I'm at the dentist getting the 3 years of tartar build up scraped from my lower teeth! I am wincing in agony, not because it hurts, actually it does a little, but the wincing is from the lifetime of bad dental experiences since I was a toddler with tooth decay. It all started somewhere back in time, I came to a dental office and had all of my front upper teeth capped with silver crowns! It saved my teeth and let me eat apples until my permanent teeth kicked in, but the experience of the dental chair, the sterile smell, the aftertaste of blood and conversations taking place above and without me as I listen and endure like a molar, forever seared into my mind a dread of the dental office.

I was just like my poor little molar whose only destiny is to be pulled out years down the road because I don't question authority. I blindly accepted the words of the IHS dentist, pull the tooth out and the toothache will cease. Little did I know that I could just go to a real dentist, pay a few hundred dollars and get a root canal that would have saved my precious tooth. It's too late for that, the teeth are all gone, my lower right jaw free of molars, on my left, there is a nice gaping hole that always catches those stray tortilla chips as they pierce my fleshy gums like daggers in the spot where a mighty tooth should have been. Now I am older, and I have lived and learned that I can talk back to the dentist and the staff. I can ask questions, opinions and even state my preferences for treatment. These days I try to hang on to what I have left.

Then the dental tech pauses for a second pondering what she will tell me next, and without finishing whatever she was trying to tell me about the cruelty of Apaches, she starts speaking of her vast experience living among Navajo people. “I lived in Chinle for a few years working at the Indian Health Service, and what I saw there in that community really disappointed me. The trash, the dilapidated houses and the abject poverty and alcoholism really seemed contrary to how Native People are supposed to be. When I was a little girl I remember that commercial where the Indian cried because of all the litter you know, that was all I could think about when I was there in Chinle. I must say I was really let down by the Indian people. Why don’t they want to keep the land clean like they used to? Why don’t they just get jobs and work?”

I have been squeezing the chair handles so tight that my fingers ache when the scraping is finished, the sharp scraper is out of my mouth, my chair is being tilted back to the upright position, and now it’s time for me to speak. I turn to the dental technician who so boldly shared with me her disappointment in Navajos and how barbaric my ancestors were, and I tell her with a straight face nearly as emotionless as hers that what she just said was completely misinformed fantasy concocted by a society and culture that has brutalized our people since it’s introduction here in the Americas. Many of our communities are the legacy of an oppressive system that has nearly destroyed our ability to be self determined through it’s systematic campaign of forced dependence nearly 4 to 5 generations deep. This sick paternalistic relationship that American Indians have with Uncle Sam is by design not by accident, and the majority of our fellow Americans are also just as misinformed about Indians and our communities as she and her husband are.

“Your husband read one book about Fort Huachuca, and you have to understand first and foremost that the majority of these books are created without ever consulting Native people. This time period was terrible all out war, and when it comes to America, and the American recollection of this war, this collective memory represents just the tail end of a conflict that had been endured by Natives for over 300 years before America even came into the picture. The whole time, colonial countries were wheeling and dealing, laying claim to lands, buying and selling to one another without ever considering that the Native people of the land might be inclined to disagree. This is complete racist behavior, and this racism enabled some of the most brutal, deranged and barbaric treatment of my ancestors. So yes, when Americans came into the picture, they encountered people who had tailored their whole lifestyles to a climate of war and resistance, yet through all this they maintained their humanity, humility and concept of posterity. So to say that Indians, Apaches in particular are cruel, is just as ignorant as saying that Santa Claus is real.”

She looks at me, almost amazed, a white woman in the presence of a wooden Indian come to life like Pinocchio. I am real, I can talk, I am brown, I’m a paying customer and she is speechless. She puts her tools away and leaves to set up for another dental patient.

For some reason most white bread Americans eventually outgrow Santa Claus and accept that he is myth, but they can’t seem to learn when it comes to the truth about taking over a whole continent in the name of freedumb and democracy.

Learn humility teach it to your children and tell them the truth to prepare them for this kind of ignorance.