My Valentine Status

 

Image from Vintage Valentine Museum

This Valentine's Day I am being, well, rather cliché , and pondering love. My boyfriend of over a year is non-Native. Yup, he's a white guy. In August 2008, I wrote a post about Bloodlines and how I was choosing to date only Native guys. Then in October 2008, I met him and fell in love.

I didn't mean to fall in love with a white guy, we just spent time together and I discovered such an amazing person. Our chemistry simply worked. It did take me a while to get over the fact that he was white. Not that I have a long history of only dating Native men, but I had begun to buy into the bloodlines concept of being exclusive to my race in order to strengthen the culture, as well as having children that will retain Indian status in Canada. What a mouthful, huh?

Recently, there has been controversy in the Mohawk reservation Kahnawake as they have struggled with the bloodlines debate. 25 non-Native residents were faced with eviction as the Mohawk council of Kahnawake enforces their law that non-Aboriginals have no residency rights. The reasoning behind the law is to try to preserve Mohawk bloodlines, but Mohawk Grand Chief Mike Delisle says otherwise. “This isn't about ethnic cleansing,” he says. “It's about self-preservation.”

It is messages like these that underlie the pressure that Native peoples face today to date within our own race. I too have felt this pressure to only date Native men and have faced insecurity about my choice to date a non-Native man. Would I still be accepted amongst my Native friends or would I be seen as in-authentic. Or worse, as an assimilator? So I kept quiet about my relationship, publicly speaking that is. Until now.

I can't even imagine the experiences of those families who are being forced to break up on Kahnawake reserve right now. My mother, of mixed heritage, moved onto my father's reserve, Tsi Del Del, in the late '70s and continued to live there for many years while he served as chief. It would have been a horrific experience as a child to have had my mother forced off of the reserve, just for being non-Native.

In the '70s in Kahnawake entire families were forced off of the reserve, if one of the parents was non-Native. Many would have lost touch with their culture, their language, and their families based on this forced ejection. Their children weren't given the choice to be on the reserve near their families, take part in their culture and language on a daily basis, or attend the Kahnawake Survival School.

And here it's all happening again. The Montreal Gazette summarized the debate well: "As long as identity is based on ancestry rather than culture, say, or common citizenship, then talk of protecting bloodlines is pretty much inescapable." But Quebec Native Women's President Ellen Gabriel goes a step further, suggesting that "ever since the creation of the Indian Act, every effort has been made to oppress the customs and rights of all Indigenous peoples.

"These evictions do not follow Mohawk customs or tradition. The letters of eviction are a sad reflection of the degree of colonization that is embedded in the mindset among some Indigenous peoples," she says. "It is a mindset influenced by the residential school system and the assimilation policies of the Canadian government and whose doctrine is now being carried out by our own people."

It is an unfortunate reality that the Canadian government has placed on First Nations that in order for our descendants to maintain Indian status, we have to perpetuate an act of racism by dating exclusively within our own bloodline. What ever happened to untethered love that knows no racial boundaries? I choose to celebrate this Valentine's Day free from those colonial dictates and instead perpetuate love and inclusiveness. 

N.B. Club Native film by Tracey Deer of Kahnawake

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