Thinking about Self in a Family Way

Philip J. Deloria

I never had to worry about my identity as a middle school music teacher. Or as an off-hours videotape editor. Or as a paper boy, retail clerk, or warehouse worker. As an academic, though, I think about it all the time—perhaps not identity so often as subjectivity, and perhaps not my own so much as others'. Yet the connections between self and subject are seemingly obvious. My first book, Playing Indian, tried to take seriously people with pale faces who would be "Indian." 1 "That," said some acquaintances, "has got to be personal!" My next project turns to my own family, asking how mixed blood and culture bounded and created my grandparents and great-aunt. In effect, it stands as a matched bookend to the first project: one concerned with whiteness, the other with a family way of thinking about race, culture, and Indianness. While I continue to insist that these projects are not about me, per se, I can hardly deny that they are informed by my own curious position. It feels as if a recent self, apparent for perhaps fifteen years, asks most of my questions. That self is taken with dualisms, both as structuring devices and as things to worry at, contemplate, and complicate. It quests for a usable past, not necessarily to explain itself to others but to make its questions visible through narrative and metaphor. Explanation and visibility, though, go hand in hand. My recent self has two stories to tell, and they necessarily implicate both self and subject. The first tends to function as history; the second as parable.	1
My brother and I began in 1971 an utterly haphazard ethnographic project. We brought our grandfather Vine Deloria Sr. together with our father's tape recorder, and we pushed the record button. A Dakota native clergyman in the Episcopal Church, my grandfather had spent much of his life collecting stories, and he was a gifted teller. His father and grandfather were Yankton Dakota, and he had inherited their stories, which spoke to Yankton life on the middle Missouri River. My grandfather had been raised farther north, however, on the Standing Rock Reservation, and he had thus also come to know a second set of stories, those of the Lakotas upriver. As he traveled during the 1930s and 1940s among small chapels scattered across the Rosebud and Pine Ridge reservations, he also learned the histories of the western and southern Lakotas—the Oglalas and Brules. He kept a diverse collection of narratives—historical, spiritual, funny, and fanciful—from traditions scattered across Sioux country. The tape recorder captured the fruits of his life as a vernacular ethnographer of the Sioux, a story collector whose work shadowed the more formal ethnographic inquiries of his sister Ella Deloria.	2
For my immediate family, Indianness was everywhere that year, in ways we had not fully understood. My father, Vine Deloria Jr., was dealing with the opportunities created by his 1969 best seller, Custer Died for Your Sins, furiously working on his next books, crisscrossing the country talking Indian politics, and settling into a teaching position at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington.2 With our periodic forays into my grandfather's story vault and visits from our great-uncle Philip Lane Sr. (another fine Dakota storyteller), my brother and I began, as we verged on adolescent consciousness, to understand the extent to which we were part of an Indian family. We had recently moved to a spot just beyond the boundary of the Lummi Indian reservation outside of Marietta, Washington. The Lummis were not "our" people, but they had an impressive aquaculture project underway, and men involved in it would sometimes show up at our house with big wire hoops of oysters or perhaps a fish or two.	. . .