Breaking Childhood Illusions: A Personal Narrative

Holga: […] I didn’t know. And now I don’t know how I could not have known.
-Arthur Miller, After the Fall (15)

“Just don’t say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story.
You’ve heard it now.”
-Thomas King, The Truth about Stories (167)

A few years ago, another student I was sharing a house with asked if I could drive her out to Hershey so she could visit her friend. Being an undergraduate, I actually had some free time; so I said yes. I had taken the drive many times—a girlfriend of mine had lived out there—and family car trips had occasionally ventured that far from home in search of antique markets, fun little tourist traps and amusement parks. We bought some Peach Rings, bottles of water and cans of soda, and set out.

We stopped at one of the largest indoor train sets in the country, Roadside America. The signs outside the building, which were weather-beaten when I was a child, had been repainted since I had last been there, but they were already showing signs of organic wear and tear. The interior of the main building looked as though it had not been touched since the 1970s, except for the few stray traces of technology which had clawed their way inside from pure necessity. We paid our entrance fee to go look at the train display, and walked through the thick, velvet curtain just in time for the “night show”—a production of patriotic songs and lighting effects which cast the entire room into darkness and created an eerily beautiful display of hundreds of miniature homes lit up from the inside as trains rush past. The production ended as the lights recreated a sunrise over the display, and Kate Smith even sang “God Bless America.”

The last time I had been there, in the days after 9/11, it seemed as if this retro-patriotic effect had been designed just for that moment. Now, lacking any subtlety, it seems almost comical.

As the lights came up, I saw something which I had completely forgotten about. There was a display of a western scene to the right of where we were sitting. The scene varied in scale, from small models which were the size of everything we’d been looking at below to two large Indians looming over everyone, looking out into the distance at the American flag and Statue of Liberty at the other end of the room. If I were a more talented child, I think I would have created a story about this man as a great spirit who looked out over everything below—a spirit of the first people in this land, looking for his decedents, and looking on at those of us who came over without permission. But I wasn’t that kind of talented child, and in fact the western scene used to scare me. The reason that I did not remember it from when I was younger was that I had avoided really looking at it before. Like a fear of heights had kept me from looking over the railing in the elevated mountain-scape section of the tour, the fear of the unknown had kept me from looking at this display. I will admit to having been cowardly child, frequently afraid of what was different. Perhaps this was because I was afraid of what was different growing inside of me—a growing knowledge of my own queerness in a heterosexual culture. Sensing this difference, I pushed away from the differences of other people instead of finding common ground and reaching out to them.

Now I looked at the two figures of “Indians” staring out at me, one on each side. They were covered in tracks of war paint and dark as coffee beans. Below the one, a battle of the Wild West erupted; below the other, a pueblo untouched by white settlers. Given that the model town on display below us was supposed to represent any small town, but specifically Pennsylvania’s small towns, it seemed so odd and out of place. Of course, there had been Indigenous people in this part of the country, and there still are. There’s even a small pamphlet about the Hochstetler massacre on sale in the gift shop for those who don’t understand the dangers of indigenous folk.

When I grew up in Bethlehem, there was a house on the side of a mountain with a cement patio in the back that had the statue of a young Native American girl looking out over the Lehigh Valley. We called it the Pocahontas statue because Pocahontas was the only female “Indian” we ever thought of and because she was pretty. (Sacajawea was not yet coined into our consciousness.) She looked out from her perch and waved to those who came and left the Valley. “Wave to Pocahontas,” my mother would say, and my brother and I would make a rudimentary gesture of what we thought would be some kind of Indian hello and goodbye. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I realized she wasn’t waving—her hand had broken off, and so the wave was cut off in a grey stump.

I listened to old radio shows on cassette tapes bought in thrift stores, comic book shops and the gift store of the Cracker Barrel restaurant. Until I was a teenager, there was no cable in our house, and the Internet existed only as something I used the library computer for when I couldn’t find a book. Tonto and Lone Ranger were childhood playthings, imaginary worlds, alongside the Shadow and his orientalist mystical spectacular. Because they existed in my mind instead of a visual field, the fear I felt soon abated. These stories spent so much of their time cultivating the mystique of the “other,” the outsider, the person from a place cut-off from the rest of us. And with that isolation and that “other”-ness came great powers that few could access without giving a kind of respect and deference to the “other.” This does not, however, negate the constant problems of the savage myths perpetuated by these same radio dramas.

I am writing about these things that have seated themselves at the very edge of my memory because they have moved from the edges slowly inward in my consciousness over the last seven weeks. I am writing about these things because I need to find a way of explaining what I have seen and what kind of baggage I have brought into this journey with me. This was, in many respects, a part of my childhood—just as it was a piece of many childhoods before mine, especially for American boys. To my knowledge, I have no indigenous heritage, not even in an apocryphal manner of the “Indian Grandmother” myth that Deloria wrote about in Custer Died for Your Sins. I feel that I should have stated this from the beginning to clarify my own position here.

Being white, I feel that there is only so much that I can say in regard to these issues. I must acknowledge, as must all people who exist outside of these cultures and experiences, that there is only a certain point to which I can speak. After that point, I must turn it over to the writers and activists themselves. I can magnify their voices, I can amplify the radius of their message by sharing it, reblogging it, buying copies of their pamphlets and books and giving them to friends, distributing their poems. I cannot speak for them though. To do so is to contribute to their erasure and silencing, albeit in a way which is not directly reigning violence against their experiences.

My relationship with this subject can make me uncomfortable. It should.

In all of these representations, I see that the Indigenous people are cut off—sometimes quite literally—from giving full expression to their voice, their culture, their needs. Even when it’s glorified, they’re limited—they can’t move or speak or be humans. Not just yet.

I hope in writing about this, I’ve called up some images from the past for you as well, and in doing so that you become aware of the ways that these images bled into our worlds. In reading these Indigenous writers I realize that I need to account for my own background and the ways in which I contributed to these stereotypes—even if I did it in innocence. I didn’t realize then, but I do now. The illusion is broken, and I will never put it back together.