Terese Marie Mailhot: Native people revel in our contrary natures

Indian life is full of incongruences. The sacred lands we live on, the land our ancestors cleared to make our lives livable, is the same land our youth blasts their bass-ridden, misogynistic lyrics on. Granted, it’s not all misogynistic, but I distinctly remember attending a sweat lodge in my mother’s backyard, only to come inside to feast with Westside Connection playing in the background.

My own kitchen was a place of juxtaposition. Our kitchen was barren. We barely made it on social assistance, and when my mother wasn’t jobless, she was working in social work, which paid worse than the assistance. Non-Natives like to criticize that we’re so lost from our ways, but I don’t think any of those people ever lived a day on the rez. We had a lawn full of blueberries, plums, raspberries, and wild strawberries. We picked, canned, and froze our berries, and received fish from our uncles after every salmon run. But our natural diet was so low in caloric intake, we needed MacDonald’s hamburgers to supplement our energy after the amount of work it took to be below the poverty line, living the struggle the majority populous ignored. We were tired, poor, and often turned to popular culture for solace. On our old seventies countertop, next to the fridge, my mother had a small shrine ode to Stevie Ray Vaughan. An empty video cassette of Stevie Ray Vaughan: Pride and Joy was surrounded with bark and sage she picked herself. She rubbed the video cassette for good luck, and nobody can tell me this wasn’t an ancient pastime, only a new type of iconography many Indians saw in their homes.