"How do we move beyond the labels people give us?" featuring Deborah Taffa

 This episode features Deborah Taff, one of Campfire’s Fellows. Deborah Taffa provides her answer to the Season 26 question, "How do we move beyond the labels people give us?". A Fellow’s Campfire can best be described as TED without the data, The Moth but interactive, and a sermon but without the religion. You can learn more about Deborah Taffa on the Campfire website, https://cmpfr.com/events/deborah-taffa/.

 The Campfire Fellows go through rigorous training and coaching provided by Campfire Faculty so they can share their wisdom through story for you. Our Fellows are the people next to you at stoplights or walking by on the street. These Fellows apply or are nominated by people like you, who know interesting and introspective people with some wisdom to share. The Fellows go through a unique process with our team to discover a wealth of wisdom inside themselves and then are trained on how to share the origin stories of their wisdom. 

This episode was originally performed in July 2019, produced by Jeff Allen, and recorded live at The Stage at KDHX.

Transcript

Steven Harowitz:   0:12
Hello, Internet. I'm Steven Harowitz, Executive Director of Campfire, and you are listening to Campfire at Home. It's our way of bringing the live experience to you, whether that be listening and reflecting by yourself or experiencing it with friends. Each Campfire invites listeners into life and how we live it. Before we get too deep into Campfire at Home, I want to share a few opportunities for you to get involved beyond our live show. We offer classes and workshops on public speaking, story construction and group facilitation to answer the big questions in your life or at work. If you or your organization are interested, you can visit cmpfr.com. That's c m p f r dot com. Each Campfire Season poses a life question that is explored by our Campfire Fellows together with our audience. Let's go to The Stage at KDHX to listen to Deborah's answer to the Season question, how do we move beyond the labels people give us?

Deborah Taffa:   1:07
Thank you so much everyone for coming, and thank you to the Campfire team and Delores, who also answered the question, how do we move beyond the labels that other people give us? Um, and finally thank you to the Osage people on whose ancestral land we're holding this event. I always always start by thinking about whose land I'm on, no matter where I travel, because I am Native American myself. I was born on the Yuma Indian Reservation in Southeastern California, and I'm wondering how many of you who have ever lived on a reservation or visited a home on a reservation. Can I get a show of hands? Wonderful. And the rest of you maybe have read Sherman Alexie and you know about commodity cheese and friy bread. So there are a lot of stereotypes and labels that are floating around about Native, Native American reservations, that they're all bleak and impoverished. But the truth is that they are very diverse. So there are some tribes that they're doing very well, and they have very nice houses, while others don't have running water. So that's the good news. Some Native American tribes are actually doing pretty well. The bad news is that my reservation is still fairly impoverished. There's not a lot of employment there, so there's a lot of, there are a lot of social issues, so the first thing I will say about labels is that they often encompass a partial truth. And in that way I see them as being almost worse than a lie because the full truth is that even in dysfunctional communities, there can be a ton of love. So I grew up in a very big family, and we had loads of fun. I was the third of six kids, five girls and one boy, and my mother was the oldest of 15 kids, and my father was the fifth of 10. So we had a ton of built-in playmates. And my dad and his brothers and his cousins, they made up an entire baseball team called the Dust Devils, and I grew up at the baseball field, and we were always playing freeze tag, and we would swing on the bars underneath the bleachers like it was a jungle gym, and life was a blast, until I started school. When I started school, it was like the burdens of the world descended on my soul. The semblance of freedom and fun had been so believable out in the open desert. So before I started school, I was largely unaware of labels. The only labels that I had heard about in regards to Native Americans I had seen on the television set. So there were the Lone Ranger and Tonto, and the Lone Ranger is dynamic and heroic, and he saves the day and he makes all the decisions and he leads. And Tonto is just his dumb sidekick. He only says how, and he never gets to talk because he's backwards and he's stupid. Or maybe because if he had spoken, he would challenge the American Dream. Whatever the case, that was the label that I knew, and it was the label of the "good Native American." He was quiet, and he helped the white hero, and he didn't argue with any one about the way things were going. The other label that I knew about before I started school was the label of the "violent savage," and you could see him in the mascot for the Washington Redskins, right? He ran around with a tomahawk like a psycho killer, but it didn't bother me a lot when I was growing up because I didn't identify with these labels, right. I did not ride horses. I did not shoot a bow and arrow or live in a tepee. I was just me. I knew that I loved to play games with my sisters and cousins. I knew that my mom was pretty and she wore her hair in a beehive and she had this leopard print jacket. And I knew that my dad was tough. He played the