Love from a distance
Long-distance relationship creates complications
A letter to Brown University, Oct.
20,1999.
Dear sirs and madams,
I have put off writing this letter for
quite some time, but after two months,
I figured now was as good as any other
time.
I am not writing this letter asking
for acceptance to your university or
graduate school or any other idea of
die sort. Consequently, this could have
been written to any other school, but I
do ask you to read on. There is some
thing I need to tell you.
I guess I should tell you something
about myself. These are the basics. My
name is Trevor Johnson, I go to a uni
versity in the Midwest, and I am in my
fourth year.
When I began life here in the
Midwest, I never figured our paths
would cross, but in the middle of last
year, I learned they would. Now that
they have, you have got something that
means a lot to me, something I want.
Let me explain.
With all the knowledge of all the
universities in all the world, there are
some things we cannot figure out, and
we will never be able to do so. Great
Ivy League school that you are, I chal
lenge you to find out the answer to the
never-ending question of relation
ships. I am sure even you will fail.
I have, as many others have, fig
ured out some things about these rela
tionships. One such thing is that
attaching the two words “long dis
tance” to the word “relationship” is
grounds for misery and pain and is
many times barely worth the effort
involved.
Against all logic some people still
try, sometimes wondering: “Why?”
They say that, especially in col
lege, the idea is even impossible, espe
cially if one of you is a freshman.
There are too many new people
around, too many parties, too many
new opportunities. I can’t say I don’t
agree with them.
Brown, her name is Anna, and she
means a lot to me. More than I ever
wished she did. More than I can ever
tell her she does.
I’ve never written about her before,
and I rarely talk about her. As far as
most people know, she and I are a dead
item. For my own sake I think it’s safer
that way. But don’t get me wrong, I do
think about her ... I think about her all
the time.
The nature of our relationship
makes it difficult.
Technology has made it more
workable. Feelings are sustained, drop
ping the events of our lives through
daily e-mails. There are 10-second
phone calls to say goodnight and
marathon phone dates that result in
$60 to $100 long-distance bills at the
end of the month. Sometimes we can
last a week without calling, sometimes
we can’t even last a day.
There are letters (content always
out of date), there are plane tickets and
air terminals, long hours spent on
longer highways and 500-mile stretch
es of interstate.
It’s not real easy carrying the rela
tionship on like this. You don’t always
know when the next flight will be. You
can’t do the little things, like going for
coffee at 2 in the morning or having
fast lunches at campus fountains.
To be honest with you, sometimes I
don’t know if our relationship will sur
vive. Too many things say that it won’t,
but that’s not my point here.
Brown, Anna is a great girl. She is
far and away the most wonderful
woman I have ever met in my life.
You’ve already seen that she’s
beautiful. Considering you let her in
your doors, you know she’s smart. But
she has much more than that to offer.
She’s got oddities, passions and
desires that separate her from some of
«
There are letters (content always out of
date), there are plane tickets and air
terminals, long hours spent on longer
highways and 500-mile stretches
of interstate.
the cookie-cutter freshmen girls who
take clueless steps into expensive uni
versities that will consume and eventu
ally form their identities for them.
I know that as she walks along the
grasses of your campus greens and as
she laughs with dorm-mates at 2 a.m.,
you will take notice of her.
I also know that many of you look
at her as I have looked at her. I know
you will want her. I can’t blame you.
She’s worthy of every stare and crush
you will bestow on her. I have wanted
Anna since the first day I met her.
As things unfold, Anna will impart
herself in your surroundings. She has
told me for a long time that she has
wanted to be a part of your university.
She says it has driven her for the last
four years of her life. I hope she truly
finds what she was looking for all this
time.
While she does find her way, in the
marathon phone dates I will hear of the
unwinding tale of the journey she takes
at your campus. There will be things I
will laugh at, and there will be things I
don’t want to know. As the fates of
lovers go, there will be things that I
will only wonder about.
I will tell her my stories from the
Midwest, leaving some things out that
don’t need to be said.
As is the case with many people in
these relationships, there will be times
when I get off the phone with Anna
that I will want to drop everything and
join her on your campus. I know that
this will be impossible.
Brown, though at times we don’t
want to be so, Anna and I are far away
from one another. I know that before
Anna is mine, she is truly yours. She
needs to be with you before she needs
to be with me. You’re lucky to have her,
and if you wouldn’t mind doing some
Midwestern guy a favor, take care of
her.
Trevor Johnson is a junior English and secondary education major and a Daily Nebraskan columnist.
Fight against history
Columbus Day a celebration of racism and savagery in White ’America
Once again, last week saw the
national celebration — albeit on a rea
sonably quiet scale - of Columbus
Day.
Now, as a Cherokee Indian, I’m
not particularly fond of any day that
celebrates the invasion of this conti
nent by the “civilized” disease,
bloodshed and savagery carried
across the Atlantic by Christian
Europeans.
And it puzzles me that
Christopher Columbus is still hon
ored in such a way, considering that
all the popular (white) myths about
him have been shattered: He didn’t
“discover” America, he wasn’t trying
to prove that the world was round, he
wasn’t just searching for “spices,”
and he and his successors responded
to the welcoming hospitality of the
native population with treachery, kid
napping, rape, torture, slavery and
genocide.
