Food, Colonization, and Identity

 AnswerInProgress, a team of three people who produce video essays on their research journeys to find answers to questions that bother them, recently released a video titled "why nobody knows what curry is." Like all their videos, there's a disconnect of gravity between the lowkey, almost solely lowercase titles, the roads they travel, and the destinations they arrive at. Partially through the conceit of finding enough to talk about to make a video, they almost never arrive at a solution or answer that they expected and sometimes they even find answers that invalidate their question, answering a different one instead. 

"why nobody knows what curry is" is different still, however, as it is produced like a short film rather than their typical format. The narrator and researcher of this video, Melissa Fernandes, makes a journey to understand her heritage a little better after finding some alarming claims about the word 'curry.' "As a Brown girl born and raised in Canada, I've always been a little self-conscious about my own Brownness." Fernandes says. And, as she reads online that people are claiming the use of the word 'curry' is racist as it's a colonizer term from British people who didn't care enough to learn the names of real dishes, she says, "I was really confused." This is about the time I started to get a pang in my heart. 

There is a lot I can and have said about colonization. As a Native American person, I don't think I'll ever be finished saying those things, so if you want to hear all of that just stick around, read my work. However, central to my experience is the confusing mix of pain and guilt that come from finding something you thought was foundational to your culture having come from colonization rather than being intrinsic.

For me, I learned about the stereotypical, savage 'Indians' (as in Cowboys &...) before I conceptualized that I was one. One of my earliest memories is a car ride when I was four or so. I don't remember how the topic came up, but I remember the silence that came first, so I probably said something about Indians on a cartoon I watched. And then my parents, uncomfortably telling me that I was an Indian. And then me bawling my eyes out in raw panic. Clearly, from my reaction, I hadn't had any good Native American cultural representation up until that point. I remember believing that I would have to surrender my home, TV, etc to go live on the plains, living as the stereotypes do. 

I have never had a strong connection to my culture. My parents and grandparents were all christian, and so any piece of the culture that would've been deemed spiritual or religious was either untrue and not worth considering or worse, silly, and though they didn't say it, savage. In fact, the only connection that I really had was the language being around me (though never taught to me) and the food even though I spent years living on the Reservation. 

However, once I did start to question the world I grew up in and the prejudices I held and began the work of decolonizing my heart in my late teens, I remember being fixated on the word 'Indian.' I mean, fundamentally it's wrong, isn't it? By no metric am I from India in any way. And around this time, there was another concerted movement to say "Native American" instead, which I do get and agree with on a surface level. I don't think white people should be calling me, "Indian." For awhile I would cringe when my family would say, "Indian" or when other Natives would say it.

It was only after being in more Native spaces that I realized it started to feel inclusive. These were the same people talking about racism, talking about preserving culture, and they were using it too. And as I relaxed, I came to a similar conclusion that Melissa did about her food. 

"The word curry may have started as a misunderstanding, but the more that I think about it from listening to my grandma [...] and the recipes that I cook to this day, the more I see the dishes I call curry as a symbol of connection, a way for generations to honor their roots, but with permission to evolve."

It's heartrendingly difficult to find a place to land with your culture after centuries of distributed disconnection, intentional and negligent both. It sometimes, perhaps often, feels like a losing battle to connect again. The work is never done, the fight feels never won, and so how can you have a home when you don't know if you'll ever arrive at answers, at peace and reclamation? But you have to live. Not just survive, you have to live. You have to find a way, in the shifting chaos and the raging storms, to build your home and to steal time if you must in order to craft a life. You can make a home anywhere. You can create culture anywhere. You can synthesize all the parts of yourself you found and continue to find into something new and maybe it won't be the same, but the truth is it never would be. Even if you had all the answers, even if we were in peace, you would still be something new. That's how it should be. The road always moves forward. Enjoy it whenever you can.