An Indian among Los Indígenas Read online

  Copyright © 2021 by Ursula Pike

  All rights reserved. No portion of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from Heyday.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Pike, Ursula, 1968- author.

  Title: An Indian among los Indígenas / Ursula Pike.

  Description: Berkeley, California : Heyday, [2021]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020030725 (print) | LCCN 2020030726 (ebook) | ISBN 9781597145275 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781597145282 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Pike, Ursula, 1968---Travel--Bolivia. | Peace Corps (U.S.)--Biography. | Peace Corps (U.S.)--Bolivia--History--20th century. | Karok women--Biography. | Indians of South America--Bolivia--Social conditions. | Indians of North America--California--Social conditions. | Bolivia--Colonization.

  Classification: LCC HC60.5 .P53 2021 (print) | LCC HC60.5 (ebook) | DDC 362.6283/9998084 [B]--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030725

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030726

  Cover Photo: Raúl Barrios

  Endsheet Photo: Valentina Alvarez

  Cover Design: Ashley Ingram

  Interior Design/Typesetting: Ashley Ingram

  Published by Heyday

  P.O. Box 9145, Berkeley, California 94709

  (510) 549-3564

  heydaybooks.com

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  Contents

  Preface

  1 A la Llegada – Upon Arrival

  2 Cochabamba

  3 La Clase de Baile – The Dance Lesson

  4 Primer Viaje a Kantuta – First Trip to Kantuta

  5 En la Noche – In the Evening

  6 El Centro Infantil – The Children’s Center

  7 La Ch’alla – The Christening

  8 Ropa Sucia – Dirty Laundry

  9 La Repostería – The Bakery

  10 Misiñawi – Cat Eyes

  11 La Noche Más Fría del Año – The Coldest Night of the Year

  12 Amigos – Friends

  13 La Aislamiento – Isolation

  14 La Celebración – The Celebration

  15 Aventura – Adventure

  16 La Flota – The Bus

  17 Cantando – Singing

  18 Bailando – Dancing

  19 Casa – Home

  20 Mi Salida – Departure

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Preface

  Brooklyn Elementary School in southeast Portland, Oregon, had a special Thanksgiving celebration the year I was in third grade. Earlier that week, a man came to the school to teach us about the potlatch tradition of the Pacific Northwest Indians. This middle-aged white man overenunciated in the way adults do when they are explaining very important things to children. Potlatch came from a Chinook word meaning “to give,” and although it sounded like “potluck,” it was different. A traditional potlatch ceremony included feasting and gift giving. The more a family or a chief could share at the potlatch, the more important they were. The giving was the important part. Sharing their wealth also cemented important connections between families.

  I had never heard of a potlatch. I am a member of the Karuk Tribe, from the steep mountains near the California-Oregon border, but I had also never ridden a horse, shot an arrow, or slept in a teepee—things I thought all Indians were supposed to have done.*

  Our teachers decided that each class would have our own potlatch before going on break, so we made headbands and attached construction-paper feathers. Some of the girls braided each other’s hair. My mother almost never braided my hair even though it was long and straight, because of enormous tangles I never let her brush out. All the students and the teachers sat on the gym’s wood floor in a big circle. The man played a hand drum slowly and told a story. I sat on the hard floor, thinking of what I could give as part of the potlatch. I was looking forward to the Thanksgiving break because my mom, my sister, and I were driving to my grandparents’ house in Daly City, California. We often stopped in Yreka, the halfway point of the eight-hour drive, where my auntie Mary always greeted us warmly at the door no matter what time we knocked.

  “Does anyone have any gifts they would like to give?” the man asked the circle. I nearly dislocated my shoulder in an attempt to be the first one to raise my hand. I was eager to show that I had absorbed the lesson of the potlatch and could perform the version of nativeness he had presented to us.

  He gave me the nod and I stood up. Making elaborate hand gestures in hopes that they added to the realness of my performance, I offered an imaginary chicken to my friend across the circle. I watched the man the whole time I was talking, wanting him to affirm that I was doing it correctly. My friend on the other side of the room looked at me with confusion in her eyes.

  “Say thank you,” the man told her. She mumbled her gratitude for the nonexistent chicken. Standing in front of the class was embarrassing, but I was also uncomfortable because I knew I was performing an identity that looked nothing like my actual life. There was no confusion in my mind about being Karuk, but up there in front of my classmates, I thought I had to act the way he told me Indians acted. I understood that there was the real life I lived and then there was the version of American Indian everyone expected. When the exchange was over, I sat down with relief. Other children stood up and offered imaginary gifts to each other as the man coached them through the exchange. When the potlatch finally ended, I left the gym quickly, happy to be released into my real life.

  My family repeated stories of Spanish, Irish, and even Cherokee ancestors, but the language my grandmother spoke to her mother was Karuk, and the culture I was taught to claim was Karuk. Unlike my grandmother, I didn’t grow up near the confluence of the Klamath and Salmon Rivers. My playgrounds were in the cities of Oregon and Washington State, and I learned to ride my bike in the parking lot of a Laundromat in Portland. I know the sometimes-bitter flavor of xuun—a traditional acorn porridge—but I don’t know how to gather acorns.

