white

Mom was the spontaneous one. Where dad’s money went to buy the necessities and save “for later”, Mom was the one who took my sisters and I on “girl’s day out” and helped my brothers purchase their snowboards and video games, and was always the one we could count on for movie night.

It wasn’t until late elementary, early jr. high that I began to notice the racial and religious tension, the “no man’s land” my family fell into. The first time I heard the term “apple Indian” it was directed at me by a ninth grade Native boy I had a small crush on. I was an awkward seventh grader with braces and knock-knees trying to find my place in the microcosm of jr. high. My circle of friends was a rag tag group of social misfits: the smarter Native’s, the wannabe-rebel white girls, and the athletes from out of town. I had to ask one of my Native friends what an “apple’ Indian was. She told me it meant that I was “red on the outside, white on the inside”. Later I would laugh at the description. A “banana” would have been a better description, what with my yellowish skin tone and slightly Asian features. Nevertheless, the gibe stung and I began to wonder where it was that I fit in. In all honesty, my best friend was my younger sister, but now that I had entered jr. high, I was on my own for two years until she entered seventh grade.

Playing sports blurred the line between “white” and “Indian”. A little. I had white friends and I had Native friends, both of which could be lumped into the category of “school friends”, but for very different reasons. My white friends were part of the same religious group that I was, yet there was an unspoken rule that, because I was Native, they could only associate with me at school. I remember the first time I had a white friend come to play at my house. The miracle occurred in large part because my friend had an older sister who was also a friend of my older sister. Their mom dropped them off on a beautiful Saturday morning in spring. She drove to the nearest non-Native community (a small hamlet, ten minutes away) turned around and picked up her daughters. Our play date lasted a total of thirty minutes. In high school, one of my white friends who lived in that small community told me how one of her town friends had insisted on locking the doors and speeding through the reservation “in case one of the Indians tries to jump into the car”. Don’t even get me started on the logistics of something like that ever occurring.