Liam McDonald - Indigenous America

Be proud youre an Indian. But be careful who you tell.

This is a common phrase young Native children are taught in America, and it is one of the first things I learned from my dad about being Native. Being some of the first people to experience colonization in the United States, we hold the long memory of its brutality. The culture was forced underground, and our people survived a genocide.

My father was born in Watertown, New York, in the St. Lawrence River Valley. His family is Kanienkeh:ka, more commonly known as Mohawk. The Mohawk are the keepers of the eastern door of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, otherwise known as the Iroquois Confederacy (youll learn more about this in Chapter 1). My family originates from the Kanienkeh:ka Mohawk reserve outside of Montreal, Canada; the people are also referred to as French Mohawks or Catholic Mohawks. This name comes from their conversion to Catholicism, when Jesuit priests established the first Catholic mission in a Native village in North America in the seventeenth century.

My great-great-great-grandmother, Delia Deschamp (maiden name Warner), was born near Kahnawake Mohawk reserve, outside Quebec, Canada, in the late 1800s.

Delias father died when she was only two years old. Like many Native children in the late 1800s, Delia was forcibly removed from her mother, Susan Sawyer, and adopted into a white household. Delia was part of what we call the Stolen Generation, where many Native children in Canada and the United States were kidnapped from their families and put up for adoption by the government and Catholic church, and subsequently placed in white households.

After the death of her first husband, Susan would later marry a Mohawk man named Francois Robidoux, who was born on Akwesasne, a Mohawk Nation territory. Together, Susan and Francois began a family. The Robidoux family and I can trace our shared lineage records through the same ancestor: Susan Sawyer. Our records also show that Susans father, Louis Sawyer Sr., was buried on Akwesasne. Today, the Robidoux family continues to live there.

According to marriage records, Delia initially lived on Wolfe Island in Ontario, Canada, with her husband, and they would ultimately settle in Watertown, New York. Later in her life, Delia reconnected with her mother, Susan, and the rest of her Native family. (To see a picture of Delia and Susan, go to the photo insert.)

Even as an adult, with her deep connection to her spirituality, Delia went by the white name given to her as a child and was known to completely deny any Native ancestry when asked. She learned at a young age what kind of persecution went along with being Native.

Most Native American families today have ancestors who were subject to child separation and/or forced attendance to residential schools. Our families still carry the scars of those experiences to this day. Today my family honors Delia by carrying on her name. Some of her descendants, like my sister, are named after her. This is a way to not only recognize our heritage, but also to remember her and her experiences.

In this book, I will not shy away from the truth, for it has been willfully ignored for far too long. You will learn about the massacres, murders, and other atrocities committed against the Indigenous peoples of this country. You will learn about the strategic and coordinated efforts of the United States government to exterminate the cultural identities of Native Americans who survived. But you will also learn about the resilience of Native Americans. How despite generations of oppression and marginalization, Native American people have had profound influences on American popular culture, music, and politics. And you will soon see just how intertwined Indigenous history and knowledge is with the creation and expansion of the United States.

Today, most Americans understanding of what it means to be Native American comes only from portrayals in Hollywood films and other media misrepresentations. This is just one small part of the large-scale coordinated genocide and ethnocide (two terms youll learn more about in coming chapters) that continue for Indigenous people to this day. Throughout this book, I hope to present you with the truth about Native Americans, our history, and our modern culture. And I hope you will better recognize the invisibility of Native people in todays society, and ensure we are not simply thought of as a people of the past.

This book is dedicated to all the young readers out there who have always felt like their stories were missing from the history books. More specifically, this book is dedicated to Native youths who have ever felt misrepresented, underrepresented, or not represented at all within the education system. The future will be Indigenized, and you are the future.