On the Red Road // Story by Grace Dobush

©This story is property of The CyBurr, the online version of The Burr, Kent State’s student magazine. Spring 2004.

On the Red Road

Native Americans reclaim culture while dealing with stereotypes and prejudices

Story by Grace Dobush

From the door of the lab, a young black man looks in at the group and asks, “What’s this?”

“This is a meeting of the Native American Student Association,” responds Lauren Yates, president of the organization.

Only three people have shown up for the organization’s meeting in the Oscar Ritchie computer lab.

“You all are Native American? You guys look white to me,” he says.

“That’s probably because we don’t look like the stereotype of Native Americans,” Yates says.

“What’s the stereotype?” he asks.

Yates explains that most people expect Native Americans to have dark skin and long black hair. Actually coloration varies from East to West and from nation to nation.

The black man doesn’t back down and says it’s “white privilege” to claim the heritage of minorities as they please.

Yates insists: “No, really, we’re Native American. I’m Eastern Band Cherokee from North Carolina.”

“And I’m German.”

Native Americans on campus make up less than 1 percent of the student body at Kent State. Some have a hard time trying to keep traditions alive while making others understand what they’re all about.

The man leaves and the three NASA members are unsettled and angry.

“Don’t we love the cultural diversity on this campus?” Yates says sarcastically.

Chris Headworth, freshman anthropology major and a member of the Prairie Band of Potawatomi, says he gets that a lot, especially because his hair isn’t black and he has blue eyes. He moved to Ohio from Kansas four years ago, and it wasn’t as much of a problem there because people are more accustomed with Native Americans. But then he recalls being called a “prairie n-----” by his third grade teacher.

A few minutes later, the three are telling Indian jokes while eating frybread, a Native American treat that tastes like a cross between soft pretzels and county fair elephant ears, especially with a little sugar or honey.

One joke Yates tells has the punch line, “You left your injun running.”

Preparing for the Powwow

Later, they discuss plans for the Kent State Powwow and look at the catalog of the Crazy Crow Trading Post, a supplier of Native American craft supplies and kits.

“People who want to be Indian, they buy drums,” Yates says. “We make our own.”

But, she admits, she gets “regalia envy” looking at the catalog.

Regalia is the special dress Native Americans wear for special occasions such as powwows.

“It’s never called a costume,” says Kandis Schoenfeld, a sophomore pre-med major who is Lakota Sioux. “We’re not pretending to be anything.”

Yates unpacks her regalia from a box, wearing a “Rez Chick” t-shirt (rez is slang for reservation) and a watch with a band she beaded herself. A traditional regalia takes a year to complete, and everything is handmade. It all smells like sage, which she burns in an abalone shell for purification. She dances in the women’s traditional cloth category, so her dress has no beading on it—all patterns and accents are done in cloth. Her dress is red, something she just knew she had to have.

“You don’t argue with your dream,” Yates says.

A long fringe of ribbons goes all down the sides of her black shawl in a red, orange, yellow, light blue and black rainbow.

On Yates’ bead loom is what will become a purse to hang from her belt. It takes an hour to bead four rows, she says. She has a sketch pad of graph paper with the bead designs she uses. Patterns are never copied, but patterns and colors often are passed down through a family.

One design she uses was given to her by a friend. In Native American culture, a gift honors a person and cannot be refused. After powwows, for example, Yates gives gifts to drummers, dancers and anyone who helps. At the last powwow, she had two blankets laid out with gifts and nothing can be taken back—it all has to be given away.

“Sometimes even the blankets go,” she says.

Yates started the Native American Student Association at Kent State when she transferred from Baldwin Wallace College in 2001. As of fall 2003, there were 135 students at Kent State who identified themselves as Native American, but Yates says many do not identify with the Native American culture and go uncounted. Yates says her dedication to tradition comes from being raised on the Uintah-Ouray Reservation in Utah for the first 11 years of her life.

One part of this is being “on the red road,” which means no drinking, smoking or drugs.

Shane Roach, a producer/director for Kent State Teleproductions, says the phrase also represents spirituality or “living right with the world, with nature, with everything.” In some aspects, Roach says the red road, or red path, is a return to fundamental beliefs and a sense of traditionalism. Abstaining from smoking or drinking is a rejection of white culture, he says. Native culture is holistic, and separating the spiritual and the physical is impossible.

Where the Past and Present Meet

Roach’s office, isolated in the basement of the Music and Speech Building, seems like an oasis, with a large, light green couch and dreamcatchers, feathers and Telly Awards on the dark green walls. Roach was not raised in traditional Native American culture but says he embraced his heritage when he became older. He says he didn’t learn about particular traditions until he was an adult and sought them out, but the Native American spirituality was always there.

