Black Indian

978-0-8143-4580-1, Wayne State University Press wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/black-indian In addition to your extended family, you describe your mother’s relationships and marriages in great detail. Much of it a tale of heartbreaking sadness and abuse. As witnesses to such violence, how were you affected later in life? The cycle of physical abuse ended with me and my daughter. However, in my first marriage, in particular, I ended up in an emotionally abusive and psychologically abusive marriage. With regards to being a witness of violence, for a long, long time I didn’t even realize that I was a child surrounded by violent occurrences. I was just growing up in the Midwest, this nerdy reader girl who loved sci-fi and fantasy books. We did not know we were enacting historical, generational, and societal issues of race, migration, and erasure. So I never told anybody about my childhood until I finally started writing about it in my twenties. I was trying to heal myself at the same time. And then, it occurred to me that if I wrote these stories out maybe I can heal my family. I’m writing my ancestors, my mom and her sisters, into an American tapestry that probably never wanted them anyway. As I say in Black

Indian, “I will tell Mama, I will tell.” One of the historical complexities of the Black Indian historical record is that quite a few Native American tribes owned African American slaves in the 1800s. Is it possible to reconcile these facts as you contemplate your own identity? Another reason for writing this book was to expose some of the hypocrisies of slavery and to explore the complexities of the Black Indian’s experience. There is no way to get around the fact that the Five Civilized Tribes who had assimilated into Western culture owned, abused, and murdered their black slaves as much as white slave masters. But it is possible to reconcile these facts. I have to reconcile and forgive or I couldn’t dance at anyone’s pow wow. You have to forgive if you are going to be any good to anyone. We have a thing called “getting well.” You have to get sick to get well. In some ceremonies when a person takes medicine and vomits, you know they’re getting well for the people, for all of us who can’t vomit up the bad at that time. Writing this book is a kind of way of getting well.