when I was in college I was very involved with the Native American student group. I was actually voted chair of the group and was involved with the major ordeal of putting on a Pow wow several years running. I really enjoyed being part of the group, but it all came crumbling down on me at the end.

I was at a state school in California. most of the students there were white and middle class. Most of the native students were hyphen-americans: filipino-native american, mexican-native american, puerto rican-native americans. And white-native american. There weren't a lot of people who had grown up outside California, so the group of students in my club would be categorized primarily as "urban indians." Now that I think of it, there were only a few, like a handful of students who had actually lived ON a reservation for a portion of their lives. Like two.

In my experience there is this bizarre hierarchy of "indian-ness" that defines how we interact as young, urbanize indians. The people who are placed at the top of the pyramid are those who a)speak their tribe's language and b)have lived on their tribe's reservation. More points if your family was poor, lived on government commodity foods, had no plumbing, electricity, traveled only by horse, etc. Even more points if you can remember the first time you saw a white person. Next tier up are the people who have an important, distinctly indian name or reputation (their father is a notable indian dignitary). Next tier up are people who's grandparents are famous in the Indian community. Anyone gets extra points if you traveled the country at some point on the pow-wow circuit, are part of a drum group, or have a strong connection to one of the above. The pyramid gets fatter toward the bottom with the lowest tier being those people who's grandmothers were cherokee or their great grandparent was kidnapped from the navajo reservation and made into a slave somewhere. The people on the lowest tier tend to have absolutely no identifiable "indian" trait- pink skin, blond hair, blue eyes, etc.

The native group at my college was mostly filled with very low-tiered individuals. I'm not saying they weren't Indian, I'm just saying they felt very defensive about it because they had names like "Goldberg" or they were very caucasian in appearance. So everyone scrambled to try to find a way to outwardly justify their indian-ness. Some people became close to a local plains indian guy who kept promising to start a drum group with the students but never did because he couldn't get the kind of committment he wanted from the group. Mainly, that they didn't speak Lakota and had a very hard time learning that language on top of all their other studies. Others became active with the American Indian Movement, which at this time in California was still filled with people who were patting each other on the back for having occupied Alcatraz fifteen years prior. Others tried to justify their indian-ness by joining our club, which always backfired because then they had to find another way to prove that they were indian to the members of the club.

It was ugly. My position was that self-identity was the only thing that mattered. I wasn't interested in seeing people's tribal cards, or making sure they knew how to fancy-dance. I just wanted a safe place for people to gather where we all accepted each other just as we were. I wanted a unified voice when school-wide issues called for a response. I wanted to host a pow wow at our school because those events bring indians together in a state where government policy had been very effective in tearing indians apart.

As a result of my fairly liberal policy toward membership to our club, people who needed the club as part of their indian identity felt that the club wasn't indian enough. They were so competitive and mean to each other, trying to prove how indian they were. I was pushed out and accused of stealing from the club and defending non-indians who were faking their indian-ness. In the end I felt betrayed and I left the organization permanently. My vision of acceptance and support was completely obliterated and my spirit was defeated. It was a horrible time.

All along, I never felt I needed other people to help me feel more indian. There has never been any question that I was anything BUT Apache. Yes, my mother is white, but I was raised by my father's family in New Mexico, and we were never anything else. I didn't need to belong to a plains indian singing and drumming group, I didn't need to wear plains indian dress or dance in the plains indian style, I didn't feel the need to go to sweats to prove to anyone that I was indian. I just was. I think that because I didn't do those things, the other students were threatened by me. Because there were so few students who had been raised "as indians" to act as indian role models, the students who needed that defining went to the furthest extreme they could find. And they pushed me out.

The reason I'm writing about all this is that I am having a bit of a quandry myself. It's been three years now that I have been at my new school, and I've had very little contact with this school's indian group. For some reason, I've been excluded from their group and I just don't know if it's because I haven't tried hard enough or if they don't think I'm Indian enough. Hard to say. Either way, I have a weekely discussion with myself that I am going to try to get in touch with them one more time and see what is happening here. But every week I just seem to let it go without doing anything about it.

I want to be a part of it because it reminds me of home and makes me feel good. I want to be a part of their group for the support and the contacts. But I really don't want to be burned again like I was as an undergrad. I'm torn between joining the group with hope and optimism that these students are wiser and more self aware and expecting that they are just playing out the same indian games that we see all over the country.