Purty! But rather weird. I normally don't go that asymmetrical, largely because M doesn't like it. I'm actually going to switch out the bead for a button that pulls the nice brassy yellow over to that side of the necklace. Great customer, by the way; when I asked if she wanted any specific colors she said brownish metallics with possibly some rust, mustard or maybe green. That is an awesome way to commission a piece. Tells me exactly what sort of corroded metal tone is being asked for, there are just SO many shades of it, but here I knew what she had in mind ... Hooray! I can't get a photo that shows how cool that jeweled button above the hinge is: it's got this lovely smoky silver depth ...
Now for the contemplation. Last week I got confirmation of something I've suspected for a long time: I have Native American ancestry. Specifically, I'm part Dakota Sioux.
See, I learned in one of my archaeology classes that one of the ways to identify what cline (which is a little like race but more biologically based and less socially monolithic) human remains represent is to check the shape of the incisor teeth. Shovel-shaped incisors indicate either Native American or Asian ancestry. By the simple expedient of shoving my fingers in my family's mouths, I discovered that my brother Andrew and I, like our father, have the shovel incisors, while Mom doesn't.
I knew my great-great-grandfather, Clifford, was the captain of a Chinese tea clipper and a Civil War blockade runner, so either option was a possibiliy. Last week I finally got a chance to check my grandparents' teeth and, as it turns out, my paternal grandfather's grandmother was related to one of the followers of Sitting Bull.
Now this is cool.
Conveniently enough, it's also Native American month over at Multiculturalism for Steampunk, which is probably part of what got me thinking more deeply about it.
You see, it's also a little startling because I've never thought of myself as having any Native American blood -- and also because I've read Boas and Sapir and Whorf and to ascribe excessive significance to an ethnicity goes against everything I've been taught for four years at university.
Further ponderings after the jump.
On some level, my gut reaction is to take pride in that I've got something awesome in My Heritage. On another level, while I think genetics and ancestry are really cool, I also find them ethically worrying. In a world of prejudice and genocide, our trendy emphasis on this is just a redo of the Victorian belief that ethnic heritage could map skills and traits and personalities -- only now it's fashionable to tease out every individual thread in our personal carpet of Mutt.
The heritages I was aware of were all European. The one I'm most involved with is Sicilian, followed closely by Scottish (M is a Scot). People react to me as Irish -- Chelsea Clarey is a name that shrieks Irish-American -- which, percentage-wise, is probably truest. There was an adoption somewhere that disguised either a German or a Dutch surname (I'm not entirely clear on which). Grandma's father was French but we don't talk about him much and I'm not at all sure how he died ... or when, given that Grandma's youngest sister looks nothing like the rest of the family but an awful lot like her mom's best friend and I could totally see Grandma's mother burying bodies that got in her way.
Anyhow. I take pride in each of these heritages, approximately in the order given, but I'm also a little uncomfortable with that. On some level, why is it important? Should it be important? I suppose the answer to that question goes with the answer to "Should we have a color-blind society or one that is universally accepting of and perfectly open about race?" And if I ever find the answer to that question I'll be sure and let you know.
Part of what complicates my reaction to the news is what I like to refer to as the Great White Guilt. Educated Caucasians are uncomfortably aware that theirs is the legacy of the colonizer. We like to distance ourselves from this. I think this is part of the reason why everyone likes to know that they're part Welsh and part French and part Bavarian or what have you. "See," they are unconsciously proclaiming, "I too have a history; I am not a representative of Empire but of Globe."
I find it flattering that my friends who are Desi (Indian-American) or Persian are comfortable telling me white-people jokes ("You know those white people who shop at Trader Joe's and think they're being ethnically diverse?" "Yeah, but I have to admit, I do that." "Well, this one time ...") I was very pleased one day when one of two Korean peers referred to some classmates as "the two Anglo girls" in my presence. The other looked at her, then at me, in the slightly sidelong you-just-broke-the-conspiracy manner; the first speaker dismissed this, "She's not." Most Caucasians aren't even aware that they are referred to as "Anglos" by some minorities, at least in Southern California; I was proud that I was not, apparently, performing whiteness to such an extent that these friends considered me an Anglo girl.
I believe that race is something to be discussed. We, as a society, and I don't mean just the U.S. because societies are so interconnected now, so I mean the global society -- we believe in it precisely because we don't question it. Yet race is a social construct. If we can talk about it realistically, we realize that what we think of as races are just populations united by the way a given society has reacted to and mutually constructed their physical features.
I should be able to talk to an Asian student about the model minority myth; to act otherwise is to pretend it doesn't exist. We should be able to acknowledge racism even if the perpetrator is a member of a minority race; to act otherwise is to give Whiteness an implicit power it doesn't deserve.
Should we be able to take pride in our ethnic heritage? I think so. Moderately. To act otherwise is to pretend that people everywhere are the same, and to move from that conclusion in either direction begins a terribly slippery slope: to the myth of racial superiorities on the one side, and to the myth of conformity on the other.
So I think my solution to my little ethical dilemma here is as follows:
I cannot take pride in "being" Dakota Sioux. I cannot take pride in "possessing" American Indian blood. I cannot say that I am a mix of Native American and White.
I can say that I have an ancestor who was Dakota Sioux and followed Sitting Bull to Canada, and that I have an ancestor who was a Sicilian fisherman in San Vito lo Capo, and that I have an ancestor who came from Ireland to serve as a cabin boy on a ship that would one day carry cotton from the blockaded South, but who refused point-blank to have any trade in human bondage on his ship or among his crew.
I cannot say that I am any of these things, but I can appreciate and admire that these people came together with one another to create me. I can take pride in the fact that all of these categories and identities flowed mutably together. I can take pride in being a member of a generation that, at least among some academics, can discuss each of those identities that contributed to my self: can talk about them without shame, admire them without hero-worship, and weigh them all as stories and people of equal value.
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