In “Featherweight,” your story in this week’s issue, a young Native American man experiences a kind of culture shock when he leaves his reservation and goes to a college populated mostly by white people. What’s the nature of that shock, and how would you characterize his response?
Culture shock is another way of saying that all the unconscious things people around you are doing that make up the behavioral patterns of a group are in some way unfamiliar to you, and that creates discomfort in you and sometimes for them. I went through massive culture shock when I left home and went to college. Of course, at that time the term wasn’t in common usage, and there was no public discussion about what Native people had been going through since we started attending colleges and universities in larger and larger numbers, so it was difficult for me to frame my experience there—I didn’t know it was common. What I did know was that I missed home and my family terribly, that I was depressed a lot, and that whenever I tried to tease the white guys I knew they usually got mad because they didn’t understand that teasing, at least for Blackfoot people, is an essential aspect of our cultural experience and sense of belonging (and that if we aren’t teasing you it probably means we don’t like you, or assume you’ll start crying). I’m an introvert, so I spent a lot of time alone, didn’t party, and played ball at the rec as much as I could—which was my one point of contact not just with other humans but also with some of the other indians on campus. There were also some Samoans who were on the football team—they’d come in to play, and it felt good to be around them. They were tribal, and that made me comfortable. But there are indians who don’t do that, who really go for it and immerse themselves in the larger experience and have a good time doing it; and I wanted to write about that, both because it was very different from my experience and because the people I know who did that, they still had those moments—like all Natives do—of radical disjuncture that occurred between themselves and the non-indians they were spending time with. And those moments are the important ones for me, because they’re a reminder that just because we can speak to you in a way that makes sense to you, that doesn’t mean you understand us.
He gets involved with a bunch of white girls—they stereotype and idealize him, and he does much the same with them. How do you go about representing such interactions in fiction against the constant backdrop of cross-cultural misunderstanding and prejudice that makes up our world?
It’s true that he and the white girls don’t quite understand each other in a way, but that’s happening in different ways on each side. The white girls come to the table with their notions of what indians are, and what it means to be an indian, which don’t really speak to his experience at all, whereas he’s noticing things about them that they don’t know about themselves, things that indicate an unbridgeable gap. There’s a difference between assumptions that come from stereotypes and the kind of understanding that results from closely observed experience. The early situation in the story was a way for me to talk about how whiteness—which, and this is something we never talk about, is different from being white—functions. The most striking thing about people who really embody whiteness is that they see everything but themselves. Whereas people who aren’t coming from that space, usually people of color but not always, see themselves (because they’ve been objects of the white gaze for decades and centuries) and the peculiarities of whiteness at the same time. This blind spot is one of the reasons this country is such a mess right now; whiteness doesn’t get to function in an unimpeded manner anymore, and this process of coming to self-awareness is extremely painful, both for these people waking up to the values that underpin whiteness and for the rest of us, who have to experience their resistance to that awakening. I felt from the start that much of the support for Trump was about this: the promise of a return to a time when white people didn’t have to look at themselves, which means they could continue participating in the great American project of forgetting—the past, how the country was made, etc. Going back to a prior America isn’t an option, though; the only way out is through. And, though I’m deeply critical of this country, I’m also deeply invested in its continued existence and health, exactly because the future of indigenous nations here is tied up with the future of the U.S. as a whole. Native people who think our nations would survive the collapse or fracturing of this country are living in a fantasy. I have no time for it.
He meets a Native girl named Allie, who seems altogether a richer character. Can you talk a little about how you use her to complicate ideas about Native backgrounds?
It’s not that the other girls weren’t rich in character; it’s that he didn’t go deep with them. You can’t discover the depth and complexity of another person’s character without investing in them in such a way that they reveal their nature to you. And that takes time and effort that he doesn’t give. But, also, it’s easier to discover that nature when you have certain cultural elements in common; the door to knowing opens more easily. So Allie was both a way for me to talk about what it’s like to have that experience of familiarity in the midst of an ocean of whiteness, and to talk about how much difference there can still be between people from different tribes. This is one of those things non-indians simply don’t understand unless they’ve had massive exposure to multiple parts of Indian Country (which almost none have)—that people from different reservations and tribes can be very different from one another because the cultural spaces are so distinct. Not to mention the differences that come as a result of family, individual nature, etc.—all the normal human stuff. Remember, when we talk about Native people we’re actually talking about hundreds and hundreds of distinct tribal nations, with unique cultures and histories and languages. No one benefits more from the diversity project than we do, because we are the original diversity. Just because America calls us American Indians or Native Americans doesn’t mean that’s how we see ourselves, even if we use those terms also. There are deeper levels of meaning that we adhere to.
This is your first story in the magazine. Is it part of a larger project? And what was your path to becoming a writer?
I don’t know when I’ll have a collection of stories; now that I’ve found a way to get my inherent, Blackfoot long-windedness on the page, I may never write another short story. (I’m working on what I think are two novels.) But who knows? Ideas for stories hit me like unexpected storms. Probably this story will find others to spend time with, but as to when . . . I have no idea.
Regarding my path to becoming a writer, I can look back from here and see that I became a writer the moment I put down “On the Road” and tried to write something that felt like what Kerouac was doing. I was an undergrad then, but I was already on my way to here (which is still nowhere; writers are always nowhere), because what drove me to write those first words is the same thing that drives me to write now. It was the elegiac tone of the book, which is to say it was my introduction to the fragility of beauty and the ineluctable forward movement of things in time. The ultimate subject of fiction is time, which is to say death. Until I see a thing stand in relief against the backdrop of death, I don’t understand what its value is.
