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Meredith McCoy is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and History at Carleton College. Her father, David McCoy, is a citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. Meredith is a former public school teacher and a former Policy Assistant for the White House Initiative on American Indian and Alaska Native Education. She currently lives in Minneapolis.
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Meredith writes:
Mending Colonial Ruptures
Within me, I have all the pieces of America's harsh and fragmented racial past. I come from people who spoke German, English, French, Anishinaabemowin, and Michif, from people moving across two continents, and from six sovereign nations. I have ties to both the American South, where I was born and raised, and to the Great Plains, the homelands of my father's nation.
I am a product of relocation. Not just formal Indian Relocation Act relocation, but the relocation of centuries of people moving to find work and opportunity. On one side, I come from immigrants from Germany, Scotland, England, and Ireland. They were doctors, boiler makers, teachers, and farmers coming to America, the place they saw as the land of promise. They settled in the American South, and as colonizers of this space, they participated in many of the nation-building activities that exploited and forcefully relocated Black and Indian people.
On the other side of my family, I come from French fur traders who relocated to Canada and the northern Plains for work. I also come from from Anishinaabeg who relocated from the Great Lakes west to the Plains. My father is a dual citizen of both the United States of America and the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. These two nations are united by treaties establishing a government-to-government relationship and by a history of inequitable policies and interactions. My great-grandfather's lands were allotted under the 1887 Dawes Act on the Turtle Mountain Reservation. Both he and my great-grandmother attended federal boarding schools where they were taught to assimilate into white, Christian America.
My great-grandparents’ relationship to their homelands was complicated by the economic destabilization of reservations in the early twentieth century. In the 1940s, they left their community and moved to Tacoma, Washington, motivated by the promise of World War II factory jobs in cities. My great-grandfather had picked up mechanic skills at Wahpeton Indian Boarding School and opened an auto shop. While living in Tacoma, my grandmother and many of my great-aunts, aunts, and cousins met U.S. military servicemen, entering into relationships which were marked by deployments all over the world. My grandmother, step-grandfather, and their children moved around according to military command — my dad attended 12 different schools before he finished high school. Eventually, my dad (the first in his family to graduate from high school) went to the University of Georgia where he met my mom, a white Southerner raised in Arkansas and Georgia. After finishing their degrees, my parents moved to North Carolina for graduate school and decided to stay. Seeking to provide the stability he hadn’t had in his own childhood, my dad made sure my sister and I grew up in one town PreK-12.
I grew up in suburbia where I was the only Native student in my grade. As far as I knew, my sister and our three Lumbee neighbors made up the only other Native students in our district of over 10,000 students. Aside from reading Vine Deloria, Louise Erdrich, and Dee Brown at home, the extent of the Indian education I received was on the first day of Social Studies every year (always hunters and gatherers before Columbus and only in years when we covered state or U.S. history) and whenever we covered Westward Expansion (often taught as aggressive Indians living in tipis who massacred settlers while riding on horseback). The closest I ever got to seeing my own history and identity reflected in my school curriculum was when, as a third grader, I was allowed to set up a table for the school multicultural fair. That's right. One table, one year, and one eight year old trying to represent all federal and state recognized tribes for everyone at my school. Needless to say, good try but not enough.
In the eyes of the school district and to most of my town community, I was white. With my dad and at home, though, I was also Anishinaabe. I’ve often thought about the politics and implications of how I identify, and at times this process has been pretty demoralizing. I know, though, that I am not alone. I am just one example in a generation of Native people whose separation from their communities has resulted in disrupted connections to family, language, and place.
I grew up separated from my dad’s nation for a variety of political, economic, professional, and personal reasons, but these disrupted connections can be remade. In the last several years, I’ve reconnected with my aunties, uncles, and cousins in North Dakota. I’ve begun to get my grandmother to open up about family stories. I’ve attempted to learn Anishinaabemowin, and I’ve come to think of the Turtle Mountains as a kind of home. I’ve found other homes, too, in digital, suburban, and urban communities of Indigenous people. I’ve found that Indigenous Studies can help me to contextualize why my family has come to be where we are and to think about how I can uphold my responsibilities to my family, my clan, and my community (even from several states away). When I went "home" in July 2015, I realized colonial disruptions aren't permanent. Ties to home persist. We can mend colonial ruptures.
