BURY
MY BRAIN AT WOUNDED KNEE
Scene: An elevated train on the North Side
of Chicago. The protagonist, a
thirtysomething male student, is wearing his
prized Syracuse Chiefs baseball cap. The logo
of the Chiefs, the Triple A farm team of the
Toronto Bluejays, is a war bonnet highly
stylized in the same modern design mode as
the bluejay on the parent club's cap. The
antagonist is a fortysomething woman wearing
a vaguely Earth-Mother-type outfit of granny
glasses, floral-print maxi skirt, and clogs.
AN: You know, mister, I find that hat
highly offensive.
(Protagonist
looks behind him at the mention of the word
"mister", thinking that there must
be an older adult male sitting in the rear of
the train.)
AN: You. That hat. I find it really
offensive.
PRO:
(confused) Why? I'm not a gangbanger. I'm
wearing it frontwards.
AN: I think
it's wrong for sports teams to exploit native
Americans like that. You're using their heritage
without their permission.
PRO: What
makes you so sure I'm not an Indian?
AN: Native
American.
PRO: What? I am
a native American.
AN: Which
nation?
PRO: American.
AN: No . . .
which nation? Cherokee . . . Lakota . . .
Pottawattomie . . ..
PRO: American.
AN: Aren't you
proud of your heritage?
PRO: Sure am.
AN: Then why
don't you tell me what it is?
PRO: I did.
I'm an American.
AN: But you
just said you're a native American.
PRO: I am
a native American. I was born in this country
and, except for a few weeks spent in the
Caribbean and Europe and the odd trip to
Canada, I've spent my entire life within
American borders.
AN: No, I mean
a native American. What we used to call
Indians.
PRO: Used to?
AN: Indians is
incorrect. People from India are Indians.
Columbus didn't discover India--he discovered
America. And the people he found here were
native Americans.
PRO: If you're
saying that "native" applies only
in an ancestral sense, then you're doubly
wrong. Wrong on one count because native is a
personal term as well as an ethnic term.
Wrong on the other because there are
no native Americans in an ancestral sense.
Homo sapiens is not native to this
hemisphere. The first people to set foot in
America came here from Siberia sometime
between 13,000 and 20,000 years ago. Exactly
when is a matter of debate. I mean, there's
the dispute over the carbon dating of the
Folsom site, and I've been reading stuff
about the Alaskan coastal warming of 13,000
years ago . . . .
AN: Well,
that's not really relevant. However many
thousands of years ago, they certainly got
here long before we did . . . and look what
we did to them.
PRO: We?
AN: So I think
that they qualify as native Americans, and
most people agree nowadays.
PRO: First of
all, who's we?
AN: White
people.
PRO: Be more
specific. I have an ancestor that came over
on the Mayflower--an English
criminal named John Rutherford. My guess is
that your ancestors came over a lot later.
According to your reasoning, that makes me
more native than you.
AN: That's
dumb. We're only talking about a couple of
centuries between your ancestors and mine
coming here. With the native Americans, we're
talking about thousands of years.
PRO: And
you're the gatekeeper? You're the one who's
going to arbitrarily decide how long your
ancestors have to have been here to be native
Americans? I think my definition is smarter.
Anyone born here is a native American.
AN: You Mayflower
people have been setting the rules for too
long.
PRO: Mayflower
people?
AN: That's
right. The WASP establishment. Your people
didn't even want my people to come here to
America!
PRO: And who
would your people happen to be?
AN: Slavic
people . . . Czechs, Poles, Russians. My
grandparents moved from Czechoslovakia to the
Northwest Side.
PRO: You've
got some pretty interesting views for a
Northwest Sider. I've never met someone who
grew up in the Bungalow Belt who insisted
that Indians are the only native Americans.
AN: I didn't
grow up in the Bungalow Belt. My parents
moved out to Schaumburg when I was a kid.
PRO:
Schaumburg!? So you went to Schaumburg High
School?
AN: Yeah, so?
PRO: So . . .
your high school's nickname is the Saxons. As
someone of both German and English ancestry,
I find that highly offensive. You exploited
my ancestral heritage without my permission.
(The
antagonist glares at the protagonist for a
moment, then picks up her shopping bag and
moves to the next train car. The protagonist
looks out the window and breathes a silent
prayer of thanks that he isn't a Cleveland
Indians fan.)
Captain
Spaulding
Previous Mountaintop
Experiences with Captain
Spaulding:
Hooray
For Me #1-- One
Margarita Too Many?
Hooray
For Me #2-- Spitting at
the Generations
Hooray
For Me #3-- The
One-Eyed Spokesmodel
Hooray
For Me #4--
Semisardonic Over Semisonic
