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In new memoir, CU Boulder alumnus Tony Tekaroniake Evans eschews narrow notions of identity, especially Indigenous identity

Of all his childhood memories, one in particular sticks in the mind of�� (DistSt'86, focusing on cultural anthropology, biology and geography): In his third-grade class in Georgia, while making decorations for Thanksgiving, his classmates began asking about American Indians.

“Where are they? Can we meet them?” they asked.

“I’m an Indian!” said the young Evans, who had recently begun to learn more about his Mohawk heritage. His teacher replied that, no, the Indians were gone. “The teacher said Indians were extinct,” Evans recalls. “That was a little traumatic, and I realized I was going to have to take what I was learning in school with a grain of salt. After all, my grandmother spoke Mohawk in our house.”

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In his new memoir, CU Boulder alumnus explores history, identity and society through a personal lens, encouraging readers to eschew received and narrow notions of identity, especially Indigenous identity.����

Evans recounts the episode in his new memoir,��, published by Basalt Books. In the book, Evans explores history, identity and society through a personal lens. Along the way, he encourages readers to eschew received and narrow notions of identity, especially Indigenous identity.��

The author of three books, Evans is also a journalist, historian, columnist and public speaker. He began his career writing for the Santa Fe New Mexican and the Taos News newspapers and since then has written for A&E Networks, History.com, High Country News and Smithsonian’s American Indian magazine. In addition, he has thousands of reporting bylines over the past three decades for the Idaho Mountain Express, his hometown newspaper in Ketchum, Idaho.

“People are so much more interesting than we can realize by glancing at their appearance, or making stereotypical assumptions about someone’s background, knowledge and interests,” he says. “It’s important to hear the details, because details bring us together as human beings, and that’s what I hope I’m doing with my book.”

Telling family stories

The jarring incident in the classroom spurred Evans to ask more questions about his family and background.

“My mother started telling me stories, and that my name, Tekaroniake, meant ‘two skies’ in Mohawk,” he says. “My Aunt Nadine had a medicine pouch made for me, and my mentor, who was also my mother’s childhood friend, Ed Two-Axe Earley, sent me some books from the reservation. That’s where my life journey began—but it didn’t end there.”

One of the questions about identity that Evans weaves through the book is who decides, and on what grounds? “If you tell people you’re Indian, they’re often going to have all these boxes to check—language, fluency, culture. Are you from the reservation? Do you know your history? It just goes on and on,” he says.

“When do you stop being Indian in somebody else’s eyes? When you get a vacuum cleaner? When you do yoga? There’s no standard way to be Indian or Indigenous. My Jewish grandfather was taken in by the Mohawks. He married my grandmother and worked with them building the Manhattan skyline. Did he stop being Jewish?”

In his book, Evans tells ironically of receiving his official registration “as an Indian and a member of the Mohawks of Kanawà:ke Band” from the registrar of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development of Canada. “Becoming Indian is no simple process,” he writes. “Today, as a newly minted official Indian, I could go down to a nearby reservation and legally take peyote, stay up all night and visit with ancestors in the spirit world. Or I could just stay home and watch PBS Masterpiece programming and have a glass of wine.”

Time spent at CU was rewarding

His interest and investigation of his own identity led Evans to study cultural anthropology at the ��������.

“I learned a lot of wonderful things at CU and absolutely loved my time there,” he says. “I found that I could learn from many cultures, not just my own. And I learned to interpret Iroquois traditions in my own way. Our Great Law of Peace, perhaps a thousand years old, stems from an experience of compassion and understanding for the pain of others, and how to heal from violence and move on from retribution to a better way of life.”

Evans’ book ranges across cultural topics and religious traditions, and provides numerous history lessons along the way, but stays firmly in the personal throughout. “I realized that the book needed to be about my story and emerging sense of Native values, and all of its quirks and weirdness, and heartache and humor,” he explains.

“Memoir is a really important art form. It is personal and subjective, and also specific. It gets deeper than the ethnographic generalities that people recount in much of the scholarly writing on native history and culture.” Evans also makes a case for what Indigenous people and traditions have to offer the world in a turbulent and uncertain moment: “Indigenous cultures can provide spiritual renewal and a sustainable path forward for humanity.”

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