Born white - and with a death wish

Page 8

I'll be honest with you. White people amaze me. They really do. And there are not too many things in this big old world that I can safely say really amaze me. Having grown up on an Indian reserve for the first 18 years of my life, I was introduced, at the tender age of seven, to the wonderful and colorful (no pun intended) world of Caucasians when we got our first television.

And by "amaze" I mean specifically this preoccupation those people have for trying to kill themselves and supposedly have fun while doing it. And I must admit, they've come up with many interesting and unusual, and dare I say entertaining, ways of attempting it. And better yet, they feel some peculiar guilt that forces you to cough up money and pay people big money to help you.

Case in point - bungy cord jumping. You pay somebody you don't even know something like $100 to wrap a rope around your leg and throw you off a bridge screaming as you plummet earth-ward. But yet you call this fun?! And this is the supposedly "superior" civilization!

Of course some of you will argue the point that bungy cord jumping originated somewhere in the South Pacific as a puberty rite or something. That only goes to prove my point, little boys trying to prove to other people that they are big strong brave men. At least the Polynesians have an excuse, they are little boys when they do it.

And can we talk about the concept of skydiving, something that quite frankly beats the hell out of me. Again you pay somebody an excessive amount of money to throw you out of a plane at some god-awful height with an oversized table cloth attached to your back.

And to make it worse, what do they yell when they're plunging to their deaths??? Geronimo!

Now however in this bizarre world did the name an Apache chief get affiliated with skydiving? I don't think it was very high on his list of things to do. This may be a little presumptuous of me but I can safely say, given the opportunity to jump out of a plane, Geronimo quite probably would have said "Do I look White?" And even more probably, he might have said "No" in somewhat stronger terms. I personally think white people who fling themselves out of planes should yell "Custer!" Why not, he was suicidal, too.

No wonder there are so many white people out there exploring Native beliefs and traditions. They're all afraid if they look too deeply into their own culture, they'll find themselves someday careening down some raging river, or climbing some ice-coated mountain, or racing a car around a track at 200 miles an hour, or my personal favorite, being chased by a herd of bulls down narrow streets in some European city. No wonder these people are so unhappy.

I think these people must have heard that old Indian saying "Today looks like a beautiful day to die" one too many times. Snap out of it people, it's just a saying.

And these people with a death wish spend a fortune, we're talking megabucks, trying to do themselves in. What a waste of money. I have uncles that will try to kill you just for lunch money.

But, for me the really scary thing, and I'm shuddering as I write this, is that I am also half white. And that makes me very very uneasy. I'm terrified of waking up someday with a smile and saying to myself. "I'm bored. Where's the nearest ski jump?" I'm not that white yet, but all this does make me blanche at the thought.

Now none of this is to say that we Native people don't do our share of stupid suicidal things. Why, it wasn't that long ago a few strange people showed up on our shores looking lost. And what did we do? "Come on, stay awhile. Pull up a log, there's lots of room. Can I get you anything else? Some gold or fur perhaps? Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

So here I am - a confused individual trying to figure out three quarters of North America. But I've come up with a plan to help me figure out you white people. It involves doing field research. I got the idea from a book I studied in high schol. All I have to do is get a decent hair cut, a good suit, stay out of the sun, join the Reform Party and a few restricted clubs, and I'll have all the information and knowledge I'll need to write my book about what makes white people tick. It will be called "White Like Me."