Sail of Tears

(pg. 4) Now who am I? My name is David Arv Bragi, a name that I chose and adopted as a legal name in 2001, replacing a birth surname to which I have never had any active family ties. Arv is the Muskogee Creek word for Nomad, and Bragi is the Norse God of poetry, reflecting of the two most prominent aspects of my ancestral heritage.

The history of my Native ancestors is the history of gradual assimilation. We can't really blame them for wanting to adopt white culture, of course. Talamasmico's father lost his life to liquor; Talamasmico lost his tribal coming-of-age to kidnapping; he and Harriet lost homelands and family to war; their son John Douglas lost both daughter and life itself to illness; Myrtle lost family ties, ethnic pride, even her birth name, to white fosterage. Whether steered by desperation or the winds of fate, each generation found safety and comfort in the same America that, failing to destroy us, decided to "civilize" us by stripping away all that we had, even our names.

Yet, as the winds turn with the seasons, in recent generations that process seems to be reversing itself. Not only my family line, but Natives and mixed-bloods throughout the country are rediscovering who we were and who we are. Our ancestors lived in a time of forgetting. Now perhaps we have entered the time of remembering.

By now my family's Native blood is diluted and we have had little contact with tribal organizations. Yet for some reason this is the only ethnic part of our ancestry that my immediate family, which tended to insulate itself from the rest of the world, ever cared much about. When I was very young I was taught that I was part Muscogee Creek and Seminole and to be proud of it. Since childhood it has been a quiet part of how I see myself. Perhaps the best way to put it is, when I was young boy watching Westerns on TV, I rooted for the Indians.

Off and on, though, I seemed to almost "forget" that side of me. As a child my red, white, brown and black friends considered me white, my being part-Indian no more than a minor curiosity. As a teenager I watched mental illness tear apart the only family I'd ever known. As an adult I found "trendy" Native American spirituality among non-Natives to be shallow and embarrassing. For years I even thought my mother hypocritical for referring to herself as Native American on government forms, since she was only one-eighth Native, without ever connecting those feelings to how I felt about myself.

Then in 1985 my life changed forever when I married a wonderful woman and dear friend, Dolores J. Nurss. Also a mixed-blood Native American, her own struggles and triumphs walking in two worlds have helped inspire me to walk this trail of discovery myself. Together we try to respect the wisdom of our ancestors and keep some of the old traditions alive.

Traveling through the more reflective years of middle-age, I feel the need to better understand the Indian living somewhere deep in my spirit. I don't really look like a Native and for the most part wasn't raised among Natives outside of my own family, most of whom have either passed over, disappeared or otherwise left my company. But I still have these old memories and stories and documents and photographs, and they all keep whispering to me over and over, "Creek, Seminole, Indian."

So in 1998, following in the footsteps of my mother and grandmother, I enrolled in the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma. What this will mean to me and mine in the coming years I can't yet say. But it feels strange now, being a citizen of two sovereign countries, sort of like walking along my beloved Pacific shore, the rustle of trees on one side, the thunder of waves on the other.