I am a product of relocation. Not just formal Indian Relocation Act relocation, but the relocation of centuries of people moving to find work and opportunity. On one side, I come from immigrants from Germany, Scotland, England, and Ireland. They were doctors, boiler makers, teachers, and farmers coming to America, the place they saw as the land of promise. They settled in the American South, and as colonizers of this space, they participated in many of the nation-building activities that exploited and forcefully relocated Black and Indian people.
On the other side of my family, I come from French fur traders who relocated to Canada and the northern Plains for work. I also come from from Anishinaabeg who relocated from the Great Lakes west to the Plains. My father is a dual citizen of both the United States of America and the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. These two nations are united by treaties establishing a government-to-government relationship and by a history of inequitable policies and interactions. My great-grandfather's lands were allotted under the 1887 Dawes Act on the Turtle Mountain Reservation. Both he and my great-grandmother attended federal boarding schools where they were taught to assimilate into white, Christian America.
My great-grandparents’ relationship to their homelands was complicated by the economic destabilization of reservations in the early twentieth century. In the 1940s, they left their community and moved to Tacoma, Washington, motivated by the promise of World War II factory jobs in cities. My great-grandfather had picked up mechanic skills at Wahpeton Indian Boarding School and opened an auto shop. While living in Tacoma, my grandmother and many of my great-aunts, aunts, and cousins met U.S. military servicemen, entering into relationships which were marked by deployments all over the world. My grandmother, step-grandfather, and their children moved around according to military command — my dad attended 12 different schools before he finished high school. Eventually, my dad (the first in his family to graduate from high school) went to the University of Georgia where he met my mom, a white Southerner raised in Arkansas and Georgia. After finishing their degrees, my parents moved to North Carolina for graduate school and decided to stay. Seeking to provide the stability he hadn’t had in his own childhood, my dad made sure my sister and I grew up in one town PreK-12.
I grew up in suburbia where I was the only Native student in my grade. As far as I knew, my sister and our three Lumbee neighbors made up the only other Native students in our district of over 10,000 students. Aside from reading Vine Deloria, Louise Erdrich, and Dee Brown at home, the extent of the Indian education I received was on the first day of Social Studies every year (always hunters and gatherers before Columbus and only in years when we covered state or U.S. history) and whenever we covered Westward Expansion (often taught as aggressive Indians living in tipis who massacred settlers while riding on horseback). The closest I ever got to seeing my own history and identity reflected in my school curriculum was when, as a third grader, I was allowed to set up a table for the school multicultural fair. That's right. One table, one year, and one eight year old trying to represent all federal and state recognized tribes for everyone at my school. Needless to say, good try but not enough.
In the eyes of the school district and to most of my town community, I was white. With my dad and at home, though, I was also Anishinaabe. I’ve often thought about the politics and implications of how I identify, and at times this process has been pretty demoralizing. I know, though, that I am not alone. I am just one example in a generation of Native people whose separation from their communities has resulted in disrupted connections to family, language, and place.
I grew up separated from my dad’s nation for a variety of political, economic, professional, and personal reasons, but these disrupted connections can be remade. In the last several years, I’ve reconnected with my aunties, uncles, and cousins in North Dakota. I’ve begun to get my grandmother to open up about family stories. I’ve attempted to learn Anishinaabemowin, and I’ve come to think of the Turtle Mountains as a kind of home. I’ve found other homes, too, in digital, suburban, and urban communities of Indigenous people. I’ve found that Indigenous Studies can help me to contextualize why my family has come to be where we are and to think about how I can uphold my responsibilities to my family, my clan, and my community (even from several states away). When I went "home" in July 2015, I realized colonial disruptions aren't permanent. Ties to home persist. We can mend colonial ruptures.