“It’s like breathing. It’s just who you are,” he says.

He discovered things he always did were actual traditions and prayers.

“They were longings I found homes for,” he says.

Roach says his haircut was in his dreams for a year before he made the cut: His head is all shaved except for a round patch in the back, which he ties into a ponytail.

“It gets looks, sneers and jokes,” he says, “but as soon as I did it, I knew it was right.”

Roach does not have a strong tribal affiliation but passes on to his children what he calls “pan-American Indian” culture. The stories he tells them and the prayers he says are taken from many different nations. Modern Indians are “an enigma, a paradox, a contradiction unto ourselves. Our traditional lifestyle can’t be lived today,” he says.

Roach’s great-grandfather was forced to relocate from Montana, where some of the Blackfoot tribe originated, to Oklahoma. But he ran away from the orphanage and ended up in Ohio. His grandfather died young, and a lot of things died with him—his grandmother was too busy raising the children to keep up traditions. Roach’s father was born in Stow, but when Roach was 5 years old, the family moved to the farmland of southern Ohio on the side of a mountain, he says. His father was a coal miner, and the family had a large garden and raised cattle, pigs and chicken.

“It was one step away from sustenance living,” he says, adding that they bought bread and sugar, but most of what they ate was their own.

Roach and his family are avid powwow goers, he says. They travel to Ann Arbor, Mich., each year, which kicks off the powwow season. It’s another example of pan-American Indianism—at powwows, traditions of the Cheyenne, Cherokee, Navajo and many others are all upheld. Last year, a group of Inuit even came, he says.

“It’s indescribable,” Roach says. “Everywhere you look, it’s another Indian.”

Full-blooded Native Americans are rare, even on reservations, Roach says.

Does being full blood make you more or less Indian? Is a city Indian more or less Indian than a reservation Indian?

“You are who you identify with,” Roach says, explaining that observing traditions is a way of connecting with his past to find out who he is.

Native Americans don’t separate religion and state, he says.

“We see ourselves as one of many creatures in an environment,” he says, adding American Indians believe they are no better or worse than a rabbit or deer. “The deer gives food to us, just as we become food for other creatures when we die.”

It’s all very cyclical, like the medicine wheel or the popular dreamcatcher, he says.

“The goal of American Indian spirituality is to find your place in the world and be happy, where the mindset of Euro-centric spirituality seems to be to defeat, conquer and subdue nature,” he says.

A Ridiculed Ancestry

Roach describes a funeral hat he has made. He adds a feather whenever a close family member dies, and so his ancestry becomes tangible. He uses it at funerals and during certain seasons, and once he teaches his oldest son how to use it, the hat will eventually belong to his son.

“Every feather has a story, and every story has a person,” he says, adding that those people made him who he is.

To explain this, Roach pulls out from under his shirt a leather necklace attached to a medicine pouch his father made. He doesn’t leave the house without it. Inside are herbs, soil, ashes and feathers.

“I live with my ancestry and future around my neck every day,” he says. “I am not me. I am us.”

In the 1950s, practicing Indians couldn’t be open about who they were, Roach says.

“Just 20 years earlier, even, kids were beaten for speaking their native language.”

But starting in the 1960s, and now even more than ever, Native Americans are rediscovering their traditions.

The Navajo, Zuni and Apache, for example, have been able to maintain their traditions because of their relative isolation. But most Native Americans not on reservations—and even some on reservations—live life like normal people. One of the biggest frustrations is being seen as a figure of history, Roach says, and the Cleveland Indians logo is an example of that. He says Native Americans are the only race who still can be ridiculed with no consequences.

“Until we’re no longer seen as mascots or historical figures, we won’t be seen as legitimate people with needs,” he says. “The rest of the issues won’t matter.

“I don’t want anybody to get the impression that we wear feathers in our hair on a daily basis or wear buckskin on a daily basis."

People think Native Americans will look like the old pictures in history books, but “the chief got on his war bonnet because he was getting his picture taken,” Roach says.

Most people don’t care about Native Americans as a living culture, Yates says.

“We’re only important when we’re dead and buried.”

Yates once had an instructor who said it was “cool” to dig up the graves of Native Americans and collect all the items they were buried with. He said it was no problem because there weren’t any Native Americans around anymore.

Yates raised her hand and asked the instructor where his grandmother was buried.

The instructor, confused by her question, asked her why.

“I’m going to dig her up,” Yates said. “It’ll be really cool.”