Elissa Washuta: This living Indian doesn't owe you any answers

I am here before you, a living Indian, upright and animated, full of blood. I am a young Cowlitz woman, not one of the dead chiefs flattened into history books. I have come to expect that you may want to know what an Indian knows and feels; you may want to unroll before me your knowledge about Indian wars or toss out a fun fact about totem poles — conversational niceties, perhaps, attempts at connection. Fair enough. Know, though, if I have no response, it is because I have only a few inches of innards left to pull out for examination. I must place some limits so that I might keep myself intact.

I do not owe you a complete breakdown of my ancestry. I do not keep a blood quantum chart sketched out on my palm like crib notes for an exam. I do not have to tell you where my mother was born or what substance forms my father. I don’t have to justify the place of my birth, necessarily off-reservation because my tribe has none, all of our land taken from us. I cannot stop you when your gaze searches my face, gouges out my eyes, and roughs up my cheekbones, but I don’t have to respond when you offer your assessment. I don’t measure my blood in pints and quarts, and I will not spill it at my feet for you.

I do not owe you my assistance with your search for the Indians you’re sure you’ll find buried somewhere in your ancestry, the ones from tribes and places you can’t name, specters skittering between generations, a rumor or a wish.

I do not owe you the names of those you call “shamans,” and I will tell you I don’t know where to find any, but when you ask me if it’s all a bunch of hocus-pocus, despite every urge to bundle up all my secrets and send you away with nothing, I will spit back at your slap, “Of course that’s real.”