Introduction
Prejudice. What is it? What does it feel like? When I was in high school I read a book titled The Ordeal of Running Standing. It was about a young Kiowa boy who faced set backs in the white man's world because of his race and returned home unsuccessful. When I finished reading the book my teacher asked me if I thought prejudice still existed. Because I had been born and raised on my Diné Nation, and never have experienced prejudice, I answered "No." The teacher's response was something like,"Oh it still exists." The teacher at that moment made me realize, understand, how naïve I was about the world beyond my border. Later, I did experience prejudice in the border towns that surround our Diné Nation. I, like Running Standing, came home feeling unsuccessful and shattered. These people are apart of the group who have oppressed Native Americans are "educated", but behave in a "barbaric and uneducated" manner in treating people. For myself, I have since learned that knowing who I am, having a strong self-identity as Diné, has impelled me to able to be resilient to such racist experiences and obstacles, and be successful as a Diné.
I would like for my students to identify who they are, who they would like to become. When they find out who they are, what will they do with it? How will they continue the intangible heritage of Diné?
Today, very few of Diné children know who they really are as Diné. Their self-identity was kept from them due to various reasons: 1) The parents or grandparents may have made a decision not to teach their children Diné language, Diné culture, Diné teachings; 2) The parents and grandparents themselves do not speak Diné language nor practice or participate the Diné way of life, or know Diné traditional teachings; 3) The child herself or himself may have made the decision not to learn her or his language and heritage. The deep time experience of oppression inflected on Diné through genocide, reservations, and boarding schools resonates through the uncertainty of self-identity. There is an enormous outside influence from the media, namely television. Diné youth want to be like the popular music people on television such as MTV. Therefore, most Diné youth find this as a better, "cooler", option to what she, he naively decides is unimportant.
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