Happy Holidays or Something…

Yesterday, Lauren Boebert, a sitting member of Congress and a white woman, posted a photo of her four white sons holding gigantic guns in front of their Christmas tree. This as a "friendly" holiday game with her white male colleague, Thomas Massie, who went viral this week for his own gun-toting Christmas card. Massie is joined by three white male family members and three white women family members.
Let's set aside the obvious horror of their particular cards and discuss Christmas cards in general. Specifically your obsession with them. Namely what they mean to you. Dozens and dozens of your cards - close to a hundred even - used to arrive in my mailbox, dutifully tucked into red, white and green envelopes, my name printed onto the front, a mass-produced Christmas gift to so many. How many of these do you people send? Now the number has greatly dwindled. I may get about a dozen cards from white women. Each card is as unique as each of you - but the general gist is the same. Beaming perfect pictures of your family. Sometimes color coordinated outfits, sometimes not. There are often individual pictures of each of your kids, before one or two family shots. Of course, there's the zany photo -- usually on holiday, kids jumping off of boats, missing a tooth, or skiing, or laying on the beach. Like I said, each card is as different and unique as each of you, but the overarching theme is this: WHITE PERFECTION. The perfect family. You stand together for the formal shot. You have loads of fun on vacation. You have a dog or two, maybe a cat. No matter what, the image is that of perfection.
This during a pandemic where nearly one million of your fellow friends and neighbors are dead. This during a time of ABJECT of income inequality -- as your fellow neighbors are losing their homes at an unprecedented rate. This at a time where there are so many school shootings, the media has stopped covering them. This at a time when the police continue to brutalize your Black and brown neighbors.This at a time when those sunny and wintery spots that serve as the backdrop of your zany family pictures are burning, flooding, or drought-stricken -- or are about to be. This at a time where your neighbors are cold and hungry. This at a time where 50% of our population, us women, are about to lose autonomy over our bodies.
This at a time where your marriage is falling apart. Your child is toying with suicide. Your niece has recently overdosed. Your mother is in hospice. Your bulimia is back.
You still find time, amidst all the pain and sorrow and anger and anguish of your life and the lives around you, to put together this Christmas card and send it to as many people as you possibly can. Some of whom you've not spoken to in years, decades. And lord knows how much you SPEND on these cards. You manage to do this while you are frenzied, crazy busy, can barely make it through the day without collapsing as you have so much to do.
Why?
The same reason Boebert took that snapshot and uploaded it for the world to see.
To project your perfect family.
Rather than spend a ton of time talking about how different you are from Lauren Boebert, how different your Christmas card is, spend some time thinking about how you are the same.
Happy holidays!

Dot…Definitely Dot.

"Are you an Indian from India or..." and then the white kid would put their hand over their mouth and make what they thought was a Native American war cry or chant. A racist sound meant to denigrate Native Americans.
"Indian from India," I'd respond quickly and forcefully.
"Are you dot or feather?"
"Dot, definitely dot," I'd respond quickly and forcefully, indicating I'm the kind of Indian who wears a dot on her forehead, a real Indian.
As I got older, I'd say a version of this: "I'm Indian American, not American Indian."
White people mocking, belittling, stereotyping Native Americans. And me? Doing the same, following their lead, inflicting violence against Indigenous people.
Growing up in Richmond, Virginia, I drove down Cherokee Road weekly, not giving the name a second thought. Without a professional football team to call our own, many of my peers regularly cheered on the Washington R*dskins. I didn't give the vile name and logo a second thought. Every Thanksgiving, we'd gather with our family friends, all Indian American, to eat turkey, stuffing and pumpkin pie. We didn't mention the genocide of Indigenous people and how our annual feast, a holiday concocted by lying white folks, was taking place on Indigenous land, stolen by colonizers.
During a post-college road trip, a white friend and I stopped at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and walked around, gawking at the residents as if they were museum exhibits. Not fully human. I ended up keeping in touch with a woman there and would send her money in the mail for a while. White saviors can be brown too.
When protestors descended upon Standing Rock, I applauded them from afar but it never even occurred to me to GO, to put my body on the line.
I'd like to think I'm different now. Now that I'm aware of my internalized white supremacy -- and concomitant bigotry against Indigenous people. But am I? I supported Elizabeth Warren in the presidential primary, a white woman who deeply harmed Native folks. I was able to justify it as -- "but look at all her great policies" and "what are the other choices, everyone has committed harm to a marginalized group."
I think about this everyday.
How I -- how we -- have decided it's okay to harm Native Americans.
I didn't think about Cherokee Road or the Washington R*dskins or Thanksgiving when younger...paving the way for me to give Elizabeth Warren a pass in my adulthood.
This Indian American, this settler, needs to do better.

11/17/2021

By Lisa Bond

They Were Just White People

I really struggled with trying to write or record something about Indigenous erasure for this month’s topic. I mean…what do I even say? How can I address this? I’m not Indigenous…I grew up in Oklahoma but never thought of anyone there as Indigenous. They were just white people.
And then I realized, the answer is in the question.
I can address this because I live this. I have lived this.
“They were just white people.”
Growing up white in Oklahoma, racism was just a hushed up thing that happened behind closed doors. No one I was around used racial or ethnic slurs out in the open…wetbacks and towelheads and chinks and goons and n-words…those were all said by adults behind closed doors.
I learned early on that these were negative words. That they were ugly and harmful. Not because I was taught that, but because no adult I knew was willing to have other people hear them spoken.
Oh…but not so with Indian.
We played cowboys and Indians…with all the costumes and tropes we could think of.
We gave each other Indian burns.
We called each other Indian givers.
We did rain dances and had powwows.
We used the terms savage and chief and tribe endlessly.
And now, 35 years or more later, I think…”ahhh…there it is.” This is how we erased Indigenous people from our lives…our minds…our lands and our activism.
Because now, at 46, I recognize how I grew up with MANY Indigenous people….people who are tribal nation members. People whose culture and family and customs were our playthings. We did such a good job of erasing Indigenous people that it didn’t MATTER what we said about them – they didn’t exist.
And now, as I look at the last 20 or so years of my life when activism played a larger and larger and larger role, I see the same thing. I speak often of Black men killed by the police, but rarely of Indigenous men killed by the police. I speak often of listening to Black women, but I rarely speak about missing and murdered Indigenous women. I speak often of paying reparations, but rarely speak of rematriation of lands.
So here I am…even now…participating in the erasure of Indigenous peoples. It’s a common thread throughout my history – throughout US history. Indigenous peoples on these lands used to number in the 100 millions…that number is now under 3 million.
What does my activism look like when I think of myself as a settler…a colonizer…in addition to a white person?
I’m about to find out…