From Lake Geneva to the Finland Station 

Actually, I never had much sympathy for urban Indians, because I came of age during the late 1960s, the only time in recorded history when it was cool to be an urban Indian, and I had the terrible misfortune to be coming of age in the suburbs. This was definitely not cool. 

I did not want particularly want to be an urban Indian, but I mainly did not want to be who I was. If I could not be a racially pure, culturally intact aborigine of the Comanche persuasion, I would have gladly chosen less desirable alternatives (imagine arrows moving like weather fronts, heading north, and west, hitting the big tribes with vast reservations first, then slowly going East, South-the B list) and even settled for a ghetto in Oakland or Minneapolis or Winnipeg. 

I would still be alienated, sure, robbed of my birthrights, but it would be a righteous, militant alienation, and I would join my lumpen proletariat brothers (tempted to say 'and sisters,' but let's face it, back then it wasn't that kind of a party) and we would together awaken the sleeping red giant. 

Sullen worked for me, and I think urban poverty would have too, but instead of the seething, Black Pantherlike rage that might have led to . . . something, I mostly grew up in a mostly white middle class suburb of Washington, D.C. 

In my entirely undeserved teen age angst, I secretly believed that no red person on earth had ever gotten a worse deal. Yes, I knew that was wrong, because I had never been hungry, except for that time in LA when my parents left my two sisters and me with relatives who gave us cold cereal for lunch, and I knew terrible things happened to people lucky enough to be from reservations or urban ghettos, but this is what I believed at the time. 

There were even dark moments when I thought it would be better to be adopted out, live with a white family, not even know any Indians till I hit my first year at Dartmouth when I would trade my alligator shirt for, well, I don't know for what, maybe some indigenous dialectic, or turn into a drug addict or a poet. At least then the whole situation is spelled out, and your life becomes a journey to connect with what you never had. 

I wanted everything to be different from what it was. Take the suburbs, for example. Washington is ringed by prosperous jurisdictions who rank among the richest in the country, but did we live in Montgomery County or Fairfax? Nooo, we lived in Prince George's, more blue collar than white, called "the ugly sister" of the metropolitan area's suburbs. No European sports cars on my 16th birthday. We should have been rich if we were going to live in the suburbs, otherwise what's the point. 

Both parents were problematic. Admittedly, Mom packs an impressive resume: two full blood Comanche parents, raised by an extended family with lots of old people in blankets who didn't speak English, fluent in Comanche into her twenties. But then what the heck are we doing in the ugly sister county in Maryland? It is both of their faults, clearly. Dad: a white guy from a farm in Dibble, Oklahoma. Should be a redneck or maybe an anthropologist. Instead, it seemed like he couldn't care less about the profound issues of race mixing and colonialism and its tendency to produce confused offspring. Paula and Clodus (he claims to have no idea why some aunt named him that), from loving, strong families, and the first thing they did after getting married was move out of the state. 

This is why I was born in west Texas (no memory) and soon moved to Ithaca, New York (maybe one memory) before landing in Maryland in 1959. We lived in the suburbs, but we visited Oklahoma at least once and often twice a year, and I sometimes spent the whole summer in Lawton, where my Indian grandparents lived, or at the farm where my white grandparents lived. 

However, I could just as easily tell it this way: They call it Texas now, the place where I was born, but when my ancestors roamed those endless stretches of the Plains Texas was an idea whose time, fortunately, had not yet come and the country was better known as Comancheria. When Ten Bears visited Washington in 1864, President Lincoln showed our chief a globe in which our territory was so labelled.  

My home is the staked plains of Texas, and the red dirt of Oklahoma. Home is the little house in the foothills of the Wichita Mountains where my grandmother lives, just down the road from our tribe's bingo palace and at the edge of the Wildlife Refuge where unhurried buffaloes block roads and golden eagles arc through a turquoise sky. Thunderheads build to the west. Geronimo is buried just a few miles away, and sometimes we stop by and pay him a visit. It is, we say often and in a thousand shades of emotion, hard to be an Indian. Yes, it is hard, and yes, our homes are modest and our cars rusting, but at least we know who we are and where are from. 

All of the above, incidentally, is true. Grandma really does live in that house in Medicine Park, in the heart of the heart of Comanche country, and buffaloes really did block the road last time I was there. 

I felt persecuted by history, tortured by fate. I wanted it all to be one thing or the other. I hated being half-white and half-Indian. We were the only Comanches in a white suburb, and even the white suburb was unsatisfyingly lame. The contradictions were half-hearted, as it were, ineptly constructed, lacking dramatic power. One hand Dad was a successful white guy who wore a suit and worked at a university, but he was also straight outta Dibble, still active in the Future Farmers of America, and bragged about never reading books although he managed to write one called "Rural Recreation for Profit." On one hand Mom fit the image of someone who "married white" and craved assimilation, yet she was fluent in Comanche into her 20s and seemed remarkably free of confusion about her identity. Grandpa Chaat was a Christian, but he led a church full of Comanches who sang Comanche hymns. 

Nothing really worked out. Grandpa Chaat should have been a self-hating, colonized oppressor, yet he carried out the duties of a spiritual leader and on both sides of the family there was no one who more clearly offered unconditional love. Dad should have been a gung-ho Republican, but he voted Democratic and refused to be drawn into issues of race and politics. 

I want my contradictions to have the bold, clean lines of Scandinavian furniture. Instead they are more like junked cars on acid. 

The truth is that I longed to be a stereotype. Mainly I wanted to be the full-blooded Comanche, secure in his own Comancheness, raised on the stories of his people. (Somehow, the full blooded Comanches who I had known my whole life, who had never moved away from Southwest Oklahoma, who almost always married other Comanches, would not suffice. They were Christians and not traditional enough. I think over the next rise I imagined more suitable Comanches.) 

For most of my life I could be paralyzed with either one of two questions. The questions, though rarely asked with malice, were devastatingly personal ones masked as polite conversation. The questions were, "Where are you from?" and "How much Indian are you?"  (next page)