Not All Fun and Games: James T. Meggesto Shares How Native American Culture Becomes Caricature

James Meggesto: I went to a parochial school that was kindergarten through eighth grade in a suburb of Syracuse, and I was certainly the only Native American in the class. And I would always, you know, around Columbus Day — which was certainly always celebrated as Columbus, there wasn't even a notion that I can remember that had anything to do with indigenous peoples or anything like that — I just remember always feeling like people would ask, you know, did I live in a teepee, did my parents speak English, they would ask why I don't have a ponytail or why I didn't have a mohawk. From a kid's perspective, they certainly weren't intending to be hurtful. But you know, that sort of ignorance that was there kind of expanded through the teachers, too. There was never any, I never felt any sort of sensitivity to like, "Hey, let's not put this person on the spot" or things like that.

So what does Native American Heritage Month mean to me? I'm glad you asked that because I think it changes year to year. Some years it's about stereotypes and combatting some of the negative connotations that are associated with, say, sports mascots. Last year, for instance, was the first year that the Washington Football Team didn't continue to use their nickname, which was a dictionary-defined slur that traced its origins back to bounties that were put on the heads of Indians and were paid to settlers in Minnesota for basically committing murder. So there's a reason why it's been a big issue now. It's because I think the generation of folks that have led that fight understand what it feels like to be marginalized or caricaturized, in that your culture is trivialized in the nation. That it could be that people can go to sporting events and dress in a stereotypical way and that should be all right. And so to me, that stems from experiences like I had where you can feel different without being overtly told you can't do something because of your skin color. Certainly, my parents all experienced that growing up in the '50s and being told they couldn't go to certain pools because they were native. So I think for my generation, it wasn't necessarily outright discrimination in that context, but it was a feeling of inferiority based on being made to feel like your culture wasn't really something other than past tense caricature of what was portrayed in Old West movies or other kind of stereotypical notions of what Indian person was or is.