“Yeah,” said one older white woman. “I read he was scalped.”
“Yeah,” said a white man. “Like an Indian would do it.”
“An Indian?”
“Yeah, Indians started that whole scalping business.”
“Oh, that’s spooky. And here we are, in an Indian class. I just got the shivers.”
“You’ve got it all wrong,” Marie said as she sat at a desk near the front. “The French were the first to scalp people in this country. Indians just copied them.”
The white students all stared at Marie, saw that she was Indian, and then turned back to their conversation.
“I bet it was one of those serial killers,” said another white woman.
“Yes,” said a third white woman. “There’s something in the water here. I mean, we’ve got the Green River Killer, Ted Bundy, the I-5 Killer. We, like, raise them here or something.”
Marie tried to ignore the morbid discussion. She was more concerned about the professor. She’d signed up for the class because she’d heard that Dr. Clarence Mather, the white professor, supposedly loved Indians, or perhaps his idea of Indians, and gave them good grades. But he was also a Wannabe Indian, a white man who wanted to be Indian, and Marie wanted to challenge Mather’s role as the official dispenser of “Indian education” at the University.
“He always wants to sweat with Indian students, or share the peace pipe, or sit at a drum and sing,” Binky, a Yakama woman, had said. “He’s kind of icky. He really fawns over the women, you know what I mean? Real Indian lover, that one.”
Still, in spite of and because of Dr. Mather, Marie assumed she’d be one of many Indians in the class, all looking for an easy grade. But she’d been wrong in her assumptions. She was the only Indian in the class. When Mather walked into the class, he was wearing a turquoise bolo tie, and his gray hair was tied back in a ponytail.
While Marie was surprised by the demographics of the class, she was completely shocked by the course reading list. One of the books, The Education of Little Tree, was supposedly written by a Cherokee Indian named Forrest Carter. But Forrest Carter was actually the pseudonym for a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Three of the other books, Black Elk Speaks, Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions, and Lakota Woman, were taught in almost every Native American Literature class in the country, and purported to be autobiographical, though all three were co-written by white men. Black Elk himself had disavowed his autobiography, a fact that was conveniently omitted in any discussion of the book. The other seven books included three anthologies of traditional Indian stories edited by white men, two nonfiction studies of Indian spirituality written by white women, a book of traditional Indian poetry translations edited by a Polish-American Jewish man, and an Indian murder mystery written by some local white writer named Jack Wilson, who claimed he was a Shilshomish Indian. On the recommendation of a white classmate, Marie had read one of Wilson’s novels a few months before the class. She’d hated the book and seriously doubted that its author was Indian, or much of a writer. She’d done some research on his background and found a lot of inconsistencies.
After seeing the reading list, Marie knew that Dr. Mather was full of shit.
“Excuse me, Dr. Mather,” Marie said. “You’ve got this Little Tree book on your list. Don’t you know it’s a total fraud?”
“I’m aware that the origins of the book have been called into question,” said Mather. “But I hardly believe that matters. The Education of Little Tree is a beautiful and touching book. If those rumors about Forrest Carter are true, perhaps we can learn there are beautiful things inside of everybody.”
“Yeah, well, whatever was inside that man, it wasn’t Cherokee blood.” Marie’s voice grew louder. “And there are only three Indians on this list, and their books were really written by white guys. Not exactly traditional or autobiographical. I mean, I think there’s a whole lot more biography than auto in those books. And there aren’t any Northwest Indian writers at all.”
“Ah, yes,” Dr. Mather said. “And your name is?”
“Marie. Marie Polatkin.”
“By your appearance, Ms. Polatkin, I assume you’re Native American.”
“I’m Spokane.”
“Ah, yes,” Dr. Mather said. “I taught a Spokane named Reggie Polatkin. A relative of yours?”
“My cousin,” said Marie suspiciously. She knew Reggie and Mather had been close at one time. But Reggie had been expelled from the University after assaulting Mather for reasons that were never clear. While Marie recognized that Mather was a pompous jerk, she also knew that Reggie was no saint. In fact, he’d been involved in more than a few fistfights in his life. And after he’d been expelled, Reggie had simply disappeared. No member of their family had heard from him in over a year. Marie didn’t want Mather to give her a poor grade simply because she was related to her crazy cousin. If she was going to get a poor grade, she wanted to receive it because of her own craziness.
“I trust you are aware that Reggie and I had, well, let’s say it was an academic conflict.”
“Yeah,” said Marie.
“Well,” said Mather with a smile. “I hope you don’t hold a familial grudge against me, Ms. Polatkin?”
“Reggie is Reggie. I’m me.”
“Fine, fine. Now, let’s see, where were we? Ah, yes. The Spokane Indians. Columbia Plateau, Interior Salish, closely related to the Colville, Coeur d’Alene, Flathead, and others. A salmon tribe whose reservation is bordered by the Columbia River to the north, the Spokane River to the south, and Chimakum Creek to the east. A veritable island of a reservation, is it not?”
“I guess,” said Marie.
“Well, Ms. Polatkin, I understand your concerns. But I must correct your math. We do have four Native American authors in this course. Mr. Black Elk, Mr. Lame Deer, and Ms. Crow Dog did have help transcribing their stories, but many people use professionals to help write their books. And Mr. Wilson, as you can see by the syllabus, is a Shilshomish Indian, which, unless I’m mistaken, is a Northwest tribe.
“You see, Ms. Polatkin, I envision this course as a comprehensive one, viewing the Native American world from both the interior and exterior. One would hope that we can all benefit from a close reading of the assigned texts, and recognize the validity of a Native American literature that is shaped by both Indian and white hands. In order to see that this premise is verifiable, we need only acknowledge that the imagination has no limits. That, in fact, to paraphrase Whitman, ‘Every good story that belongs to Indians belongs to non-Indians, too.’”
Mather dismissed any further questions with a slight nod of his head, and proceeded to launch into a detailed lecture about the long tradition of European-Americans who were adopted into Indian tribes. A red-headed, green-eyed Irish and British mix, Mather proudly revealed that he’d been adopted into a Lakota Sioux family, an example of the modern extension of that long tradition.
“Dr. Mather,” Marie said. “What about the long tradition of white guys who were killed by Indians? How about the white guy they found dead in Fremont? Can we talk about him, too? How about the modern extension of that long tradition?”
“Ms. Polatkin, I hardly see how the murder of one poor man has anything to do with the study of Native American literature.”
Dr. Mather tried to ignore Marie, but she felt compelled to challenge him and constantly interrupted his first lecture. She was enjoying herself. She’d found an emotional outlet in the opportunity to harass a white professor who thought he knew what it meant to be Indian. For Marie, being Indian was mostly about survival, and she’d been fighting so hard for her survival that she didn’t know if she could stop. She needed conflict and, in those situations where conflict was absent, she would do her best to create it. Of course, conflict with whites didn’t need much creating. Her struggle with Dr. Mather, which started out as intellectual sparring, became personal, and intensified as that first class hour went along.