Native Influence

My father was born William Harold Stanfield

October 22, 1924. His obituary says he was born in Vigo County, Indiana, probably because he grew up on a farm and may have been born at home. He died October 5, 2013.

His obituary lists his parents as Bertha and Jesse Stanfield of Vigo County, Indiana, his sister, Mildred Applegate of Indianapolis, two brothers, Robert Stanfield of Charleston, Illinois and Paul Stanfield of Paris, Illinois and a sister, Marie Kinney of Terre Haute, Indiana. They all died before him. He died just shy of his 89th birthday.

Sometime after my father died, I tripped across this photo of an actor named Gary Farmer. Although most photos of Gary Farmer don't look like my father, that one looks eerily like it could be a photo of my father. 

Farmer's nose is different. My father's nose was more prominent, so profile views or three quarter views don't make me go "I've just seen a ghost."

My father lost a lot of his hair in his twenties to malaria, so he was bald at a young age and looked about the same for decades. Photos of a younger Farmer with long, black hair make him look surprisingly Native or First Nations in origin and I was SHOCKED because I always thought of my father as looking like Archie Bunker.

Farmer's Wikipedia page lists him as Haudenosaunee/Iroquois and my father always said he was part Cherokee. Digging around, I found that Iroquois and Cherokee are related peoples.

This led me to start a blog titled Native Influence with the subtitle Exploring the largely unrecognized Native influences on my own life and society generally. 

Writing that blog was a valuable experience for ME because I reexamined a lot of details of MY life and drew new conclusions about some of the significant events of my childhood. But it became extremely overly personal and I repeatedly redacted everything and started over and never did find my voice and eventually took it offline.

This post is being written because I tripped across a discussion on Reddit that I can no longer find where people were saying "If you call yourself Cherokee, you're probably a pretendian. The correct word is Tsalagi." 

That's news to me and I'm probably not the only one. I've only ever seen it listed as Cherokee and their own website for the tribe is Cherokee.org.

I'm not a pretendian. I have never tried to claim any rights based on according to oral family tradition, I'm a small part Cherokee. 

That statement -- that my best understanding is that I'm part Cherokee -- is an explanation of my interest in reading up on Native topics, including following several Native Reddits. And I mostly get open hatred for reasons I don't really understand.

I took zero interest in my supposed Native heritage until after I saw that photo of Gary Farmer. But with seeing that, I felt like important details about my life suddenly made sense and I followed the clues as best I could to sort my baggage because both my father and brother molested me and the uglier and more accurate term for that is incest.

So I'm a recovered survivor of incest twice over and the planet seems to think that's not possible. People don't recover from that.

One of the things it caused me to rethink was my relationships to several men who were Native or part Native who helped me recover. Those were PERSONAL relationships and I took that blog offline because of the excessively personal nature of the information but I have a point I wish to make and wish to stand by on the public record and it's not possible to do that without including at least some of that here.

I was molested from age eleven, probably starting in the fall after my sister left for college, until age thirteen and a half or so. My brother stopped when he turned eighteen.

The summer I turned twelve, he raped me. It hurt like hell and that really messed up my mind for the next twenty years until the summer I turned thirty-two.

That summer, for the first time ever, I traveled home to see family just because I WANTED to do so and not on the way to Germany or the way back from Germany or to care for my sister's infant. For the first time, I did not FEEL like chattel property.

I had a good month visiting family and on the flight back, I had an epiphany about the assault and concluded my brother didn't mean to hurt me. It was a tragic event rooted in a terrible misunderstanding.

And I made my peace with it on that airplane flight and it felt like the entire world changed. I felt different. Life felt different. I don't have words for it but this kind of experience likely helped foster the human creation of religion. 

Within three days of that event, I met a physician because I was pissed off at my asshole husband. And he and I hit it off and just enjoyed talking. We felt like kindred spirits.

At one point, we talked on the phone and he said something like "We should do lunch." But we never did because we were both married and we realized it would look like a date and that wasn't the intent. 

