What’s Your Relationship to It?
An essay for Native American Heritage month, 2024
by Vanessa Osage
November 26, 2024
THE GIFT
I have a great grandmother named Anna Kathryn, who I never got to meet but feel infinitely close to. Her daughter, Esther, my beloved Gramma, always told me how much I reminded her of her mother. When I moved to Humboldt County, California, in my twenties, amidst years of road travel adventuring, Gramma sighed over the phone, “Oh, that’s funny, Nessa. Mother and her family were from Humboldt, Kansas.” Gramma — who chose to go by Connie — was the great love of my early life, the only safe and clear waters in otherwise dangerous seas. Her love was the lifeboat and the lighthouse, buoying me and pointing the way toward clarity and truth. Her love saved me from an elitist New England culture where I was eternally out of place, and nearly drowning in retaliations to impose conformity. Somehow, just by responding to my true, innate nature, I was a threat to social status. I never did comply. Still, it was all so disorienting and confusing. Fortunately, Gramma’s love taught me to swim stronger and to trust in exploring new ecosystems and waterways.
As I approached age 30, I was magnetically drawn to the land north of Seattle, Washington, after more than a dozen homes along the lower west coast. Once I arrived, I called Gramma to tell her the place I’d chosen for Home this time. She offered up in amazement, “Oh, Mother spent time up there when we were little…” This was pure surprise for me, since the Pacific Northwest is so far from the plains of Kansas and Missouri, and nearly as far from where Gramma had come of age in Ontario, California. Wherever I went, I felt Anna consistently near me and with me.
This union came into awareness most potently for me at 16, when Gramma conspiratorially whispered in the privacy of her room one day, “You know, Nessa, we’re part-Indian.” In my recollection, her tone was far more impactful than the revelation. Her voice was sneaky, proud, defiant, rushing on an air of danger at its being spoken at all. It was thrilling to feel her release this long-held family secret. With these words, I suddenly breathed more easily, as if someone had flung open a window. All kinds of sweet, warm air came swirling in. Gramma’s face beamed in radiance too, as Anna had been her safe haven, the most loving source in her early world. I understood this truth flowed through her mother, to her, to me. Something ancient clicked into place for me that day, aligning me with a current of love that I recognized.
I’d had to hold my true self — tomboyish, rugged, attuned, creative, and nature-loving — so near that I was primarily a sad and disconnected child. Of course, the sadness and disconnection go so far back — both mine and so much larger than me. Bereft of belonging, it is hard to ever imagine there truly is a place for you. A cloud of social disease can smudge out what naturally longs for clear sight. In an instant, Gramma had wiped that all clean for me. Her voice, the shine in her smile, the warmth that now reached us — it washed the stagnation away like a river in a flood. As one water-bearer handing vitality and wisdom down to another, I was the sudden beneficiary of a great, overflowing gift.
Then, Gramma handed me the gift in tangible, visible form. She stood and moved quickly toward her closet — she was always agile, even through her 80s — and dug out an old black & white photograph of her mother. I nearly gasped in awe as she laid it in my upturned hands. I saw myself. Gramma spoke again of our physical similarities, my deep-set, dark eyes and auburn hair. I was overwhelmed by the novelty of recognition. There she was, clearer than my imaginings. Anna Kathryn sits in an ornate wooden chair beside a tall, open window. Long, white curtains blow in on a breeze. She cradles a baby high at her heart, her eyes closed, head bowed in sweet intimacy. Baby’s cheek rests at mother’s face in a rare tenderness for the photographs of the time. Her posture, the shape of her face, even the expression, all just as my own.
THE CHOPPING IN THE BACKDROP
Growing up as a child and teenager north of Boston, I didn’t grasp the historical significance of what being part-Indian meant. We had been taught of Plymouth Rock, of pilgrims, and the benevolent, cooperative Thanksgiving origin story. I’d played “The Oregon Trail” computer game in middle school (which would later define my ‘micro-generation,’ as one born in 1977) when computers were a strange, new marvel still. Here, Indians were an exotic creature of threat, standing in the way of “progress” for settlers, alongside the bears and raging rivers to be forded in covered wagons. At Catholic grade school in Tyngsboro, Massachusetts, we all played from the perspective of the European settlers. Another perspective was not even an option. So, I learned I was also part of the wild, natural backdrop of the Great American Story. What does that mean?!
In the 1980s New England colonial village towns, I did not learn about the Indian Removal Act, or the federal outlawing of Native religious ceremonies, nothing about Indian Boarding Schools, treaties, relocation (maybe a mention of the Trail of Tears?), or all the forced assimilation policies that tore up the fabric of Native life. History was always my worst subject in school, and now I wonder if discord in the telling was part of why. I was the only one of the five kids Gramma told this secret to, the only one she taught to ‘count to ten in Indian.’ I imagine my likeness to Anna and my rare spirit amongst the seven family members opened her heart to trust the safety of my holding into the future. She’d had this knowledge from her early days, and held it near in her own way.
