he told us stories of change. He told us stories of a Florida he said my mother's mother would not recognize again, and would never see again. These stories brought with them a continued sadness, and a sense of loss.
My uncle told us stories of recent times, of how our grandmother married a man of mixed heritage, of Seminole, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Cherokee descent. It was said that he might have been Creek as well, but for some historical reasons, we never mention this identity. James Hunter Henry came from Indian Country in Oklahoma, where twenty years ago, in Wewoka, I visited photographs of him, his likeness, and of his people. I never knew my grandfather; he died when my mother was seventeen years old, but I heard many stories about his family from Mary Hunter, in Tennessee. After many years Mary had gone back to the old records of allotment, and forced the government to give to her and her family the 25 acres that the government placed in trust, deeming full bloods to be incompetent to manage land. To this day, as far as I know, that land is still held by Eugene, her son. A picture of my grandmother and grandfather, taken when they were youthful, always hung in my grandmother's bedroom.

My mother left Florida when her father died, to take a job with a government program in the city. She took the job to take care of herself and her mother. Though she married a nonIndian from the midwest, over the years my mother kept in touch with her many relatives. When I turned twenty-one, I visited these family members as my mother took me on a sojourn, just her and I, through the land of my many ancestors in the Southeast. This was taken for the purpose of knowing who I was, and where and why my famiily of several generations had passed through, and been set to rest. I heard many stories then, from many relatives. Driving through several southeastern states, none of the resting places had any markers, yet my mother had historical memory of which graveyard, and which tree, and which hill or rock they rested upon or near. To this day I can see these resting places we visited, and the surrounding land, as clearly in my mind as I saw them many years ago. In this way, as Paula Gunn Allen might say, I hold an idea about who I am in the context of kinship, accountability, and responsibility.

Most important to my grandmother's way of seeing the world was an idea about herself as a Southern woman, a woman from Florida. And not just anyplace in Florida, but from Tampa Bay area. This was home, and had always been home for her, and for my mothers' mothers. The South was part of our blood running through our veins, and part of our breath bringing oxygen to our blood. The South was in our food we ate, in the smells of home, and in our stories of everyday. This South was us, just as the blood and bones of our grandparents and all our relatives, resting in the Southeast, in the ground, the air, the plants, trees, flowers, rivers, and in all of creation in that place where our people still live. We were told we were a part of that land, and that that land, in the Southeast, that land and no other, was a part of us from which we grew to be who we were. The land had provided our food, and was in us, and we, in setting our relatives to rest, were in the land. When my grandmother cut oranges, she cut them with the smell and taste of Florida fresh in her nostrils and breath. And when I smelled the oranges, the juice seeping from her fingers as she cut for ambrosia, the oranges mixed with pecans and coconut, I knew it was a special smell, and that somehow my being in the world was connected to that smell.
Always, everyday of her life, my grandmother yearned to return home, to Florida; to return to that place, and no other. She finally returned home when she passed on after 99 years of living in this world. And when I walk with my grandparents and all my relations in returning to Florida, I am walking in that place where my family and ancestors lived, and live still. And when I smell oranges in the humid south, I smell of my grandmother, of my family, and of my people. That place, near the Tampa Bay area, is a part of an idea I have about myself, about what and who I am. I cannot help but to think that I am also, in some strange way, a part of what that place is now, a part of the invisible stories of Seminole survival, a part of my homeland.

Eventful Being

Eventful Being is about historical context. It is about Muscogean Being blending with Seminole Being, in text, though not in Story. It is also about being from a culture that experienced cognitive dissonance in suddenly finding itself dominated by people of another shore, another place. As colonies of Spain swept across the Southeast, they first tortured and murdered our people, and then "traded our land" to the people of the Colonies of England. They did this in exchange for the Spanish privilege to more fully colonize, without interference from the North, another territory, indigenous communities of the Southwest. In asking why the Colonists from England would want Florida, land of crocodiles and mosquitos, we uncover hidden relations.

