One of the things that continually frustrates me about where I work is that the Indian people are complicit in the oppression. For example, I've heard one of the reasons I didn't get the job I applied for last December had to do with someone (a secretary) saying I never come to work. I believe I know where that comes from. My assumption is rather complicated.
When I was attending a National Writing Project meeting a few years ago as a co-director of our local writing project, we had a whole group of teachers with us participating in a special initiative called Project Outreach Network. We had to come up with a plan for how we were going to conduct inquiry at our site. There were five of us there, four Indians, one non-Indian. Somehow during the week-long meeting we got into a fight, and one of the Indian teachers who was older than me said something to the effect that I should not be one of the co-directors. And for the first time I came up against a race issue among my own people in which, basically, once someone of your own race casts you in a role, they don't like it when you leave that role. They don't like you to leave the little box where they've sorted you. Garbage men cannot become city councilors. Poor, single mothers cannot become directors of significant grants, and, for the purposes of my writing here, support staff at tribal colleges cannot become faculty. When you look at our tribal college you'll notice that a majority of the Indian staff are support staff, while a majority of the white staff are faculty. The few Indian faculty we have are held to a different standard, a rather low standard, of professionalism. We are labeled as flighty, never there, lazy, uneducated, unprofessional. Even at our own institutions we don't get a fair deal.
The assumption that I was "never at work" didn't have any basis in fact. I was there for all my classes and taught them for the full three hours, and I was there for all of my scheduled office hours. I just wasn't there for the full 80 hour week that support staff (like secretaries) are supposed to be there, hence the hyperbolic comment that I was "never there." I was there, far more than many faculty. I was working, doing research on future and current classes. I was there providing support to students who weren't even my own students in the computer lab that serves as my office (because I'm Indian and I apparently don't deserve the respect of having my own office, I have to share a computer lab with students and provide writing and tutoring support to them, unlike my colleagues in the same building and across the whole campus). I wouldn't mind providing the tutoring, computer assistance and paper writing support I provide if other faculty in my department were held to the same standard. They are not. Other faculty send students to me and tell them I'll help them without offering to help their own students.
Despite nearly forty years of providing education on the Rosebud Reservation, little has changed in education on the Rosebud Reservation. People still expect the whites to be the experts and the assumption remains that educated Indians must have scammed someone to attain their jobs. I don't know how that can be changed. It's agonizing to try educating my students about how great their future will be when they have an education when I know it not to be true. When you get an education, you are still going to be Indian and nothing is going to change regarding fairness. Especially among your own people. Especially among your own people. Nothing is going to change among your own people.
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