catcher even when he broke his finger. He took the glove off and went and squatted behind home plate. And I knew that we had a ton of birthday parties and weddings that we got to go to. And I knew that my uncles called my dad Uncle Loony, and that my cus, my uncles called my dad Loony and my cousins called him Uncle Loony because he was very funny and he was always the center of fun. And when he laughed, everybody laughed, and when he got angry, he sucked the air out of the desert. But the good thing was when he got angry, I knew why he was angry. He was angry because he was exhausted from working multiple manual labor jobs. He was exhausted from his low wage. He was tired and angry because he was tired of being poor, and he wanted to get us out of that poverty. And so one day he finally did. He showed up at home, and he told us that he had taken a job as a welder on the Navajo Reservation in northern New Mexico, 12 hours away. It's in the Four Corners region, and suddenly my parents were packing up the U-Haul, and we were moving to a town called Farmington, New Mexico. Now, unbeknownst to me, Farmington, New Mexico, at that time, was under a federal commission, Civil Rights Watch. They were investigating the town because of violence against Native Americans. So there were missing and murdered indigenous men and women. And it was all over the national news. The national news was talking about Farmington, and they had labeled it the Selma, Alabama, of the Southwest. But my parents, they did not tell me anything about any of this. Maybe they didn't want us to be afraid or bitter. I assume that they didn't tell us because they didn't want to make us feel like we didn't want to be there in that town. They never told me that some people viewed Native Americans as violent savages. It's funny, though, the way little kids, you know how you kind of pick up on subliminal tension. How many of you remember having your parents, that they weren't telling you something, but you could feel that something was wrong, right? Little kids are smarter than we think. So we got to Farmington and my parents decided to put us in parochial school because New Mexico has very poor, a very poor educational system. So I started school at Sacred Heart, and my teacher in the second grade was named Sister Mary Evelyn. And she was like Darth Vader with a rosary. She she was always talking about Manifest Destiny and America as the shining light on the hill, and we were exemplifying moral values for all the world to see. And Sister was the first person in my life who taught me that Native Americans, becoming the "good Native American" that helped white people and remained silent was the type of Native American I was supposed to be. How did she do this? With compliments. So it was the year of the Bicentennial, and America was awash with patriotic fervor. It was all America the beautiful, America the great, and we were putting on a bicentennial play and she chose me to be the lead. So all my classmates had minor roles. They were just immigrants and they stood around me like in a horseshoe shape on the stage. And there was the nurse and the schoolteacher and the baker and the blacksmith and the farmer. And there was me and America, and I was supposed to play England with a gold crown, and I turned to America, and I congratulated America on successfully colonizing my own people. And I looked out in the audience and I saw my parents faces and they were blushing and they were smiling and they didn't say anything to me. They wanted me to be proud. They didn't want me to feel shame. They wanted me to think that I could be anything I wanted to in this country. They wanted me to be a model minority and to never play the victim. In some ways, it was really nice, actually, that Sister thought I could rise to the task of being the "noble savage" because it meant that she thought I was smart. Seriously, I felt like she thought I could be really smart. So when we would go to the library, for example, she would take me and this girl Annie aside from the rest of the class, and she would lead us to the middle school section while everybody else read baby books. And we got to read the thick chapter books and Annie, who eventually became a nun, she got to read fiction, so she read Pinocchio and Where the Red Fern Grows. I was jealous because I always had to read nonfiction biographies. So I read George Washington chopping down the cherry tree. I read Benjamin Franklin learning how to sail. I read, I remember the biographies of Patrick Henry and Nathan Hale. Sister picked all my books for me. She even made me read about the American hero Andrew Jackson, for who my family had been named, forcibly renamed after the government took our land, and nobody told me for more years than I'm, I'm, I'm embarrassed to admit. For many years I did not realize that a lot of historians called him Old Hickory, The Indian Killer. Just had no idea. So here is the point in my narrative where I get like a little nervous, and it's it's, um it's the more difficult part of my narrative. So if I could, I would like to ask you all if you could help me with some of the heavy lifting. So I'm gonna go ahead and pass around a bowl, and in the bowl I would like it if you would anonymously, um, get the index card out from where you're sitting and write on it whether or not you've ever been hurt by a label. And it's an assignment in two parts. Have you ever been hurt by? Have you ever been given a label by a parent or society? And if so, how did it hurt you? And don't put your name on it. Just put it into the bowl as it comes around and then I will, uh, I'll tell you what we're gonna do next.  

