Chapter Text
"I wanted to learn the white man's secrets. I thought he had better magic....Seven years I was [at Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania]....They told us that Indian ways were bad. They said we must get civilized....We all wore white man's clothes and ate white man's food and went to white man's church and spoke white man's talk. And so after a while we also began to say Indians were bad....I tried to learn the lessons—and after seven years I came home....The chiefs said to my father, 'Your son who calls himself Rafael has lived with the white men.... He has no hair. He has no blankets. He cannot even speak our language and he has a strange smell. He is not one of us.'"Sun Elk, Taos Pueblo
"Frogs and Prejudice"
It was an argument over frogs that made me choose.
I was seven years old, impatient for eight and the independence of my own scooter bike. But at seven, my mother said I was too small to fly alone, so I would sneak away with Avery and Bill on theirs whenever I could. Come evening, we would return, full of ourselves and dirty with Oklahoma dust churned up by tiny engines which spurted dry clouds in our wake. Avery was two years my senior, Bill one. It made me feel important to go flying with bigger boys. And, truth be told, it made me feel important to go flying with friends who did not live on reservation ground.
Old prejudices eel their way from camouflaged lairs in "harmless archaic flatscreen shows" and curl up in the minds of children who are too young yet to recognize covert racism parading as sympathy and "respect for a proud people." A proud people, my foot. A frozen people—frozen in time by white Western nostalgia, reduced to some esoteric idea of Indian "pureness" which is then refined, enshrined, tagged and displayed as "The Authentic Native American Soul." Those who don't fit homogenized red are labeled rebellious, or reactionary, and sometimes—if the labelers want to get really nasty—"apple." Red on the outside, white on the inside. But it's not whites who use the term apple. Thus we absorb even their stereotypes. Shame drives us to flee our culture, or freeze it.
It was frogs that made me choose.
***
On this particular day, Avery, Bill, I, and a net and pail were headed out to Rattlesnake Ridge. It had rained two nights before, a hard rain that had soaked the Oklahoma dustbowl and would, we knew, add to The Pond under the north face of the ridge. The Pond amounted to a thumbprint in the earth where rainwater would stand for a while until summer heat baked it away, leaving parched pentangles of cracked mud. This was the latest rain in two weeks of storms. The Pond was a respectable size, about thigh-deep in the middle. But it was not swimming which had brought Avery, Bill and I out on scooter bikes to the north face of Rattlesnake Ridge.
It was frogs.
Tadpoles, to be exact.
Frogs didn't realize The Pond wouldn't last. The females laid eggs in it and, if there were rains enough—as there had been—those eggs would hatch. The Pond would roil with tadpoles. It was to rescue the tadpoles that we had come. Avery's idea, actually. His grandfather was a Vulcan and Avery had inherited Vulcan black hair and Vulcan respect for life—if not Vulcan coolness. The thought of legions of beached tadpoles abandoned to fry set his face grim with Red-Cross Rescue determination. He had called out his guard—Bill and I—and together we set out for The Pond.
"Chakotay, hold the pail still; you're sloshing the water over the edge." Avery was wielding the net while Bill paced in his footsteps: a shadow as black as Avery's hair, as black as the tadpoles in my pail.
"We're running out of space," I warned, then squatted down to whisper over the rim, telling them what they would grow into, as if by naming them I could will them to live long enough. "Koka, koka, neejdee koka...." I made a little song of it.
Avery came up beside me. "What on Earth are you saying?" He dumped in more tadpoles.
I stood up, a little embarrassed and curt with it. I shrugged one shoulder. "Nothing really."
"What does 'koka' mean?"
"Frog."
"They aren't frogs yet," Avery pointed out with that acid Vulcan precision that I both admired and despised simultaneously.
"They will be!"
Bill had detached himself from the pondside long enough to come listen. "'Koka,'" he repeated. "Sounds like a grunt, not a word." And he dropped to the earth, hopping about in a fair frog imitation, croaking, "KoKA, koKA!"
Avery blinked, grinned. "Onomatopoeia," he said. My turn now to blink. Sometimes I wondered if he sat around at home, flipping through a dicto-pad for fun or if his grandfather made him learn words like that. Seeing both my and Bill's confused expressions, he added, "It's when you find names for things by imitating the sound they make. Lots of primitive cultures create their words that way."
Slam! Just like that, I hit the walls. It was the first time I fully realized that my friends did not see the world the same way I did. It was more than language. One can translate words, but one cannot translate so easily a different way of seeing...a way of seeing that finds "koka" the better word exactly because of onomatopoeia. Did that make me a primitive, a savage? Or more logical than my part-Vulcan friend? I was not sure. But I was sure I didn't like the sound of "savage"—whether it was qualified by "noble" or not.
Avery, Bill and I remained friends until my parents divorced and my father took me with him to a colony world. But that afternoon when I was seven years old, I learned to be ashamed of my people, and of my language. I also learned I had two choices in society: live alienated from the larger culture, or live alienated from myself. I chose the latter. It would be many years before I would come to see I had made the wrong choice, and it would be even more before I would understand that there were more choices than two...and that alienation could be precious.
He-d'ho!