Once upon a time, as a child living on land in Virginia where the Powhatan had lived, I dressed as an Indian princess—Pocahontas most likely—and tried to learn to paddle a canoe, silently, “like an Indian.”
Once upon a time, as a young teenager, I was dressed in white flowing robes and a feathered Indian headband, paddled out into the middle of the James River at Jamestown at night (amidst a raging thunderstorm), and brought back to the bonfired beach as the Spirit of Chanco to the amazement of the group of Episcopal Church campers gathered there. Even more bizarrely, I was then blindfolded, placed in the back of a white-painted hearse, and roughly driven around Surrey County as some sort of initiation into the inner circle of place. Writing that now, I see the echoes of the KKK—although, of course, I was the ‘wrong’ gender for that. Ironically, the ‘real’ Chanco was male.
Once upon a time, quite recently in fact, as I was writing a book chapter about Chief Seattle’s daughter, Kikisoblu, also known as Princess Angeline, she began to appear to me in dreams. Her voice whispered—okay, sometimes yelled—over my shoulder as I tried to honor her story. Her story, at least as I have heard it, is layered with the stories of so many other Native American girls and women who have lived with—and in too many cases, died by—gender-based violence. Honor their stories.
My own heritage is white European- American and not Native American. I recognize the danger inherent in cultural appropriation and the long tradition of “stealing stories.” I also recognize the responsibility of using my privilege as a white academic writer to amplify stories and voices.
Abigail Echo-Hawk, Chief Research Officer for the Seattle Indian Health Board, states: “I always think about the data as story, and each person who contributed to that data as storytellers. What is our responsibility to the story and our responsibility to the storyteller? Those are all indigenous concepts, that we always care for our storytellers, and we always have a responsibility to our stories.”
Echo-Hawk goes on to talk about what she decided to do with the results of a CDC-funded 2010 study on the experience of sexual violence by Seattle-area Native American and Native Alaskan women. She states, “The Seattle Indian Health Board had decided to not publish this information because of how drastic the data was showing the rates of sexual violence against Native women. There were fears that it could stigmatize Native women, and that would cause more harm than good. But those women had shared their story, and we had a responsibility to them, and to the story, and I take that very seriously.”
(Sources: “Abigail Echo-Hawk on the art and science of ‘decolonizing data” by Manola Secaira, Crosscut, May 31, 2019 and “Nearly every Native American woman in Seattle survey said she was raped or coerced into sex” by Vianna Davila, The Seattle Times, August 23, 2018).