Friday at 7 p.m., Native American author Tommy Orange will visit State College to talk about his Pulitzer Prize finalist novel “There There.”
In the book, one character gathers oral history interviews. WPSU used some of that character’s questions, and some of our own, to talk with Native Americans living in the State College area.
In today’s interview, WPSU’s Emily Reddy talked with Jacinta Garcia, who grew up near Harrisburg and recently moved to State College to be the Native/Indigenous Community Coordinator at the Paul Robeson Cultural Center at Penn State.
Here's the transcript of their conversation:
Emily Reddy
What's your name and your tribe?
Jacinta Garcia
So, my name is Jacinta Garcia. I am not a tribal member. I am a descendant of the White Earth nation, and that is to say that they do not have a record of me. How that came to be was my grandfather was part of the forced assimilation policies, where they were taking indigenous children and adopting them out to European American families. This is where social services started moving into Indian country, and for any number of reasons, small or large, would start to remove Indigenous kids, put them into the foster care and adoptive system, en mass. So, I think a total of 35% of all native children were taken away during that time, and I think it was approximately 90-95% were placed in non-native homes. So, it was this big movement to continue that Americanization process. And what it does is undermines tribal sovereignty. And if there's no citizens left to take over that country, then that land gets absorbed into the greater United States. So, my grandfather was part of that assimilation process through the adoptions.
Emily Reddy
Where did he end up?
Jacinta Garcia
He ended up… He was taken from a nation in Minnesota, the White Earth nation. I don't know that he was ever enrolled, because, based on his letters, he was taken at six months old from his mother. And then he was with a family in Minnesota. And then he kind of ended up all over the place. I had never met him, but I had written letters to him when I was little. When my dad was little, he got meningitis when he was 3 years old, and so he had gone into a coma and woke up without his hearing. And my grandmother and my grandfather divorced pretty early on, so he was absent until my dad was an adult. I remember when my dad first met his dad, because my dad being a Native man, it was actually kept from him his entire life. He was told that he was Italian. He was told he was all these other things, because anything's better than being an Indian. It was considered so extremely shameful. And he was treated horribly his whole life. So, he actually found out in his 20s that he was native, and did not find out that he was Anishinaabeg, or Ojibwe, until I found out. So that's what those policies did. It kind of dismantled families, dismantled citizenship. So, there's so many of us out there who are of indigenous descent, who are the descendants of the forcefully assimilated.
Emily Reddy
Wow. What was the process like for you of finding out and discovery and trying to explore your heritage?
Jacinta Garcia
Yeah, I had known since I was little that I was indigenous. I had faced a lot of comments growing up, you know, everybody calling me Pocahontas. Or there had been family members that had told me that they were so sorry that I was native, that they wished they could bleach the color out of my skin. I did have a lot of family that was very supportive as well. But it's very lonely. Because you experience a lot of the racism, but with none of the culture. None of the identity and the pride and the teachings and the language. When I got to speak Ojibwe for the first time, I actually cried. I'm not a crier. I consider myself kind of tough. So just being able to say words in Ojibwe… and especially my dad, being deaf, he can't speak. So, you know, that's something that has been painful for him, too, is to also have experienced all of that racism, all the isolation from his family, from his close family. He has family who said recently that we are dead to them because we have gone, quote, too Wahoo Indian.
Emily Reddy
Do you feel “native pride” connected to your native heritage?
Jacinta Garcia
Yeah. Yeah, I would say so. Especially, even more so, because of the emphasis on “You should be ashamed” as I was growing up. But then there's also those feelings of “you're not native enough,” right? So you end up, if you're a mixed race person, if you're not enrolled, if you are a descendant, or even if you are very close to your community but you don't have enrollment because of the enrollment qualifications of that particular nation, there can be this feeling of being stuck in the middle of two cultures, and you're not welcome in either.
Emily Reddy
When I called you, you said that “There There,” the book that Tommy Orange is going to come talk about, you said you've taught this book. But how did you react to “There There”? How did it resonate with you?
Jacinta Garcia
I loved it, because I loved that it shows that struggle. Because there is also those feelings of imposter syndrome, of not feeling native enough, if you're not wise to the culture or haven’t had access to ceremony and language and things like that. So, it's really nice to have a story that details other people's struggles with that. Whether it be shame for some of the things that have happened in Indian country, or whether it be characters in the books who were learning how to bead or how to dance on the internet. And you know those feelings of like, “Well, are you a fraud if that's how you learn your culture?” Even if you are enrolled, but growing up away from the community. So, I thought that it was deeply impactful in a way that really tells the story, not all inclusive, right. There's other stories out there as well, but gives a broader view of what it means to be native in contemporary America, and the kind of struggles and the feelings. And it also really drives home that point of all of those policies that were so destructive in Indian country, that Indian country is still trying to pick the pieces up from. Of trying to answer the questions of, “Well, what defines being truly native?” Is it growing up on territory and being deeply immersed in the culture? Is it just your DNA? Is it, you know? What is it now, at this point? And Indian country still really struggling to answer those questions for themselves. So I think that the book really captured that really well.
Emily Reddy
Thank you so much for for talking with me.
Jacinta Garcia
Yeah, of course. Thank you for having me.
