Thinking about Self in a Family Way

Abstract

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.