Well, I’m a person of mixed ancestry. I was raised by my grandparents, who were actually on the English and American Indian side. My grandfather, Jesse, was Abenaki Indian but was one of those people who in his generation did not talk about being Native American. About as far as he would go would be to talk about things like the fact that he left school in fourth grade because they kept calling him a dirty Indian and so he jumped out the window and, as he put it, never come back again.
His wife, my grandmother, was a highly literate woman, a graduate of what later became Skidmore College and had a house full of books. And her ancestry, she proudly traced it back to the Mayflower, although there’s some interesting things about that ancestry too, which are uncertain, but really somewhat colored as you might say. On my dad’s side of the family it’s Slovak from a little place called – or not so little community called Trnava in Slovakia, not far from Bratislava.
And as a child I was aware of these ancestries, but wasn’t really given a lot of information about them. I was kind of in a state of equi-distant ethnic denial because the Slovak side wanted you to be good Americans, and the Native American side wanted you to fit in with everybody else and not draw attention. And then the English side, which is sort of there and not really paying much attention to history. It was a period when I was born in 1942, during the war and after the war, of sort of American triumphalism and people wanting to think of the melting pot as really being a positive thing.
