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

by Special Correspondent Jessica Yee, originally published in Ricepaper Magazine

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?

Can I really understand what it’s like to be Native not living on the reservation now?

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?

Aren’t those the colonizers?

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?

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