From my mother, back to my mother's mother, and her mother's mothers' mother, and on around through our matrilineal descent, from each generation back to creation from our Earth Mother, we, the people, have been agrarian, with a diet of corn, potatoes, squash, and fish. We have settled the lands, always building community, always building survival, and always accommodating other cultures the best we knew how, and for the best reasons we could find. Neither romantic nor dramatic, we simply survived the best way we knew how to manage.
Florida was a land rich with hiding places. Foreign capitalists in slave ships would stop in the Boston Harbor, unload Africa's human beings that would be sold into slavery, and then sail on to the Carolina coast. Here they would unload kidnapped human cargo human enslaved by the thieves who stole Africa's legacy, and sell it to the world. From this Carolina coast these foreigners would sail their human cargo completely around the Florida shores, staying clear of the land, and cut up through the Gulf of Mexico into what is now Mississippi, always fearing a mishap of navigation might put them on the shores of Florida. For in Florida, not only could these people kidnapped out of Africa have a possibility to escape their enslavement, but the Africans, as the kidnappers knew, would be aided in these efforts by Florida's indigenous people. Such an assimilative culture were the Seminole, that our assimilation into our communities, of slaves escaped to Florida, by the early 1800's, threatened to destroy the plantation economic system, and with it, the Confederated States of America. Thus go stories of the Florida underground railroad, and the removals.

Our mother's children of generations had stories to tell. From the time when I was young, my mother told me how Florida far surpassed what became known in the history texts as the "underground railroad at the Ohio river." She would lean over me, tapping her finger on the page of the book, and tell me that "that" was not the way it was, that we also had a story about the way things were. Our land, Florida, was the land of indigenous southern hospitality, the land eventually populated by Spanish-Indian people, of African-Indian people, of people of color, of indigenismo. Many Africans fled to Florida to escape the newcomer's tortures; the newcomers practiced their capitalist trade, the legacy of slavery learned in the Colonies of England. These Africans migrated, and were welcomed, assimilated, and blended with many of our people. These are some of my mother's stories.
When I hear the old stories, stories about the struggle of Osceola, a Seminole man, and his wife, a Seminole woman, having her roots in Africa, I remember three interdependent connections in my being. In my Indigenous Seminole heart I feel one leg of Africa, and one of Spain. Through our indigenous being we have survived the colonization of Spain, and through this indigenous survival, our blending with Africa was made possible. Thus, while retaining our own worldview, we have partly taken on and absorbed the interdependencies of all our relations among three major continents. In doing so however, we have remained Seminole. And although many of us do not know our language, we know that it has survived, and that in it, we can find a mirror to our worldview that has been kept alive in and through us for generations. It is from this heart, this indigenous Seminole heart, and the mindspace it holds, that my identity and moral character coallesce together, ingathering all that we be, with or without CDIB!

The historical text that Osceola's wife was never found, though the U.S. government placed bounty on her, is a metaphor for the never found migrating Seminole: into the everglades, down through Mexico, off to the cities, and anywhere we could find to hide our people. We were dispersed in many directions, a diaspora from Las Floridas, forced from our lands, our places and spaces of being. From fighting one another, from Billy Bowlegs fighting stamina to Osceola's travels and deceptive capture, through the sickness of the snow and disease, the loss and genocide across the Trail of Tears, finally resting in Wewoka, we crossed over. Some Seminole remained in Florida, yet some Seminole are found today, near the "Hanging Tree" outside the courthouse of colonial Wewoka. Our presence stands as a tribute to our strength of survival, and our passion of belonging with a community of ideas about ourselves. My presence and being come from that struggle.

These are stories that some Seminole have in our being, that we have remembered, and not forgot. These are stories of a powerful nation that sought to prevent what could not be prevented-the Civil War between the northern and the southern states. The economics of slavery, and the moral assistance of Seminole people in the flight of Africans out of that slavery, was an economic matter for the Confederation of States. In removing the Five Civilized Tribes beginning in 1830, the North hoped to appease the South's complaints about southern American Indian tribal support given to escaping African slaves. As well, the North hoped to improve its colonial economic development into Florida.

A partial disappearance of the stories, our deeds, our people, was caused by those who have committed genocide upon us. Finally, when "they" could not divide us by the color line, when "they" were in fear that "their own nation," lacking any unified identity, would collapse from North to South, they kidnapped many people of our Five Civilized Nations (having a long legacy of successful kidnapping), and took women, children, and men to armed military camps where many were surreptitiously killed, and others left to starve to death. This message left a stark impression upon those who escaped. This impression remains part of our being in the world.
These events live with us still; as in memory together we walk our lands of our ancestors. And in the walking we feel the energy of our being mixing with energy of those who have shed blood, and through this walking we, the indigenous people, remain on and in our land, our place, our cognitive space. We love our land, and we will not be moved without struggle.