He was Catholic and faithfully married and we just LIKED each other and it wasn't really sexual attraction per se. We just felt like we could TALK and be HEARD and could BREATHE.

I had three medical appointments with him and right before the last one, my husband got orders. My culture allows for goodbye kisses if you are close and so does his, so we kissed goodbye.

I thought I would NEVER see this man again and I never did. I felt horrible about meeting someone I liked so much and then LEAVING with no hope of ever hearing from him again and that kiss turned into more than a little peck on the cheek.

So AFTER we said a very emotional goodbye, I made a comment about how unfair it seemed that we had just met and I was leaving and would never speak to him again and he said "Oh, you could call my message line and leave me a message and I could call you back."

So I did that and we maintained a secret friendship no one knew about for a few years. And it was a friendship, not an affair.

He encouraged me to go to college in spite of my troglodyte husband and he ultimately saved my life because he minored in parasitology and he told me my belief that I had a parasitic infection made sense given what I had told him that year while I was bedridden for months and at death's door.

He knew my medical history better than any other doctor because we were friends and he gave me permission to call him more regularly and dump on him that year. And it's why I lived.

In the course of our overly emotional goodbye, I learned firsthand he was more hung than anyone I had been with and this freaked me out. There were two reasons for that.

1. Because I was raped at age twelve, I was afraid of being hurt again.

2. He was the first but not the last Native man who seemed to come into my life because I "called" him into it.

In the time before I met him, I had grown healthier physically and emotionally and my marriage was better and sex was better and for the first time I was getting wet in bed, but only AFTER intercourse started. So once things got going, I regularly found myself thinking "I wish he were bigger." though I never SAID that to him and never TOLD that to ANYONE and here was this GUY who seemed like "an answer to a prayer" so to speak.

I'm not religious. I was angry and scared and offended that the universe seemed to be listening to my most private thoughts and acting upon them.

And I also had this blue screen of death, could NOT cope, mentally STUCK issue because I couldn't imagine how in the hell that would work given I wasn't wet enough etc until AFTER sex started, so this just seemed unfeasible and I was wrapped around the axle about it for several years and never told him that.

And then I met Tom. Tom was the second Native man who seemed "called" into my life.

While bedridden and dying in a crappy apartment in California, I spent my time imagining laying on a beach on a Pacific Island and waiting to die under more pleasant circumstances. Tom was Guamanian and lived in Guam, a Pacific Island.

Unbeknownst to me, because I never ASKED him about the size of his junk, Tom was also hung and also unbeknownst to me, he was a part-time sex therapist working with a couples counselor. And he realized I was mentally stuck on this blue screen of death, you cannot get there from here, concept and he set out to change my mind and he did.

So I can state unequivocally, beyond a shadow of a doubt that Native culture helped me recover from being a victim of incest twice over and it remains true even if someday someone proves I don't have a single drop of Native blood.

Tom and my doctor friend fixed me years BEFORE I saw that photo of Gary Farmer and began going down the rabbit hole.

If you are Native and reading this, your takeaway should be that Doreen Traylor, whatever her Blood Quantum or ethnicity, attributes a significant portion of her recovery to Native influence on her life.

I removed the blog Native Influence after repeatedly redacting all posts and starting over because I got the private information about MYSELF that I needed to understand out of it and I don't really wish to invite everyone to look up my skirts. But unfortunately I can't prove my interest in Native culture is completely innocent without the above TMI details.

I don't write often about Native anything. I do write some about it and likely will continue to do so. 

If that bothers you, don't read my writing. Problem solved.

Footnote 

Another man significant to my recovery is likely part indigenous. He told me the first of his four languages was "a local dialect" and he grew up in a small village. I never got confirmation he was indigenous and he's not Native AMERICAN. He's Persian. So I don't really know how that fits in here other than, like Tom and my doctor friend, he respected women to a degree White culture seems to not do and that was good for me.