“Oh, mother felt terrible about that…” was how Gramma’s sis, Louise, elaborated on the fact when I asked her to tell me more, as the family genealogist. I bear with a heavy heart the knowing that Connie and her sister did specialized things — jumpily looking a certain way — to keep themselves safe. This is just one reason I hold my Native American heritage with reverence today. I sense the burden they bore in the journey to know, to suffer uniquely, and still protect it. I sensed clearly at 16 that Gramma handed the truth to me because she did not want it to be forgotten. Many, many did. It was a shame that burdened Anna Kathryn, and her mother, Allie Neal — who I now know was stolen from her Osage mother, Ann Riddle in Hominy, Oklahoma — hidden inside a white family for instant assimilation. This same shame likely fueled the violence my father, Gramma’s son, enacted upon my youngest brother who looked most like him. I did all I could to interrupt those effects, young as I was. Shame, a cutting us off from our better natures and common sense.
These severances are the momentum of old chopping actions, separating Indians from land, Indigenous children from their families, Native Americans from culture and language. Never mind the reality of genetics, that our unique DNA combinations do not divide by halves in simple fractions. Again, math is another way to slice, and the slicing is the problematic motion. But, we can hold up our hands now to interrupt those reverberations and give true thanks. Here, in the Pacific Northwest, Native people ‘raise their hands’ in gratitude and reverence, and I see them going up across the generations.
A TIME OF REWEAVING
Now, as a grown woman and a mother in my 40s, I bristle at the question, “How much Native American are you?” Not once have I heard someone say, “I’m German…” and their conversation partner replies, “How much?” To be instantly asked to justify and quantify is another form of the shame/aggression trickling down through the collective unconscious. I feel a flash of fight energy in my system whenever someone asks — as if they’ve just prompted, “Oh, yeah? Prove it!” Another threat to identity and connection to our culture and origins. Inside the implied follow-up is the idea of a cut off line. That, at some point, you are not what and who you come from — and isn’t that what European settlers wanted all along? To remove the “Indian-ness” from original people, so those they harmed could simply blend in as “white.” Natives could become like European settlers and hopefully erase any memory of how it all went down.
Yet nothing can erase what is eternal, resilient, and true.
What I know is that THIS is a time of reclamation and reweaving. It may be that this old pattern of non-Natives asking mixed-Indigenous people, “How much?” is an unconscious playing out of tensions that rippled through our ancestors before our time. What compels it? I acknowledge that blood quantum, enrollment, and all its implications form a complex web I am just beginning to understand. With compassion for all sides of this nation-building story, I offer another approach today. Instead, we may ask, “What is your relationship to your Native American heritage?” Because here, you will find a story. And stories heal and connect us and weave us together. Listening strengthens connective thread, and that is what we are all growing here. Whether by instrument, voice, or stories that rise up from the land itself, we hear it coming back into the chorus like expanding bird song at sunrise. Beyond the acute fractures we see around us now, in the wide view, we are mending. This is actually the alternately frenzied and calm energy of putting it all back together in its true form.
SISTER AMERICA
We, the descendants of the original people on this land, have been here all along. Only now are we riding an upswell of reclamation. The number of people who claim “Native American” on the United States Census has risen 85% in the past two decades. There were 5.2 million Native Americans in 2010, and 9.7 million in 2020. It was 2000 when all of us living in America could first claim two or more races. So, the breadth of truth now has better representation options. For too long, the fact of being part-Indian was either unknown, unacceptable, or unsafe. After contact, the context of being Native was treacherous ground.
I sense the growing collective reverence for Native people, as well. Much as I know there is still so far to go — Indigenous people and allies worked incredibly hard to change policy, advance Indigenous artists, bring languages back, promote healing, improve media representation, and more. I consider the untold hundreds who fought with everything they had to make it so. I bow to each of them this month. They have carved a path forward for our rise. May we know. May we accept. May we all be safe.
This year, during Native American Heritage month, I am all too aware of the recent disturbance to safety in this land. With election results in early November 2024, in the weeks that follow, it feels to me like watching your otherwise brilliant and brave sister go back to the abusive boyfriend who swore he would destroy everything important to her — and yet, she can’t seem to help herself. He has promised her an affluent life, and the chance to hold her head high strolling through the country club. So she goes to him with eyes glazed over, transfixed. How could she not see the larger picture here?
