After our second class session, I had the concept of intersectionality on the brain. I suppose it was partially due to the reading and the small activity from that week, but it was also because of the Multicultural Resources for Youth class I'm taking this quarter. I feel that this concept has been a constant occurrence in a majority of the classes I have taken throughout my college career (mostly because my English lit classes all had a theoretical focus), which really just means I have had a lot of time to reflect on its importance.
There are a lot of pieces that come together to create the blob that is my identity, and each one has its own purpose. Sometimes this thing happens when you're away from your culture long enough: you start to see that you're forming different identities because you're spending so much time in a different world. At least that's kind of been the case with me since I've been away from the Rez a majority of the time for the past seven years. In one of his books (I believe it was "Reservation Blues"), Sherman Alexie said that being a Native person living in modern Western society is like trying to drift down a river with a foot in two different canoes. Granted that is rather cheesy, I feel that it's also a true statement. When a person has so many identities but they don't know how to fit them together, they may feel obligated or forced to sacrifice one identity for another. But this is where being able to understand the concept of intersectionality and being comfortable navigating identity is really handy. It's about finding a balance and knowing how to make all of the different parts work as one cohesive piece. Now that was about as cheesy a thing to say as Sherman Alexie's two canoes line, but no matter.
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