That the current government continues genocide against us is a moral issue, is a religious issue, is a legal issue, is a sovereignty issue, is a survival issue, and is an identity issue. That newcomers to this land continue today to benefit from this genocide and land theft is a moral issue, is a religious issue, is a legal issue, is a sovereignty issue, is a survival issue, and is an identity issue.

Political Being

American Indians are political beings, as all tribes share in struggle against the continuing genocide perpetrated on our people and nations. Echoing the words of many contemporary Indian scholars and intellectuals: "I am a member of a group which comprises over 500 distinctly identifiable ethnicities stretching across at least three noticeably different yet questionable racial divisions, that are lumped together in the category of Native American."

As an American Indian, I am a member of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas (IPA). Part of an idea about myself in my mindspace is about how the blood and sacred agreements of the IPA have created and continue to create family and political alliances in our struggle that survive the ever-present genocide of global indigenous people. This genocide was begun over 500 years ago, and continues today by the same corporate interests, inspired by all newcomers to America's shores. The historical and present families of these newcomers have profited, enriched, and furthered their economic political interests at the expense of both American Indians and African Americans. In the year 2001, 200,000 individuals from India alone will immigrate to the United States in search of these benefits. These newcomers receive innumerable government benefits, non-payment of taxes for seven years, ready made loans to open businesses, and educational dollars for their children to attend college. American Indians, and our African Americans brothers and sisters, will be denied these same benefits while many of our children go hungry. My cognitive apperceptions of these newcomers is as benefitters of the human and cultural genocide of American Indians and African Americans. My cognitive dissonance is that the newcomers seem to have no similar political understanding, nor express cognitive identity of this situation.

In North America today there are persons who have deserted their own economically troubled lands and people because of the difficulties brought on by political economic disasters of centuries of European colonial conquests, and the extraction of natural resources, and human labor. Those taking flight to the economic comforts of North America, to escape the anguish and distress of corporate and religious colonization, only further diversifies a group of people who have in the past benefited from, and continue today to benefit from, a global systemic genocide against Indigenous Nations. Without a Nation, a People cannot survive; and without a Nations people, worldviews cannot survive. Failure to recognize full nationhood to Indigenous People creates an active agency that denies our survival. This agency creates cognitive dissonance when we must stand against newcomers who we might otherwise welcome to the shores of the Americas. If the current global genocide against Indigenous people succeeds, the worldview of the historically most violent and intolerant peoples of the colonial world remains intact. This information precludes a cognitive coherence when I must at the same time be a part of such a system and struggle against such a system.

Failing to take a stand against those who benefit from the current economic global warfare, is like failing to step forward when your name is called to take your place in historical event.

As an insurgent political intellectual, philosopher, and academic, I walk in the footsteps of two insurgent academic intellectuals, Vine Deloria, Jr., and Angela Davis. From the blending of the work and life of these two indigenous scholars, I have chartered my own political identity. It is a lived identity, and a lived politic. I have found my path of political identity in the indigenous projects of Mexico, Central and South America, Africa, Australia, and India. It is the identity and philosophy of a Native woman whose heart is well above the ground, always in struggle against colonial supremacist patriarchal capitalism.

I find direct connections from the omnivorous corporate global exploitation of human labor and natural resources (that fills the pockets of large gluttonous investors around the globe), to the contemporary brain drain from other nations to North America (based on the "if you like capitalism you are smart" immigrant test). And from both of these, I have found connections to the contemporary associations of the block-headed parsimonious proliferation, and profit driven expansion, of the North American Prison Industrial Complex. In the Americas stakes drove the capitalist entrepreneurs of human slavery to profit from mega-complex global corporate prisons at the expense of so many of my brothers and sisters behind those profit driven bars.

My identity as an American Indian, to Black Africans and African Americans is defined by my cognitive mindspace place, where my identity and my life are one of a struggle to survive human, economic and cultural genocidal madness. American Indians have been with this identity for a very long time. Yet always we are with the cognizance and cognitive dissonance of who we are, and who we are not.

