EXILE ON MAIN STREET:  From  Lake Geneva to the Finland Station (conclusion) I knew the right answers, but I could not give them without feeling like a liar. The first question caused only tension about what was sure to follow, but not paralysis. Since I either have a remarkably even tan or happen to be a person of non-Caucasian persuasion, the first question would be are you Indian or are you Mexican, Japanese, basically from whence does your color originate? This I could answer. Indian, Comanche. My sisters and I never imagined a different one; and if we had offered something else no one would have been more surprised than our parents.  Very often follows this one: how much Indian are you? Then we move on to the question of origins.  I knew the right answers. The right answers were "Oklahoma," and "full-blooded." If I credibly gave up the right answers, there could be a dignified exchange on various aspects of life as a bona-fide Comanche Indian. I probably never even considered whether or not I would like such a conversation, and I see now I wouldn't have, but anything would have been better than the mixed-up, unsatisfying responses I mumbled.  These questions absolutely levelled me. Actually, they still do; I just handle it better. Essentially, without considering the question, which wasn't necessary because it was so obviously true, my authenticity as a person was in direct proportion to those very standards I said I disagreed with.  Every question ends up having a simple, expected answer and a complicated, unsatisfying one. Like, are you from the reservation. No, but there actually is no Comanche reservation, since it was allotted at the beginning of the century. There's no tribal council, either, but a business committee. Mom is full-blood, but actually there may not have been any full blood Comanches since the last century because of our fondness for taking captives. Dad is white, undeniably so, but his mother was 1/8 Choctow, an enrolled member of the tribe, and the farm Dad grew up on, and where I drove tractors and shot bullfrogs with .22s, was allotted Choctow land (a piece of family history I learned only a few years ago) . . . I often think of myself as a suburban Indian, yet I have not lived in the suburbs in twenty years.  At another, simpler time I had political answers to some of these questions, which I only halfway believed and worked as marginally effective defense shields. The right answers say there are Indians and there are other people, but we have our own intricate rating systems for authenticity and can be ruthless when judging others. (For me, enrolled membership in a famous western tribe, skin color and a certain social ineptness I marketed as a genetically determined stoicism were the high cards.) We have trouble believing in our own authenticity no matter how many times we tell ourselves that we're okay.  In this contest who really wins? I believe blood quantum is a bunch of racist nonsense, but I also bitterly resent individuals who discover they are Indian as adults and then become Indian experts or Indian artists or writers or whatever. Saying you are Indian or not sounds good, but it also makes people choose one ancestry over another. I don't see urban Indians as second class citizens, or reserve Indians as the epitome of all that is truly red, but if the land question is not central to our struggle and the reason for our continued survival then I don't know what is. I despise the whole concept of tribal certification, but I have to admit I felt all warm inside when I picked up my own Comanche ID card.  There has become a victim mentality accepted by many Indians that sees us pawns of government policies, and the result of historical forces. Those elements are there, of course, but so too are individuals with minds of their own who make decisions based on factors far removed from patriotic national feeling, fighting or collaborating with colonialism, or economics. As some see it, there's never been an Indian who left the reserve out of a passion for bright lights, skyscrapers and all night newsstands. There's rarely an acknowledgement that reservation life, like rural life anywhere, can often be confining, mean and provincial. Just as the dominant society has frozen its image of Indian people with a snapshot of Plains Indians of the last century, so too have we ourselves adopted some of the same limited thinking in how we see ourselves.  We have set up a bunch of binaries as if it represents most people's experience. The choices, as I understood them, were urban or rural, full blood or not really Indian, traditional or sell-out. My own existence never fit into the categories, and so, I thought, I never qualified.  Culture is continually being refined and changed, and always has been. The question is according to whose blueprints, and to what ends. There is, I think, a growing impatience among dissidents within the Indian world with many aspects of the recent constructions. In the 1960s this all would have called "a negation of the negation." It was probably necessary and often a lot of fun. We had been rendered invisible, disappeared, vanished; so we raised hell and generated a pretty impressive level of noise for our numbers. We had been stripped of our culture, and yet never mastered being white which left us neither one nor the other; so we became spiritually reborn and envied by much of the dominant culture.  