College Dreams and Reservations

It's a world I don't understand and have little contact with. The premise of the story was intriguing. It's about a young Native American man who goes to college and experiences all types of culture shock, within his college city of Clarkston, not to mention the country on a whole.

This is 'Featherweight' written by Sterling HolyWhiteMountain published in The New Yorker on March 29, 2021. It's the writer's first story published in a magazine. He said "It took me what seems like forever to understand how to put the Indian Country I know on the page. The big problem, which is the problem every Native writer deals with, is how to talk about something the reader likely knows nothing about. How do you write into a cultural space where people have nothing but tropes to fall back on in order to understand you? And then—how do you push back against those simplistic ideas without turning into an explanation machine?"

Written in first person narrative, the story parallels the writer's own feelings when he left home and went to college. The writer identifies himself as a member of The Blackfoot People. In the story, the young protagonist meets plenty of people from everywhere. To him, even Portland is 'exotic'. He also meets girls, white girls. In an interview, the writer responded to a question on prejudice and misunderstandings of cultural stereotypes, and nailed it. 

He gets involved with a bunch of white girls—they stereotype and idealize him, and he does much the same with them. How do you go about representing such interactions in fiction against the constant backdrop of cross-cultural misunderstanding and prejudice that makes up our world?

It’s true that he and the white girls don’t quite understand each other in a way, but that’s happening in different ways on each side. The white girls come to the table with their notions of what indians are, and what it means to be an indian, which don’t really speak to his experience at all, whereas he’s noticing things about them that they don’t know about themselves, things that indicate an unbridgeable gap. There’s a difference between assumptions that come from stereotypes and the kind of understanding that results from closely observed experience. The early situation in the story was a way for me to talk about how whiteness—which, and this is something we never talk about, is different from being white—functions. The most striking thing about people who really embody whiteness is that they see everything but themselves. Whereas people who aren’t coming from that space, usually people of color but not always, see themselves (because they’ve been objects of the white gaze for decades and centuries) and the peculiarities of whiteness at the same time. This blind spot is one of the reasons this country is such a mess right now; whiteness doesn’t get to function in an unimpeded manner anymore, and this process of coming to self-awareness is extremely painful, both for these people waking up to the values that underpin whiteness and for the rest of us, who have to experience their resistance to that awakening.

The unnamed protagonist in the story paints himself as a simple reservation boy with a stalk of grass between his lips. He was curious, wanted to know more about the city and the big world. He wanted to meet the girls and also see the homes they live in; he went to parties and got drunk. There was lots of sex and girls. He was pretty a normal college boy! 

Their voices in my ear, even now! Where I’m from, it’s the women who know how everyone is connected. When I was a boy, they were emissaries of the mysterium tremendum itself, they knew all the stories and revealed them like the greatest of secrets. Of course, they had their own agendas, and since I was their lone living male issue, a different kind of weight fell upon me.

Don’t go giving us a half-breed baby, now! they would say. We got enough white blood already.

What if she’s light-skinned? I would say, just to prod them a bit.

Well, if you have to, they would say.

A lot of indians belong to the Church of Latter-Day Eugenicists. Right there out in the open, not even trying to hide the travesty. Brown-skin supremacists. That’s just how they are.

Then, there was Allie, a fellow college girl and Native American. She stole his heart and made him unsure about loads of adult-life things. It seemed like a glorious romance. And then they broke up. He didn't understand why, and didn't share her worries or viewpoints. She stopped going to classes, left the apartment she shared with her roommate, went back to her reservation, and he heard that she flipped burgers at a diner. 

Go find some nice little white girl, she said. That’ll make you feel better.