Injuns Are People Too

Growing up as a native child in a white family was weird.

As a young boy, I remember not thinking much of it. However, I do remember at family gatherings hearing "Aww, look he's trying to act white like the rest of us" all too often. They would then promptly send me back to the backyard where I lived. My parents thought it best that I live and grow in proper native surroundings. They built me my own teepee and gated it up, calling it the "reserve out back". To make it seem more like a real reserve, they littered it with empty liquor bottles and beer cans. Every now and then my father would dress up as a buffalo and rip into my teepee in the middle of the night, screaming bloody murder. He informed me that this was how natives lived and how the buffalo behaved. Till this very day, I've still found no evidence of this agressive buffalo behaviour. This was my home and I knew no better.
I would get my allowance every Wednesday, which instead of calling it my "allowance" my parents called it Welfare Wednesdays.
They would dress me up in animal hide clothing and feathered head-dresses, then send me off to school, where the other kids would force me to make the obligatory wild whooping sounds and call me Chief How-How. I didn't know this was wrong...this was the way I was raised to believe the natives were and happily "played" along.