In this extended metaphor, you are aghast and dumbfounded and so, so concerned. But then, you remember the time when she stole your favorite shirt — and flagrantly denied it — and said, ‘You didn’t look good in that shirt, anyway.’ She declared, ‘You’re not someone who can wear shirts like these; you’re different and less than.’ You see with utter clarity now how blatant the Bullshit of all these assertions. You consider that this inclination to deny is the ongoing problem itself. Her most troublesome weak spot in an often hopeful, optimistic soul.
America, you are the name given to a land that held my Native ancestors, and my European ancestors, my Greek ancestors, and my northern African ancestors. What is our relationship to being held? These diverse, many-storied people building lives on your contours today grapple with ideas of collective “Greatness,” while drawing jagged lines around who WE are. Who gets to draw a line of definition if not the people who were here first? How can we deny our deepest human roots and expect to grow anything of greatness? Drawing a false line around Who We Are will not form a circle. I know what moves through the lines of a family with jagged edges of belonging. You form the fractured, fragile, unwieldy shape we are today. A circle, of course, is the eternal, resilient, enduring shape of human progress and natural evolution.
Sister government, Sister land — what else might we create with these hands?
WHO ARE WE?
I will speak as “we,” and in doing so, give voice directly and only to my Gramma, and her mother, Anna Kathryn, and her mother, Allie Neal, and her mother, Ann Riddle — whose Osage name I hope to also uncover some day — and all my Native ancestors of all genders who made my life possible. “We” are the lineage of Native people who lived out these tensions in their unique forms in our unique times. I speak in solidarity with them, as one of them, in a continuous we that cannot be broken.
We are the conscience and the voice that insists we do the noble thing, even when it is so hard
We are the complex nuance of contradictory stories
We are the memory of the land that holds all of us
We are the song of your better self, calling from the future
We are the clear sight of balance and reciprocity
We are the vessels of honesty and playful humor
We are the exemplars of relationships of honor, dignity, and integrity
We are the story you’ll have to keep telling until you get it right
We are the prequel to this moment and the sequel to what comes next
We are the deepest knowing, a taproot of connection that holds all that grows here because, at its essence, this is a line unbroken
What is my relationship to my Native American Heritage?
It is the ongoing learning of who I come from and what we have brought to this world so far
It is seeing my place in a larger context and sighing with relief in my whole system over how it all makes sense
It is claiming the family secret aloud and holding it in the highest regard
It is my attempt at intergenerational healing
It is loving my Gramma back, as an adult, and honoring her through my writing
It is washing away an imposed, ideological shame that was never mine to hold
It is sending something else, more beautiful and renewed, down the lineage
It is a hope for future relationships of mutual respect
It is recognizing the shared sadness and bowing in solidarity to its message
It is the personal journey to see my interconnected place in the whole, to not doubt at claiming my heritage because that hesitation (beyond humility) serves no one
It is imagining and enacting all I could give to uplift that line through my life
It is turning toward what I love and giving what I have to offer
It is seeing the sovereign value in those who brought me here, and in myself
In choosing the name, and saying her name, I bring her back. I bring our family’s truth back into the fold. I do my small part in reweaving what was nearly lost.
GOING FURTHER
I know from decades of experience in activism and social-solutions advocacy that what is unacknowledged will not simply go away. This holds for interpersonal repair, and it holds for diverse intertribal, nation-to-nation repair. Every truth rises up to be named and claimed in its time. Native people are rising, and truths are being named and claimed. I feel an inspired kinship, more than I imagined I ever would. I know my relationships to all parts of my identity will change and evolve as I grow into fullness, as we all grow into fullness. I see a vibrant Indigenous future, rich with culture and language, reinforced by tribal sovereignty. I see the wave of relief that will ripple through all of us, Native and non-Native, living on this land.
Anna Kathryn lived to be just 46 years old, and passed about a month before her 47th birthday. This year, as I write during Native American Heritage month, I am 46 years old, and just under a month away from my 47th birthday. I get to endure. I am regaining my footing amidst an extended housing challenge, yet feel unshakable and strong despite the basics going unmet. I am tuned in now to what is eternal, when other things change. This is part of the gift. I know Anna is profoundly with me still. This narrow place I travel extends our reach through honor. I nearly tremble to put it into words: I get to go further. That fact is the glory of what each one carried, pouring the water of their love on down to the next. Remembering, feeding a continuous path of vibrant resilience over time. May I take us all so much further still in my time.
𐓏𐒷𐓏𐒻𐓁𐒰͘
I’m grateful to you, Thank you.
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Vanessa Osage is an author, speaker, and event coordinator living in Bellingham, Washington. To learn more, visit: https://www.vanessaosage.com/ @vanessaosage