Deborah Taffa:   12:48
Thank you. I'm just gonna read a few of them to give myself courage here. Um, somebody felt labeled because of their gender. They were given the impression that they wouldn't be able to do physical things. Somebody was labeled as the good, good kid, not the chola, and that was a negative thing for them. And this girl who didn't, they didn't come from that school, so it was hard on them. Somebody was labeled a faggot. And how that hurt, it hurt because it showed people thought I was less worthy of respect, and someone was labeled a bitchy woman. One of my favorites, uh, and it's a slang that made her feel like she thought she was superior to men, and it stigmatized her in the workplace because she didn't know if she could be strong and dominate. Thank you so much for showing me that a lot of people understand where I'm coming from. So to continue with my story, one day that you're in the second grade, I was out on the playground and we were playing kickball. And here's where labels really started to get their fingers in me. I was standing along the chain link fence waiting for my turn to kick, and, uh, Sacred Heart School was located in the downtown area of Farmington that had a significant homeless population. And suddenly I see this Native couple that, they're coming up the street and they're kind of holding arms, and they look like they've been drinking. But they're jolly and they're kind of stumbling and they call me Little Sister and they come up to the fence and they're speaking to me in Navajo and I don't understand what they're saying, but I'm trying to figure it out. And then suddenly Sister shoots across the playground ground and grabs me by the elbow and like, jerks me away. And I could feel by her body language that she's frightened of these people, and she takes me and we head towards the school. She's dragging me along and I'm turning to look over my shoulder and I'm thinking, "Well, they look nice. They look like my uncles and aunts." And it hit me. I could see them suddenly the way she saw them, and she saw them as the "violent savage." And it was incredibly unsettling to me because suddenly I thought maybe that was the way she saw me and my family, and I knew things that Sister didn't know about my family. I knew that my father had been in trouble with the law before he met my mom, quite a few years before he met my mom, and that he had been convicted as a minor of manslaughter because he was driving a car and he got into a car crash and one of his best friends died. And I knew that he had homemade tattoos on his arms and that he wore baggy jeans and that he had a lot of muscles and he looked kind of tough. But I also knew that the way my dad looked on the outside did not reflect at all who he was on the inside, like he volunteered to coach Little League softball and he went to church and he worked really hard at his job and between my parents, he was the good listener. He was very kind, and I think he got that way because he developed empathy because of his childhood and because of his childhood difficulties. He knew what it felt like to be at the bottom of society, and that gave him a lot of compassion for other people. And he was more than what had happened to him in his childhood. And guess what I'm trying to say is that I think my father's childhood difficulties had turned him into a better person, and I just hoped, I was crazy with hope that Sister Mary Evelyn would see that. And I remember when we went to church and I would pray and I would just hope that Sister would see that my father was a good guy. But things for me in that town and Farmington, they just got worse because in middle school and high school, I started hearing boys that would say that they were gonna roll drunk Indians downtown, which basically means like they go find someone who's been drinking, steal their wallet, wallet, and maybe, you know, knock around. Or there was an Apache girl I knew that went missing, and I saw a Navajo kid at my school get beat up after school. And the solution for a lot of Native kids in that town was just to leave the public school system, the big, large public school, and go to a smaller school called Navajo Prep. But Navajo Prep was just for Native kids, and it didn't have honors classes, didn't have AP classes, and to me, it just felt like I didn't want to succeed on the sidelines. I wanted to succeed in the mainstream, you know, wanted to see your lights, your name in lights or whatever. You want to succeed on a grand scale, not on a small scale. And so it was a very big deal for me when I was a sophomore because I was trying so hard to be a scholar and a model minority and an athlete that I made the varsity volleyball team. And suddenly I was with girls who are a little older than me, and these three girls who were very popular on the team, they really liked me, and they thought, like, I liked cool music and I was very smart and they kind of took me under their wing, and these girls were like from the right side of town. They lived up on the hill and they were the daughters of oil field executives and lawyers, and I just felt like to be their friend, I was so lucky. So around the same time, my dad is doing something very nice for me and my little sister. He has a project that he's doing, so every morning he wakes up at 4 a.m. and he goes to the kitchen table and studies for his GED. Then, at 5:30 he gets in his car, and he drives to the power plant where he welds all day. Then he comes home at 5:00 pm, takes off his jeans that have a lot of holes from the welding sparks, and he pulls off his steel toed boots and he eats dinner really fast. And then he goes in the backyard because he's rebuilding a VW bug for us so we don't have to ride the bus to school. So he's out there for months rebuilding the engine, and I love my dad. So I'm out there with them, handing