Specter Collective • And like everyone else, who you are is in part...

And like everyone else, who you are is in part about your race, in part about your class—what’s even weirder, actually, is that I’m a middle-class Indian. That’s stranger than the fact that I’m light-skinned. There are many light-skinned Indians. There aren’t as many middle-class Indians. All these things put together form who you are. As does culture. Culturally, I feel very centrally Ojibwe, in terms of both my lifestyle and my religion and all that stuff, and never carrying any burden of self-consciousness about that, whereas other Native folk may be full-blooded, but they’ve been missionized completely, they might never have lived in an Indian community, and so genetically they look like we think Indians are supposed to look, but culturally, they’re kind of adrift.

New interview with awesome writer David Treuer on my blog.