being white-passing and mĆ©tis is not a contradiction. itās a fight iām in every day.
i donāt talk about this enough because iām always afraid someoneās gonna try to fact-check my existence. that someoneās gonna look at me and decide, again, that iām not enough. not native enough. not mĆ©tis enough. not oppressed enough. not traumatized enough. not legit enough.
and iām tired. iām so fucking tired.
iām mĆ©tis. my dad is blackfoot and ojibwe. his dadāmy paāliterally went to a residential school. he had our language beaten out of him. had culture stripped from him like it was dirt that needed cleaning. and guess what? he survived. and then he passed down whatever scraps colonialism didnāt steal to my dad, who passed it down to me. stories. pride. grief. resilience. memory.
and you know what the world says to that?
āoh. you donāt look native.ā
i want to scream every time i hear that. like indigeneity is a costume i forgot to put on that morning. like you get to look at my skin, my face, my paleness, and just erase everything else. like the blood in my veins doesnāt matter because it doesnāt match your textbook idea of what native is āsupposedā to look like.
as if colonization didnāt literally breed people like me into existence.
as if passing privilege means absence.
as if my culture disappears the second you decide itās inconvenient.
white-passing isnāt some kind of golden ticket. itās a complicated-ass identity crisis you never get a break from. it means i donāt get followed around stores, but i do get erased. it means i donāt get some forms of direct violence, but i get silence.
silence when i speak about my people.
silence when i try to grieve what was taken from us.
silence when i say, āmy pa was in a residential school,ā and someone replies with āohā¦ but youāre basically white, right?ā
no. iām not basically anything. iām mĆ©tis.
and yes, my mumās french. colonizer blood, settler ancestry. that shit lives in my family tree like rot and roots at the same time. and i donāt ignore it. i canāt. itās part of me, and it makes things more complicated than i ever asked for. it means iām constantly reconciling the fact that i carry both the colonized and the colonizer inside me. itās guilt. itās shame. itās discomfort. and itās mine to live with.
and yet people act like thatās the part that makes me more āvalid.ā
like proximity to whiteness is some kind of credibility.
like i should be grateful.
iām not fucking grateful. iām angry.
iām angry that i have to āproveā anything.
iām angry that my culture is something i have to perform in order for people to believe itās real.
iām angry that i have to talk about residential schoolsāliteral generational traumaāas some kind of evidence that i belong.
why do i need trauma receipts for you to listen?
why do i have to list blood quantum and history and geography like this is a test?
you wanna talk about passing privilege? fine. itās real. iāll say it myself. i know i can walk into places and not be immediately marked as āother.ā thatās safety i didnāt earn, and i donāt deny it. but it doesnāt mean iām not indigenous. it doesnāt mean my ancestors didnāt bleed. it doesnāt mean my culture is a costume iām borrowing.
iām not borrowing anything. this is mine. this grief, this pride, this confusion, this rageāitās all mine.
my identity isnāt a checklist. itās a constant push and pull between what i feel, what i know, and what the world tries to take from me.
sometimes i feel like iām stuck in the middle. not native enough for some people, not white enough for others. and i get itāmĆ©tis identity has always been complicated. weāve always existed in the margins, the in-betweens, the places where people refuse to look. and stillāwe exist.
we survive.
so yeah, iām white-passing.
and iām mĆ©tis.
and iām pissed off.
and iām proud.
and iām still here.
donāt tell me i donāt look native.
you donāt know what native looks like.
you only know what colonialism wants you to see.
