’Well you are Indian, you just don’t have status.’

“’Well you are Indian, you just don’t have status.’ I told this to my father as it had been told to me. I repeated it. I was confirming something for both of us.”

Strong Women Stories
Laura Schwager

In this chapter, Laura discusses the process she experienced during her search for her Mohawk identity. She recounts how her white mother and grandmother encouraged her aboriginal identity growing up but her Native father did not. She discusses how her father and grandfather did not embrace their nativism.
“My Native family, on the other hand, have passed on to me messages of shame and denial throughout my life, and have discouraged my efforts to appreciate this significant part of who I am.” (p. 37-38)
She describes a journey of recognizing and voicing the spirit which she says is an inner strength. She talks about how that spirit is her connection to her native ancestry and she considers it home.
She calls it her challenge to balance between her native and white worlds. She ponders who she is and where she comes from. She talks about the legacy of her great-grandmother and the outside influences that removed her from her traditions. I think it is very disconcerting how not only her but her family seems so distanced from their traditions and language because of years of Western influences.
It was uplifting though, how Laura described a conversation with her father about their identity as Native.
“For the first time in my life, I told him how I had felt, growing up, about my Native identity. How he had never recognized pr encouraged that part of me. How I knew he had never done the same for himself. In a small but significant way, I held him accountable, because he was, is, the source of my Native blood. In saying these words I taught my father something. He recognized that it was probably because his father didn’t acknowledge his Nativeness. Together we both saw clearly that we were a part of a larger picture.”