him tools and watching his project, and it gets done just in time for the end of football season. And so suddenly I'm able to take the VW bug. I have the keys, I'm all excited and I get to go pick up my new friends, the volleyball friends that live on the good side of town. So I picked them up. We go to the game, and on the way home I'm looking in the rear view mirror and I can see that the engine is in back. It's starting to smoke a little bit. I dropped them off and they're starting to worry. "Don't you want to call your dad? It looks like your engine is smoking," and all I can think is, "What are these girls going to think of my dad when they see him with his tattoos and his holey jeans and his muscly arms? Are they going to be afraid of him? Are they going to see him as unsavory?" And I'm so afraid by what they're going to think. I'm so afraid that he's gonna get angry with me in front of them. I'm just so afraid that I dropped them all off and I drive all the way home with the engine smoking. And the next day, I learned that I have completely melted down the engine and totaled the car, and it is the most devastating thing that has ever happened to me in my life. It's horrific. I feel so ashamed of what I have done. And when my father asks me what happened, I lie. I tell him that I did not see the smoke because how can I tell this man who is one of the best human beings I've ever met, who has sacrificed everything, always provided for me, that I was a traitor and that I was and I was a coward? And so this is how I had internalized the labels. I was afraid of being a target as a Native American woman in that town. I was afraid of being seen as a "violent savage." And after the VW incident, my grades started to drop and my very carefully crafted persona as, um as a model minority, it just started to fall apart. And when my grades dropped, my coaches got mad and I was getting in trouble on my athletic team. So I quit playing sports. And there was only one thing I had left to live for my my junior year, and that was this class that I loved. It was called American Humanities. It was taught by these two female teachers that I venerated from Durango, Colorado, and basically we studied American history in tandem with the literature of that time. It was an honors class, so they walk into the classroom one day with a big box of books, and they're like, we're going to read, Bury My Heart at Knee,  Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by D. Brown, and I could see that the cover has Native Americans. But I've never heard of the book. I take it home. For the first time in my life, I learned about the atrocities against my people by the federal government. I had never, ever heard of the Trail of Tears, the Sand Creek Massacre, Wounded Knee. My parents had never told me any of it. I fell into and I went to parochial school. So I guess they, just nobody had ever taught me. I became mute. I could not speak. I felt literally like I had fallen into a well and I was walking around underwater. It was like two weeks of being in this really weird state. And then I just said, "Okay." I took a bottle of painkillers and I woke up at the hospital and there was a nurse who was asking me if I had had a fight with my boyfriend. And I was vomiting chalk, and then my dad comes in and he's like, "I was at the power plant today and I felt someone tug really hard on my sleeve on my jean jacket, and I turned around and there was nobody there," and he was like "That was you, and you don't really want to die. That was your spirit reaching out. You have things to do in this world, and you have to find a way to live and to heal yourself." And I didn't know how to do that. But the one thing that I did know was that I loved the land in the Southwest. I loved going out in the land, and so I started doing it more and more. I would go out and I would hike and boulder. I love the red rock canyons and the sandstone arches and the cliffs, the bluffs you stand on and the caves and there are black crows and there are juniper trees and sage and sand washes. And I spent all my time that year on weekends out in the canyons, and I would think about my ancestors, and I would meditate and think about how I had to get stronger and heal myself. I just divorced myself from people for a period. Most of the time I did do this alone, but I did make friends with this kind of nerdy kid. It was really I was friends with his whole family, and his mom was a doctor at Indian Health Service in Shiprock, New Mexico. And in her youth she had been in the Peace Corps and she was incredible. She came home one day at the beginning of our senior year, and she told her family that she was gonna fly to Bhutan and trek across the entire country. I was astounded by this woman. I was inspired by her independence and her sense of adventure. And I thought, I really thought, I thought, like, "I'm here thinking that I'm trapped in a well and that I'm imprisoned by labels and look at her," and I started to think, "Why can't I get a timeout? Why couldn't I leave this equation that I feel like I've been reduced to, you know, Native Americans and pilgrims or cowboys and Indians?" I started to think about America's mythologies, and I thought, "Why do I have to accept that? And what could I find freedom if I left the United States and I went to travel?" And so here's another thing that I'd like you to do if you can get out a piece of paper. There's also a paper and this one, I want you to hold onto. It's a, it's a thing in in two parts. And on this paper, I would like it if you write really fast and just make it a list. Don't write full sentences. Just a list as fast as you can. We'll say for 45 seconds, right? Just pretty quickly, of the most courageous things you've ever done in your life. The most courageous things that you have, actions that you have ever taken in your life.

