Adrift Between My Parents' Two Americas

 

 

The New York Times Magazine

Adrift Between My Parents' Two Americas 

 

David Treuer’s father, an Austrian immigrant, loved this

country. His Native mother, born on a reservation, could

never forgive it. Where does that leave him?

 

 

아래 인용 구절들과 사진은 위 기사에서

 

[M]y mom wanted to move back to our reservation, Leech

Lake, in northern Minnesota. So we moved. My father loved

Native people in a curiously modern way — unpaternalistically.

I once asked him how it felt to be on the reservation, to be

among us. He spread his hands wide. "I had been kicked out

of my country and persecuted,” he said. “So had they. We

understood one another.”

 

He loved this country in spite of everything he knew about it. 

He loved it in a way I never felt I could. Because, however

much I was my father’s son, I was also my mother’s.

 

After marrying my father, she moved to Washington with him,

and after my brother and I were born, she enrolled in law

school at Catholic University. She went on to become the

first American Indian woman lawyer in Minnesota and the

first American Indian woman judge in the country.

 

One story she fixated on, the one that would come up

regularly no matter what we were talking about, was how,

when she was 12, the sheriff stole her rice.

 

She would be tight, rigid with distrust the farther away from

Bena she traveled. Back among her uncles and  aunts and

cousins, she would really laugh.

 

“No one else wanted me,” he said. “I was hunted down in

Austria, barely tolerated in England and Ireland. But America

saved my life. It saved my life. So it’s my job to save it from

itself. That’s the deal. That’s the bargain.”