Persona non grata

Abstract

american indian quarterly/fall 2002/vol. 26, no. 4 641 As a journalist and syndicated columnist, I took a vacation from writing as a columnist while I spent three to four months trying to find a voice for my new work, a novel-length book. Since this would be my first work of fiction, I was having trouble finding a voice to tell the story. I decided on my own voice, a female voice, telling the story of her father’s life as a “Show” Indian. As simple as it sounds, for a writer voice is elusive and essential. For me, it was a painful search, which required me to look inward to my own struggles with my father, even though the actual story had nothing to do with my own life. When I finally found the voice, the storyteller, I felt great relief. In the meantime, while I struggled to write the first paragraph of the new book, I had neglected to write a column for the newspaper that had up until now published almost every single column I had written. Until now, I was listed as a “Columnist,” and my previous columns could be found in the archives of the newspaper. I wrote my first column this year and submitted it to the newspaper. I did not hear back for a while and looked at the paper online, discovering that I had been virtually erased from the publication. When I entered my name as a keyword I came up with one item. I read it and knew exactly why I had disappeared from the archives of Indian Country Today, a newspaper I had been writing for since 1996. On January 2, 2003, at approximately 9 :56 p.m., est, I was silenced and I did not know it. On that day, at that time, the editor of the newspaper not only castigated me for speaking out against Connecticut’s definition of “Indian,” he virtually eliminated me from existence, persona non grata. It made me wonder, is this a democracy or is this Iraq during Saddam Hussein’s reign of power? Where people disappeared for displeasing the ruling class? Saddam Hussein came into power in 1979, precisely around the time that many of Connecticut’s “tribes” came into legal being. At that time one of the state’s tribes, the Pequot, did not have to petition for federal recognition because they gained it through a loophole in a legal document. The Pequot did Persona non grata