How Is a Middle Aged White Male Supposed to Celebrate Indigenous People's Day?

A quick story about a broken treaty in a Native American Women Studies class over 20 years ago

Here I am during that final semester. I still maintain that droopy fire in my eyes and my beautiful red beard has lost all color and is pure white. Effing kids take it all, don't they?

In the Spring of 2000, I was deep into my last semester of undergraduate college. I had come to the end of my University experience. I would not be moving to an MFA Creative Writing program like some of my peers had already decided to do.¹

One of my classes in the final semester offered a unique challenge. I enrolled in a Native American Women 300-level course on a whim. It was a fascinating classroom dynamic, barely structured, open, encouraging, and non-judgmental.

Once, during a riff in that course, I asked the class if it was proper to blame soldiers for the atrocities and continuance of War. I don’t remember the class's conclusion, but that exchange was fascinating and respectful.

And then came the final assignment. An essay where the Caucasians in the class wrote a letter to Native Americans (a reference of respect at the time), and the Native Americans in the course (a few students) were to write a letter to Caucasians.

The rules of grading were simple. If everyone turned in their assignment, we all got an A. On the other hand, the whole class would fail if one person didn’t submit their final letter on time. We voted on this and chose this path together as a single unit.

And it was the blonde white girl who fucked us all. She broke her commitment to the class and didn’t submit her final letter; she didn’t even show up during the last week.

In the final class, after the assignment was due, we were all informed that one student had refused to turn in their final letter. She was the only one who wasn’t in class that day. Of course, we all shook our heads. Everyone was likely thinking, God, damn it, are you fucking kidding me? Some of us needed that A.

The Professor asked us again if we wanted to honor our commitment to one another or if we would like to change the social compact now that we required more favorable conditions for our individual situations.

No one in that class chose to break the treaty we had signed with each other when we voted with our honor. So we all agreed that we would fail as a class together.

I don’t remember their names from that class except for the Professor. But I remember my oath to those people and what it felt like to commit myself morally and spiritually to a social compact meant to maintain order in the group and ensure stability through equal representation, regardless of who we were and where we came from.

The Professor ended up giving us all A’s. But the test had become more than the final. She couldn’t teach the last lesson we learned in that strange class from a book. Instead, we had to learn how disappointment felt when someone broke their oath to the Common Good.

There’s a lot of this oath-breaking going around the world right now, especially in America, breaking the moral commitment that has been tested and passed on for eight generations with the following run-on sentence fragment:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…

Perhaps that middle-aged blonde is nodding along in a crowd right now while someone on a microphone rants about how White Christians are being replaced with better ideas and more compassionate behavior that seeks to build up instead of tear down like that’s a bad thing.

In some people's minds, walls are the only structures worth building, especially walls around their churches.

But that blonde could also have completely changed her life after abandoning our class, forsaking her honor. Maybe she’s a Doctor Without Borders now, battling Ebola on the front lines, saving babies, and tending to ailing human beings with kindness that can’t be stolen, only given away.

Every person is capable of redemption. Even those furthest strayed from the light.

---

I don’t know how to celebrate holidays anymore. At some point, they all get too loud and empty and smell like horseshit in a parade.

The only thing I can do as a middle-aged Cis White Male in America with an activated conscience and a modicum of talent is to rip my chest open, dab my fingertips in my heart’s blood, and start typing this letter to send to you, my fellow human being spinning around on this little wet blue marble.

I hope my letter arrives on time.

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1. At the time, I was coasting to the close of my degree studies, and from there, I was unsure of what the future held for me. But I knew it would involve writing in some form, even for free. I’ve written in exchange for the high cost of begging other peoples’ attention for most of my life. Painters paint, and writers write, even when there is no audience in the galleries we choose to display our creations.