“Respecting Your History:” Jessica Yee on being Asian, Aboriginal, and Canadian

Being mixed First Nations and being raised in the urban centre of Toronto, I’m often faced with the question of “Am I Indian enough?”:

Do I attend ceremony here?

How am I going to learn my traditions?

Being also Indigenous from Taiwan and continuing to live in Toronto makes me ask myself other questions:

Should I even partake in the prevalent Chinese culture here?

Where are my people?

So for much of my early life, I shut off being any race, and dove head first into the world of grassroots activism. It was a welcoming and friendly environment where everyone was pissed off at something, and collectively we stood to fight back against it (whatever it was). This led me to focus my energies principally on sexual health and reproductive rights. I realize now that the core values of bodily rights and ownership of oneself in these movements were a really good fit for a young Native girl trying her hardest to find her identity.

“People can’t tell you what you are or aren’t. That’s the colonizers job,” my 88 –year-old Gitxsan adopted auntie May told me when I was 20. “If you don’t start being proud of who you are and identifying with your Aboriginal heritage out loud, how is our culture going to survive?”

Today the definition for Aboriginal in Canada includes those of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis heritage. The 2006 Stats Canada census revealed that more than 60 000 Aboriginal people live in Toronto itself, and that there are currently more than a million Aboriginal people across Canada. These were considerable increases from the previous census counts in 2006, and it is no doubt because more people were able to identify as Aboriginal with the changing regulations around the mixed European/Native ancestry of Métis.

However, it’s still hard to maintain your legal Aboriginal identity in North America if you ever get together with someone outside your community. Blood quantum systems and generations of oppressive legislature mean that after one or two interracial marriages, your status as an Indian can disappear. This is worrisome for the sustainability of our culture for future generations, considering that more than half of our population is now under the age of 25 (myself included). In fact, the National Aboriginal Health Organization (NAHO) estimates that in 15 years if status laws don’t change, only 60% of Aboriginal youth will be legally recognized, while the rest vulnerable to assimilation and cultural genocide.

There are too many stories of internalized racism in our Native communities, where being half or a quarter Aboriginal means you might not be fully accepted by your community. You also might not receive equal benefits compared to those who count as biologically “full”. As Tracey Deer, director of the film Club Native says, “The colonizers sure taught us well, because the same system they used to annihilate our people to classify who was Indian or not, we are now using against each other.” I’ve always found this view interesting, especially when I see people who are legally registered as a “full-blood” even though their parents are from two different reserves or multiple nations. Even way back in the day, we used to look at each other as separate countries if we were a different nation, but now we hang on for dear life to anything that appears totally Aboriginal.

The diversity amongst ourselves as Aboriginal people is also something that needs to be thoroughly understood. There are over 700 Native nations across what we now call North America and it’s unrealistic to think that we’re all the same, or have some magical system where we automatically know everything about each other. Time and time again I’m asked about Indigenous land claim issues or the latest environmental movement, which I may not always have the answer to. My work is in sexual and reproductive health, am I supposed to expect the same proficiency of knowledge from everyone else about these domains?

But where do you go to even learn about your culture? The mass assumption usually is that as Indigenous peoples, we must have been living with our Elders and were raised in our home communities with the abundance of rich land and resources where we might have learned everything about who we are, and speak our language. That is very untrue for many of us, not just because of environmental degradation, but because colonization is still very real and happening to us each and every day. Many reservations aren’t even traditional territories, they are cut out land marks that we got the sore end of the deal of to try and make a living on. 60 Indigenous languages are disappearing all over the world, every day, and we need to focus on our young people now to get back what we’ve lost.

We’re still reeling from 500 years of colonization, and have only started to come out of it and begin the healing process in the last 50. We need to re-learn our culture and who we are as a people, and no longer be ashamed of the means and processes we do to get there. I am personally trying my hardest to gather as much information as I can about my culture and my traditions, and it’s by no means an easy process. Especially in the work that I’m involved in, I know that so much of it is rooted in Indigenous, matriarchal societies who were living with the very principles of healthy sexuality, but many of those I try to learn from don’t know about this since their teachings were erased in residential schools. I remind myself that “traditional” means before colonization happened, and that there is still a lot of deconstruction that has to take place.

“There are gaps in all multicultural societies,” says Lily Chow, author of the First Nations and Chinese historical accounts Sojourners in the North and Chasing Their Dreams. “These older generations regret that they didn’t know how to appreciate one and other. There are so many similarities if you look a little bit closer. We need more education on where we come from.”

It’s true that nowadays we don’t really sit down and discuss our culture with one and other. We see it represented mostly in festivals or conferences, but we have the ability to do more than that. As Ms. Chow puts it, “You don’t just look at the foods and colours of people if you want to know about their culture, you have to understand wholly where the person comes from. It’s more than just their country.”

But where do I fit in with all of this? I have listened to the great stories of the Chinese and First Nations unions, dating back to the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, or later on during the gold rush years. I empathize with several friends of mine who are the offspring of these unions, feeling that they too have to suppress part of themselves to be accepted into one or the other side, while they listen to their own families bash and stereotype the other.

“I’ve never had a problem being both Chinese and Native,” says Raymond Lazore, president of Students for Multicultural Alliance. “I’ve actually always found them both to have a lot in common and even complement each other. It’s everyone else that seems to have a problem with it.”

I’ve always had to do a little extra explaining myself because I am Indigenous—but that ancestry doesn’t only come from one place. And to the surprise of many of those questioners who approach me, Aboriginal people don’t only live in North America. There are Indigenous people all over the world, and those that live in what we now know as Taiwan, China, the United States, and Canada are all part of my ancestry.

Not being 100% of something or a “pure blood” as the cliché goes, makes you wonder where your place is and who you really belong to. Those “pure bloods” with a less complicated ethnic history and an easier shot at finding a racial identity are still revered in many cultures for their oneness and ability to breed more “pure” offspring with a fellow “pure” mate.

I’m also Indigenous from the land that China colonized. It’s still difficult for me to find any semblance of Indigeneity within the mainstream Chinese culture that exists in Canada, and a lot of it has to do with the reality that just like in this country, Native people are pushed out of sight and out of mind in China. Even in my research for this article, I heard comments such as, “I really like the Natives here in Canada. You know, our Chinese men did not treat the First Nations women right when they came over here. We need to make up for that.” My response? “Um, you know there are Indigenous people in China too right? Who also got screwed over by the Chinese? What about them?”

I believe what it boils down to is the importance of our right to self-determination, and of knowing and reclaiming our history. Especially as youth today, we were not alive when initial colonization happened, but we are alive now, and indeed it’s still happening. We may not have been able to choose what our ethnicity was going to be, but we can own it now and stand as allies with other communities of colour. We can work together in our common struggle for the autonomy to live as our authentic selves in the face of oppression and bigotry. We need to celebrate our rich heritages in peaceful solidarity so we all survive, while together honouring the ancestors who lived so courageously to give us those few bits of raw culture we cling to today.

At the end of the day, Cree rapper Eekwol’s song, “Respect your history” pushes me to move forward, brining everything I am to the table, as she reminds me that “History is fact. Truth. Take it back. From the ground building up on every single track”.