  Half of what I know about my tribe comes from the stories my grandmother told me and the songs that were sung around a campfire on the river. The other half comes from books written by anthropologists. However, all of my knowledge about being an urban Indian growing up in a city comes from my lived experience. It comes from attending Portland’s Delta Park powwow on the flat space off Interstate 5, where I played tag with other kids until it was too dark to see. It comes from hearing my mother’s stories about working for the Bureau of Indian Affairs on reservations throughout the Pacific Northwest. I knew Native construction workers, tribal council members, fry cooks, and botanists. My understanding of what it meant to be Native also came from sitting in a student meeting during college where American Indians from different tribes, all with their own traditions, planned a powwow. My experiences and these people were never represented in the books I read or movies I saw, but they were whom I thought of when I heard the word Indian.

  American Indian was the box I checked when I applied to college and on my Peace Corps application. When I went to Bolivia as a twenty-five-year-old Peace Corps volunteer, I knew it was a country full of Indigenous people. I wanted to help Indians. But I didn’t realize that helping people is difficult. The understanding that the giver is better off than the receiver in some absolute sense hangs in the air above the transaction. And to be certain, it is a transaction. As in the exchange of those potlatch gifts, the giver expects something in return for her gift even if it is only a mumbled thank you. Trying to help
people in another culture adds a level of complexity to the exchange because not every culture values the same things. I didn’t understand how the “help” offered by colonizers, missionaries, and nations that preceded me cast a long shadow over all attempts at assistance.

  I went to Bolivia assuming I would have connections with Indigenous Bolivians because of our shared identity as Indigenous people. All those powwow planning meetings in college with my Paiute and Yakima classmates included disagreements over everything from who should carry the flags for grand entry to the type of frybread we would serve, but we accepted that we shared a connection. In Bolivia, I learned about the similarities in the history and experiences of Indigenous people in North and South America. In South America, the Spanish launched a brutal campaign to subjugate and eradicate the Indigenous people in what would become Bolivia. On the West Coast of North America, the Spanish established a mission system with the intention of subjugating and eradicating the Indigenous people in what would become California. El oro y la plata, gold and silver, were the reason fortune seekers from Europe came to California and South America. The Quechua and Aymara, the two largest Indigenous groups in Bolivia, had not been allowed to speak their own languages in school in exactly the same way that my grandmother and her siblings were required to speak English instead of Karuk.

  When I finished training and moved out into the countryside, I was uncertain about my ability to do something meaningful. Most volunteers struggled to figure out what to do, but part of my struggle was knowing I followed in the footsteps of Western colonizers and missionaries who had also claimed they were there to help. The two years turned out nothing like what I had expected. When I boarded my return flight to the US, I didn’t feel the deep sense of satisfaction about what I had done as I had believed I would.

  Upon returning to the United States, I looked for stories that would help make sense of what I had experienced. There were no books by Native Americans who served in one of the predominantly Indigenous countries like Guatemala, Peru, and Ecuador. There were few books by African Americans who had served in Africa or Asian Americans who had served in Asian countries. Occasionally I would stumble on evidence that people of color had been volunteering with the Peace Corps since the agency started in 1961, but it felt like a secret.

  When I sat down to turn the eight journals I filled during my time in Bolivia into this book, I thought of my favorite travel books, such as Robin Davidson’s Tracks chronicling her camel trek across the Australian Outback and Moritz Thomsen’s Living Poor recounting a farmer’s move to Ecuador. These are my most dog-eared, repeatedly read books. In high school, I devoured P. J. O’Rourke’s travel stories in Rolling Stone with his now cringe-worthy descriptions of Central American women with breasts that looked like the melons they carried on their heads. An economic development professor assigned Robert Klitgaard’s Tropical Gangsters: One Man’s Experience with Development and Decadence in Deepest Africa. His story of travel, exotic cultures, and ineffectual development projects read like an economic Heart of Darkness, and I loved it.

  Yet, as much as I loved these books, I never saw myself in them. I couldn’t identify with the author because it was always a white person with enough privilege and resources to leave the world of work and travel for months at a time in another country. As much as my teenage self hoped for breasts like melons, I didn’t identify with the people in the countries these writers were visiting because their accounts were comically one-dimensional. The travel magazines I read would often have glossy pictures of Indigenous women sitting next to bright fruits and vegetables as if they were simply another colorful part of the landscape.

  A 1921 essay by Yankton Sioux writer Zitkála-Šá titled “An Indian Teacher among Indians” exploring her time as a teacher at the Carlisle Indian School gave me an example to follow. Zitkála-Šá attended an Indian school as a child, and despite mixed emotions about her own experience, she returned to teach, hoping her work would help “the Indian race.” The US government established Indian residential schools like Carlisle to “Americanize” Native Americans. Eventually, Zitkála-Šá resigned when it became impossible to ignore that the school’s real purpose was to make white settlers feel superior for bestowing charity on “the children of savage warriors” instead of actually helping the children. My experience in Bolivia was different from Zitkála-Šá’s, but the conflict of being both connected to and distanced from the objects of the charity work was familiar to me in a way I had never seen. The idea that the real beneficiaries of service work were the service workers themselves was a radical thought I had never dared to consider.

