Keep Walking. Don’t Look Back.
I want to tell you about my ancestor, Lucy.
Gramma Lucy was born in the Chetco village on the southern Oregon coast. My people had lived there for time immemorial, caring for the land and each other, living our traditional lifestyle.
All that changed when Lucy was a young woman, somewhere between the ages of 9 and 15. At that point, conflicts with colonizers from the growing United States had reached a tipping point. My people had been subject to disease, massacre, and war. Despite fighting with everything in them for the right to live in their homeland, my people were force-marched up to the coast to the reservation at Siletz.
This removal is our Trail of Tears. It was winter on the coast: cold, wet, rocky. There weren't enough supplies. There wasn't enough food. A lot of people died, including Lucy's father. Although his name is lost to history, we know how it happened. As my people were marched up the coast, he stopped to help someone. A soldier, unable to brook any delay in removing my people from their home, shot him. Lucy, filled with grief and horror, tried to run back to him, but her mother stopped her. Her mother said, "Keep walking. Don't look back."
Lucy remembered these words and internalized them. In her young life, she had learned that being Native means a loss of identity, home, and family. As she told her children and grandchildren years later, she had learned that being Native was a death sentence. With that knowledge, she did exactly as her mother instructed her: she strove to bury her identity and culture, and never look back. She strove to live her life as a white woman, refusing to teach her children or grandchildren our indigenous language or practices. In short, she didn't want to be recognized as a Native woman at all.
More than a century later, my family was alive and thriving — we had made it out the other side of genocide. I had graduated college (the first person in my family to do so) and began working in tech. In a way, I was the culmination of Gramma Lucy's dream: succeeding and surviving despite being Native. But I had internalized her understanding of Native identity too. Although I was proud to be Native, it felt uncomfortable to bring it up. Native culture, celebration, practices, and even discussions weren't something fit for the public. I could share them with close friends and of course with my family, but it was borderline embarrassing "be Native" or do "Native things" around anyone else. It didn't help that centuries of genocidal policies had eroded my people's cultural identity and nearly destroyed our language; it was all too easy to feel like I wasn't a "real" Native person at all.
Over time, though, I started to realize that I didn't like living this way. Although Lucy did what she had to for survival, it wasn't right for me to keep hiding my true, complete self. I had the opportunity to be a visible example of a successful Native woman, to make the representation I'd needed when I was younger. Native representation isn't very common, and what does exist is mostly sports mascots and reductive movies like Disney's Pocahontas and The Lone Ranger. Some non-Natives don't even realize that Native people haven't completely died out. If they do realize we still exist, they often only think of the stereotypes: poor, uneducated, superstitious, and backwards. Definitely not scientific. Definitely not technologists.
In reality, people don't know what Natives are capable of. We've always been technologists. Before European contact, we had developed successful brain surgery, as well as the anaesthesia needed to do it comfortably. We had developed petroleum extraction, plant domestication, irrigation, and many other technologies. At the same time Europeans prescribed bloodletting for epilepsy, Natives had already developed effective anticonvulsant drugs to treat it.
I don't want to let my identity fade into the background anymore. I don't want to act like being Native is incidental to who I am. I'm learning my peoples' language, gathering and cooking our traditional foods, celebrating our ceremonies, learning our history, and raising a Native child. I want to live as my whole self in my career, and I want our young people to see a successful Native woman who works in tech and uses her skills to help her people.
I'm looking at Lucy's mother's words in a new way. It's no longer "don't look back" at my people's trauma, our culture, and my identity, it's "don't look back" at the culture that stereotypes Native people, the limitations people assume Natives have, and the voices telling me I'm not enough. I will remember the reason for the words while stoking the rage and despair in them to a fire that drives me.
As I've grown as a Native woman and taken on my responsibility as a Native auntie, I've realized that it's my responsibility to help Native people and create the space that we need. For that reason, with the help of PDXWIT, I'm starting Native Americans in Tech, an affinity group exclusively for indigenous people of North America who work in tech or want to. We plan to offer networking groups, speaking events, mentorship programs, and scholarships. Eventually, I'd even like for members to team up to do cool projects, like using machine learning to analyze language patterns to support revitalization efforts.
Our first event is May 12. If you're Native, please join us — you can register here! If you're not Native but want to support the group, please take a few moments to fill out this form.
Erin Grace (Chetco and Tututni) is the User Education Manager at Abstract where she’s rethinking what’s possible to help users learn. A technical writer at heart with over a decade of experience, she loves nerding out about helping users with empathetic, human-centered documentation. She speaks both nationally and internationally on help- and user-focused topics and also writes about them on her blog.