Masquerading behind a name of deceptive calm, "Nations in Urban Landscapes" is a provocative exhibition that rejects the tiresome language of victimization. The concept is simply and elegantly stated by the show's curator in these words: "it is not an exhibit that constructs aboriginal peoples and their cultures as models for stewards of the land or keepers of Culture and Spirituality."  This sentiment runs counter to a great many Indian artists and intellectuals these days, who busy themselves with pretentious and vapid constructions of ever more grand, (and ever more humorless) cathedrals and training schools dedicated to the indoctrination of Unbelievers.  Niro, Robertson and HeavyShield have better things to do. The three artists are models of their own flamboyant individualism. They don't so much defy categories as to ignore them altogether, as if the subject is beneath contempt. Eric Robertson, who I met in Montreal only six months before and seemed so at home I figured he'd never leave, had relocated on the opposite coast as the show opened. ("I am not a political person," says Eric.) Faye HeavyShield is a Blackfoot Indian, confusingly from a Blood Indian Reserve with the mythic name of Stand Off, not far from Montana. (Call Faye's art miminialist if you want to start a fight with her.) Shelley Niro was born in the breathtakingly ridiculous place of Niagara Falls, New York, a rather miserable little town said to be run by gangsters. Already you can see how they would not be your first choice to teach Sunday School.  But make no mistake, these artists have lofty dreams of their own. "I'm looking for planets," Faye HeavyShield said quietly as we drove through the downtown Vancouver streets. A few moments earlier I had marveled, like a tourist, at the lights and bustle. Much more happening here at night than most American cities. (I must have sounded patronizing. Marcia said lightly from the front seat, "Paul is such an American." I turned to Shelley and whispered, is that an insult? Shelley, after the briefest of pauses, laughed and said yes.) If the name of the show challenges the usual paradigms of land, city and state, it occurred to me that even those weighty issues might be too limited, especially if Faye has her sights on outer space. I found out later she was talking about fabric instead of the final frontier.  In Vancouver the show opened at a gallery next to a small hotel surrounded by blocks of buildings that headquartered the hydro company that turns the raging waters of British Columbia into energy. The power company wanted the building where the hotel and gallery are as well, but the stubborn owners refused to sell.  Appropriately, the show signals its intentions even before you enter the gallery. In the window, visible from the street, you first see a a parking meter in the window. It looks pretty much like any other parking meter.. The meter has not been fed, and it registers in bright red its unhappiness with the word "violation." Inside the gallery are further violations, another Robertson piece where crabs bravely explore lawns, as if they do not care they are someplace they should not be, Shelley Niro's "ironic" poses of "urban" "Indians," and Faye HeavyShield offers a gripping tale of dislocation, separation and division ("we grew to love the sensation.")  Crosbie, Robertson, Niro, and HeavyShield seem to believe that Indian people are ready for what's next, to bust up the played out definitions and replace them with something new, something unexpected, who knows, perhaps even something interplanetary. They know there is more to be gained from hard questions than easy answers.  >A few weeks later I am speaking at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and during questions a kid asks about the Bering Strait. So, like, did Indians come here from someplace else or were you always here? I am at first charmed that there is still a Bering Strait controversy. The question is basically this: aren't you people immigrants like everyone else? I explain that although I am not an expert on archaeology, I find the radiocarbon evidence pretty convincing that my distant ancestors arrived here via the land bridge 25,000 years ago, but who knows and who cares.  Well, the questioner cared. He believed that if we had always been here we have special rights to land, but if we came over later then it's really no different than anybody else. Unless my ancestors battled mastodons and saber toothed tigers in prehistoric Lawton and Abilene, I could take this whole indigenous business somewhere else.  I no longer found the questioner and his question charming, but it did help put things in perspective. There are some standards of Indianness I will never meet, period, and some parking meters that will never be satisfied no matter how many quarters I feed it. I drove back to Washington to the sound of a 1980s hit by the Pet Shop Boys, and the tune felt eerily appropriate, exactly like an anthem that turned the contradictions of dislocation into power: "In every city and every nation/from Lake Geneva to the Finland Station."  This extraordinary tension between the imagined past and the messy, uncooperative realities of our present is a crazy making factory running 24 hours a day. If our confounding survival produces absurd questions in Baltimore, it has also created transcendent art in Vancouver. TOP © Paul Chaat Smith, 1995