  Every person who writes about real life in the genre called nonfiction must confront her commitment to the truth and be transparent about what was changed. To write this book, I used research, photographs and videos from 1994 through 1996, and conversations with Bolivians and former volunteers I knew during these years. I used the eight journals that I filled with my observations while I was there. I reconstructed my experience as completely and honestly as I could. Part of that reconstruction involved condensing timelines and re-creating conversations. My process was similar to what museums do when they construct a T-Rex fossil display. They don’t have every part of the dinosaur’s body and have to mold bones and vertebra from plaster. Adding the re-created parts gives a more complete picture of the creature. I did the same thing, but with words.

  Writing about my experience in the Peace Corps still feels a little disrespectful twenty years later. Who am I to tell a story that does not look like the accepted narrative about service and charity? I feel like my nine-year-old self, standing up on a fall afternoon at Brooklyn Elementary, speaking my truth about what giving meant to me rather than saying what I thought I was supposed to say. Although I see more African American and Hispanic faces in the Peace Corps marketing and recruitment materials since my time in Bolivia, and the demographics of volunteers is a bit more diverse, books about the experience by people of color who were volunteers are still hard to find. And, at least when I began writing this story, I still hadn’t seen any books or essays examining the experiences of a Native volunteer serving in an Indigenous country. Bolivia is also still relatively unknown despite recent news coverage, and few North Americans could find it on a map of South America. I wrote this book because the story of an American Indian Peace Corps volunteer who struggled while serving in an Indigenous country—my story—was missing from the library.

  _________________

  * I use the following terms interchangeably for the Indigenous people of North and South America: Native, Native American, Indian, American Indian, and Indigenous people. Whenever possible, I will use specific tribal names such as Karuk, Cherokee, Quechua, and so on.

  1

  A la Llegada — Upon Arrival

  I arrived in La Paz as four rum and Cokes joined forces with an altitude-induced headache. The other volunteers in the group had accepted the airline’s complimentary drinks, and I assumed this was what people did on international flights. Now I stood in the tiny airport that teetered on the rim of the bowl-shaped valley of the city, feeling exhausted and unprepared. Wood-paneled walls didn’t keep out the chilly air blowing across the high plateau. The T-shirt I had put on the night before in Miami provided no warmth. I forced myself to stand up straight despite wanting to lie down under something soft and warm. It was 7 a.m., and I was thirteen thousand feet above sea level.

  I stepped into a quickly forming line leading to a Bolivian immigration official. His pale pockmarked face and broad unsmiling cheeks made me wonder whether he was part Indian. Native. Indigenous. Bolivia had four million Indigenous people. That was almost twice as many Natives as in the United States. In Bolivia, Indians were the majority. I bit my lip to keep from grinning.

  The Bolivian official scanned passports without a greeting or a smile, quickly looking at each person’s face, then back at the passport. I stepped in front of the table where he sat and pulled my stiff passport ou
t of the fanny pack my mother had given me before I left Oregon. Behind him was a shawl-sized painting of the red, yellow, and green Bolivian flag.

  The other volunteers shuffled toward the immigration official. I had met them only forty-eight hours earlier, but I already knew exactly how many brown people were in the group. It was a tally I always made. A cute Latina from Texas, a midcareer Mexicano, a bleary-eyed Puerto Rican man, an athletic Filipina from California, and a broad-shouldered Filipino who was quiet except for the occasional self-deprecating joke. I didn’t like the term minority, but in this case we were. The remaining twenty volunteers looked like those combinations of Western and Eastern European identities that qualify as white in the United States. Did anyone wonder what I was? My dark brown hair and olive skin gave me a vaguely ethnic look. Teachers and curious grocery clerks usually guessed Hispanic or maybe Greek. My identity was a tailless donkey they had to pin the right kind of brown to.

  The immigration official looked up at my face and then down at my passport. I was excited to be standing in front of a Bolivian for the first time, but the formality of the moment made me nervous. His thick eyebrows moved up and down as he scrutinized me. Then he stamped it, handed it back to me, and reached for the next one. That wasn’t what I had expected.

  “Thank you for coming to my country. I can tell you are more serious than any of these gringos,” said No One. I looked around at the other officials. Didn’t my sincerity show through my olive skin? Maybe it was too early in the morning. Maybe they were rushed. I waited an extra moment to give him a chance for a second look or a nod of his head. Certainly, the Bolivians would eventually recognize that I was different from the others arriving from the United States that day. They would see that because I was an American Indian, we shared a connection. Coming to a country like Bolivia, a country full of Native people, had been the secret wish held in my heart as I filled in the spaces on the Peace Corps application. Couldn’t the Bolivians see that we shared a connection? Couldn’t they see that my commitment was more meaningful because I was Native? The person behind me sighed, and I reluctantly moved forward.