Interview with a
Native American
by
High School Student,
Grace Tien
..
I recently took part in an interview by a
student who was respectful, exceptional and bright. I would like to share
her story with others as I found her paper an honor to my culture and
myself. -- Tashna
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I have a cousin who is an artist, and currently, she has been working
with Native Americans. Since no one in our class had ever interviewed a
Native American yet, I thought it would be interesting to see things from a
different perspective.
Tashna is a mother right now with another child coming. She has been
very kind to allow some time out of her tight schedule to let me interview
her. I asked her questions pertaining to her personal life and the lives of
Natives in general.
During the first half of her childhood, Tashna and many of her family and
friends lived on a reservation. Most of her relatives still live there to
this day in fact. One of her most favorite memories of childhood was dancing
at the local pow-wows. A pow-wow is a gathering where food, music and
dancing were the main events. Dancers from all over competed during
pow-wows.
There were different categories for dress, style and type of dance.
Tashna’s personal favorite was the Jingle Dance by the girls in which they
wore brightly colored dresses adorned with
cone-shaped bells that jingled when the dancers twirled and bounced. The
dance is mostly done on toes—which was very pretty and graceful to see.
Although she herself did not compete, she did dance in the shawl dances
where all the women and girls could join in. She still remembers her first
dance at age three—she has pictures of that day of her wearing a traditional
red, floral ribbon shirt with corduroy pants. (On a tangent, she informed me
that most Native children wear jeans or corduroy pants, not too big on
dresses unless they are part of a traditional costume.)
The second half of her childhood was spent in Native American communities
off the reservation. Later on she attended a Native American college,
namely, the Haskell Indian Nations University (an all Native American
college in Lawrence, KS) where she studied Art Communications with an
emphasis on computers. Now she uses those skills in developing educational
materials, both software and written books, for the teaching of her
childhood language, Lakhota.
I asked Tashna about the jobs Native Americans take today and what she did
herself in the past. She told me that Natives do many different kinds of
jobs just like Americans. However, many often leave the reservations for
larger corporations in the major cities because no major businesses are
allowed to settle on federal land (or reservation land.) As for herself, she
has worked many different jobs over the years. From cleaning apartments,
working in fast food stations and selling shoes as a teenager to DJing for
five radio stations, web designing, professional singing, substitute
teaching, working a front-desk at a resort (one of her most favorite jobs),
computer technician and technical support, coffee house
waitress/barista/caterer, and finally, an artist and writer today. (Wow.) Of
all the things she’s done, Tashna tells me that she enjoys helping people
the most. As a child, she dreamed of one day owning a coffee shop, so she
could greet people in the mornings and start their days off right. Yet
whatever she’s doing, she trusts that God is guiding her.
Another question I asked her was about the religious life of Native
Americans. Tashna told me that most Native Americans were in fact
Protestants, which I found rather surprising. (But I’m glad to hear it.) She
herself is also a Protestant, like many of her relatives. Another smaller
minority among the Native Americans are the members of the “Native American
Church,” which embraces all deities of each tribe. It is a very liberal
religion, encompassing pretty much anything that was native before the
whites came. An even smaller group is Mormon, but this is mainly due to the
vast number of Native American children being adopted by Mormons about
thirty years ago.
I mentioned to Tashna that our class was covering the World Wars. I asked
what were the views of the Native Americans and what did they all do during
the wars. Tashna told me that Native Americans were/(are still) very
patriotic and very pro-politics. Their men signed up by the thousands to
fight in all the wars. They believed that if their country was at war, they
would support their country. The Natives believe in protecting the innocent
and dying for others if needed. Most Natives are or at least have been a
member of the Armed Forces at some point in their lives, including herself
and all her relatives. (Another wow.) I also asked her what she did during
her time in the Armed Forces, and she said that her job was a 97B
Counterintelligence Assistant. However, she was discharged finally in
October 2003 because of several heat injuries she received. She had more
than 6 cases of heat stroke, and the last one was serious enough for the
military to let her go.
One last question I asked her was what she and her people wished to see
change in American society nowadays. She answered me with four things,
though it’s likely there are probably more. Honestly, who likes to live on
fenced-in land? I can understand that many Native Americans wish to see
reservations abolished. A raise in the quality of education and educational
opportunities for Native American children is also another wish of the
Natives. Now that I think about it, all of us are so fortunate to live in
areas where the excellence of our education can be assured. Shouldn’t the
Natives get the very same? I never knew this before the interview, but
casinos are actually built on Native lands! The sale of alcohol, which has
been a cruel manipulative force of whites since their arrival, is still a
prevalent problem. We can only hope and pray that one day, all of these
dreams will be realized for them, just as the dream of freedom and
independence was realized for Americans several hundred years ago.
This interview has really been a mind-opener to me, and I hope this will
also be the same to all of you as well.