Christopher Columbus is a con
tested symbol, a figure around whom
emotions are strong and^visceral. For
whites, he heralds the beginning of
Manifest Destiny, of the cultivation
of the American wilderness, of the
freedom from (royal) serfdom to the
“American dream” of owning proper
ty and becoming “financially inde
pendent.”
For African Americans,
Columbus heralds the bloody start of
institutionalized slavery by
Europeans and their descendants in
this hemisphere, beginning with the
natives and spreading its crimson
claws to African shores.
For American Indians, this lone,
homely little man ushered in what
American Indian Movement activist
Russell Means recently called “the
Columbian Legacy”: “exterminate
and/or relocate.” And it’s a policy still
in full force today.
This is why we continue to see the
murders of Indians go unsolved and
unpunished - just talk to the families
■of Ronald Hard Heart and Wilson
Black Elk on Pine Ridge or the thou
sands of Indian families who have
lost sons and daughters, mothers,
fathers, aunts, uncles, cousins and
friends to anti-Indian racism.
We don’t have to go beyond the
borders of Nebraska to see it. This is
why the State of Nebraska can claim
free enterprise when the liquor town
of Whiteclay profits from the illness
of Indian alcoholism but can harass
Indian casinos with impunity for try
ing to provide an economic base for
ture, images and ideas that all too eas
ily take on murderous manifestations
(as we have seen with the murders of
Matthew Shepard, Brandon Teena
and James Byrd, Jr.).
The Columbian Legacy is
now intimately
inter
uicxr cuuunuiuues.
Just one example of the
constant double stan
dard imposed
by white
America on
natives:
We’re con
demned for the problems _
forced on us by colonialization and
attacked if we work to reverse the
damage.
Indian-Giver. But the Columbian
Legacy also extends into little things,
the everyday insults that repeat the
message that we’re not really citizens.
Squaw.
All you have to do is go to a “New
Age” store and check out their build
your-own-sweatlodge kits, the find
your-spirit-animal books and the con
tact-a-real-Indian-spirit-and-get
your-Indian-name workshops.
(Always some name like “Thunder
Wolf Bear Heart” or something noble
and stoic like that.) Scalper.
Or check out the spectacle of a
Washington Redskins game. Wagon
burner. We all know that there would
be a huge outcry if we renamed the
team the “D.C. Crackers” and had a
Klansman running around as the
mascot and representative of white
America. Red Man.
And yet Indians are supposed to
be “honored” by these racist appro
priations and misrepresentations?
Tonto.
Disney’s “Pocahontas.”
Longfellow’s “Hiawatha.” “Cherokee
people, Cherokee tribe....”
And native folks aren’t the only
ones who deal with this. People of
other ethnic groups, diverse religious
communities, sexual orientations and
expressions, economic classes and
nationalities are consistently subject
ed to offensive representations of
themselves by popular American cul
twined with
the “Anglo conformity standard:”
White, straight, Protestant, upper
middle-class Anglo-American stan
dards are the “right” and “only” ways
to live and be; anything else is
deemed deficient, deviant and
destructive.
It’s the “real American,” the
George Armstrong Custer-Ronald
Reagan-June Cleaver mold that few
of us fit but to which many aspire. It’s
the image brought to mind when
folks talk about “the good ol’ days,”
the golden age when people were
moral, religious, patriotic - you
know, when challenges to the Anglo
conformity standard were invisible,
when the rest of us were silenced and
erased by jailing, lynching, assault,
torture and persecution from the visu
al and symbolic landscape of
America.
Forgive me if I don’t ^ee the bene
fits of those upright ana ethical “good
ol’ days” of white supremacy.
Now what? Should we all feel
guilty? No, because guilt is easily
transformed into resentment, thus
ending any hope of communication
or healing.
Is it about hatred, about “pay
backs”? No. Vengeance breeds the
unending desire for more blood, and
it always brings more heartache than
resolution.
Besides, most of us are part of
“the System” and are, to some
degree, complied in its privileges and
its abuses.
I’m a light-skinned Cherokee
man; white and male privileges have
benefited me enormously at the
direct or indirect expense of those
who don’t have those privileges.
I didn’t grow up on
Cherokee land. My home
town is in the traditional
territory of the Ute Nation,
so I’ve benefited from the
displacement of other
Why do we recognize Columbus
Day? Maybe we can all observe what
Columbus Day really stands for, what
is says about the dark side of the
American consciousness and how
looking at the holiday honestly can
help us rediscover the people and
issues that are good in America: the
richness, the beauty and the neces
sary diversity of the American experi
ence.
Let’s fight for the rights of those
in our community, acknowledge
the realities of our histories
together - the darkness as well as
the light - and take responsibil
ity for them while working
^k together to reverse the
H Columbian Legacy for
K ever.
k Shawn Drapal/DN
native people.
But we can’t do any
thing to change our- ^
selves or our world
without fully
acknowledge
ing and fac- i V
ing the lega- V \
cies we ve
inherited or the legacies we perpetu
ate. It isn’t about guilt, hatred or
revenge. It’s about fairness, equality
and justice.
The battle is fought by the ballot,
the pen, the pocketbook and the sin
gle voice raised in awareness, and we
each have die power to transform this
world, even if it happens a step at a
time.
Daniel Justice is enrolled in the Cherokee Nation, is a doctorate student in the department of English and a Daily Nebraskan guest columnist