I remember when I was at Cornell University, I would write poems that had to deal with my Native ancestry. And people kind of looked at me strangely at the time. There was no Native studies department at Cornell or virtually anywhere in the country at that time between ‘60 and ‘65. And even though there were people in reservation communities not far away, they were totally unknown to the university campus.
When I went to Syracuse University on a creative writing fellowship the next year from ‘65 to ‘66, I had an old Harley Davidson motorcycle. And several times a week I’d tool on out to the Onondaga reservation and just sit around in the trading post as it was called, listening to [unint.] and her mother, Jessie, tell stories and talk with me. And I would just go out there feeling like I was going home even though it wasn’t my home. I felt this tremendous connection that was lacking in the university community.
I began writing short stories. And again, interestingly enough, a lot of them had Native American characters in them. I wrote as part of my creative writing thesis at Syracuse University a connected set of short stories. Grace Paley, by the way, was my advisor, one of the best, best writers in the world. And it was dealing with a character who was part Native and another character who was Native who went to Vietnam.
And the one young man was resistant to going to war, and the other young man had experienced it. And I remember in front of my thesis committee getting in an argument with them because at one point I had my character who was in Vietnam experiencing a massacre, experiencing the murder of children. And I remember the thesis committee said, “Oh no. Americans would never do anything like that.” This was in 1966. And I had actually been talking with people I got to know who had come back from Vietnam and experienced those very things.
And I had friends I was in college with who died in Vietnam. I never went there. I was an anti-war protestor. Instead I went and taught in West Africa for three years. But those themes of a Native character trying to come to terms with a modern world that didn’t recognize his reality was something that very early on was a big part of my writing. I remember a poem I had published that I joke with Sherwin [ph.] about – Sherman Alexie about having this title first was called “Notes of a Part-time Indian.”
And it goes, “Sometimes I tell people I’m half Indian. A woman from Oklahoma said, ‘But Indians are so dirty.’ When people ask me which half and I point at the sun, no one understands.”