I do not want a new place. My identity is in the soiled bloody mud of North America. And it is from this vista, as I see it, that I take a stand, and share my political identity dissonance. Like the mud, like the turtle, the alligator, the snake, the rabbit, and the swamps of my people, of my place, I am together in it, and I am myself, in it.
Three main historical eras of genocide continue: against American Indians, against Black Africans, and against Semites, or Jews. Race and ethnic purity are alive and well in the belly of the beast. Contributing to the beast's "divide and conquer" mentality toward "others," race and ethnic confusion is encouraged. Cognitive dissonance: Israel's people (and others) are walking this land, my place, with the Books of Law; and Africa's people (and others) are shoved into the infested prisons, in this land, my place, bearing the burden of humanities chimera with global capitalist cleansing. In conversation, it is frequently becomes difficult for me to determine just how far the notion of "others" or "we" extends in dialogue!

Yet one discreet boundary shows itself clearly: indigenous resistance to government and corporate takeover of minerals and land rights (which has been going on for a very long time). It has been going on so long, in fact, that to all appearances, colonized capitalists think it quite a rational and natural state of economic being. Thinking that a racist capitalism is quite the quotidian state of affairs requires no trick of vision; it is the obvious.
There is a fundamental irreconcilable difference between identifying as a member of a group engaged in indigenous sustainability of land and culture, and a member of a group supporting the continued colonization of global resources, including humans, by participating as a benefactor of that colonial capitalist regime. The newcomers to North America are part of a system that requires the correlative continued oppression of the people they leave behind in their nations, as well as those in the land they come to. Someone may soon hear the town crier: "Hey Folks, this is not a very viable situation-you cannot simply migrate to what has become known as the First World without it collapsing under the weight!"

This then, is another of my selves, a political identity grounded in my indigenous being. When our people, in this place, are starving, and are dying, from the byproducts of a rapacious capitalist culture, I cannot be silent. My place of being defines who I am politically, and it is in this place that my ancestors have fought for a very long time, and that we have watched, for 500 years, destructive, toxic, annihilative acts take place. In my self that springs from this knowing, my people have watched the interstices of the history of colonial racial economics secure a base to play itself out. Cognitive dissonance is created from watching the reality of colonial economics diversifying in the Americas.

For many years I have been talking and writing about how we cannot have a global understanding of the world with integrity, until we place and face the racial-economic imperialism of the U.S. within this global context. The institutional processes that continue systematic historical events that colonize the Americas, are the collective responsibility of persons who benefit from, or who seek to benefit from, this unjust resource acquisition and recreation of the "Holy Roman Empire."

These events of colonization happen for me as we the indigenous peoples of the Americas are still here, in this place, rooted to the geopolitical events that enter our borders. Yet also, it is here, in the cognition of what America has been and remains for us, that we celebrate out being. Because individuals are used to carry out colonizing enterprises, whether consciously or not, one of my selves stays busy educating those who have the power to dislodge or interrupt the harmful hegemonic thinking about "what America is." As an educator, it is crucial that I remember coyote's relation to the moral universe. In this remembering, I know my selves in and with all my relations.

Shifting Identity

Returning to our theme of creative cognitive dissonance, relaxed interstitial meanings, and shifting voices, I turn to what ties these activities together in my sense of identity. At once I am poet, playing with nuances of the language, grounded in my playfulness with a language that belongs to my colonizer. I play to survive. Shifting in the play, I become the serious philosopher, searching for some semblance of meaning relevant to my being in the world, at once participant of an academic elite, and simultaneously a stubborn word warrior against that same elite, seen as colonizer. Cognitive dissonance ensues. I shift and become the lawyer, the careful word crafter restrained from my passion for justice and fairness, admonishing my colleagues to join in the legal struggle for equality in a land not of my making or being. Cognitive dissonance ensues. Shifting again I become part of someone's problem, as I stand against the "American" system of false education, at the same time using my paycheck from that educational system to survive, to pass voice.

I shift in voice, in identity, because I am at once with and also against all that I have become. At once I am both, the entertaining poet, and the destroyer of colonial poetry. At once I am both, the dedicated philosopher, and the deconstructionist of EuroAmerican philosophy. At once a supporter of oral tradition, and also at once a writer of words on papers. At once a tribal member, and at once not a tribal member. I have learned to live with these cognitive dissonances. I am all of this, and more.

My shifting voices are my shifting identities in play. Yet always, most frequently hidden, is the convergence and coagulation of the selves- of who I am now in the becoming of this place where my people walked and where they and I walk still as we voice ourselves into being.

This paper is about in-betweens of interstitial space, and cognitive dissonance of coming into being. In-betweens are not nothing, though they sometimes appear this way.

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APA Newsletters

Spring 2001 Volume 00, Number 2

Spring 2001
Volume 00, Number 2