Deborah Taffa:   26:48
Okay, that's perfect. That's good. Just hold onto it. Okay? There's gonna be a part two. So here's one of the things I feel was the most courageous things I ever did in my life. The day after I graduated from high school, I left Farmington and I told my parents, even though all my life I had been brought up to think that it was important to go to college and be the model minority and to follow all the steps to becoming a successful person in United, I said, I'm not going to. I went to Yellowstone, where I worked as a maid, and from Yellowstone I got a job in Maine on an island called, called Hog Island and from working for the Audubon Society. And then from that I got a job in Alaska where I worked in this remote area. And then suddenly I was on a flight to Indonesia, and I was climbing volcanoes in Bali, where I met my husband, and I traveled in West Africa, and I traveled in Europe, and suddenly I was world, I was learning about world history instead of American history, and I was beginning to see that I had so much more in common with world than I thought I did, right. A miracle happened. I started to feel myself becoming whole because my pain didn't feel so precious when I realized that many cultures have suffered colonization and I realized that I wasn't special and I wasn't different. I actually had a ton of people that I could relate to if I just opened my eyes and looked. And when I came back to the United States, that feeling stayed with me. I began to understand that I could trust people again, that there were many places in the United States that I could live and that I could find my way in this country, right? And I became, I, to this day I'm incredibly grateful for travel for giving you a new perspective. I'm grateful for the natural beauty that exists out there in the world. And I'm grateful for the diversity that there is on this planet because travel taught me that I didn't have to be the silent, noble savage or the angry, violent savage, but that I could build my life on my own terms. And that was the point in my life where I found my voice as an individual, where I found my voice. Now, in October, I'm gonna fly back to the Southwest, and I like to go back there. I think it's important for me to remember my roots and to visit my sacred spaces, the sacred places of my childhood. And when I go there, I go with my family and we visit my parents. And then we go into the desert and we hike a lot. And I remember that the land there, that it healed me, and I reflect on my life. And I think a lot when I'm hiking out there about where I want my life to go in the future. Like, what are my goals for the future? And I think, how can I be more courageous and keep living the best life that I can live? Right? And here's the second part of the, of what I gave you to do. If you reach under your seat, you're gonna find an envelope. [Anonymous: Only if you are in the first three rows.] Oh, okay. Otherwise, we'll get you one. But I want you, if you will, what I'd like you to do is, you could keep it anonymous. You can put your name. It's your choice. But either way, I would like you to write your address on the front of this envelope if you have one and to fold up your list of courageous deeds and stick it in the envelope. But do not seal it up. Leave it open for me. Okay? Leave it open again. It can be anonymous. You don't have to put your name on it. You can put Return to Sender, your address, fold up your list of courageous deeds and put it inside. The funny thing about labels is that I feel like they stalk us for our entire life. Like it's not like you grow beyond one label and then you're free. You're free to live your greatest life because you're no longer held back by what other people think about you or the way society is labeling you. It's not, doesn't work that way. I'll give you an example. I'm starting to get older. And so as I get older, I could fall to the labels for the elderly that you know, I can't learn new things that I'm not sharp enough to take on new tasks or that I couldn't be athletic. And the one thing that I've noticed over and over is that people who have children are always asking their children, "What do you want to be when you grow up? What is your dream? What do you want to be?" But they stop asking themselves what they want to be and what their goals are for the future. I don't know if it's because we assume that we've arrived at a certain age, like I'm just here. My life is set. But I don't ever want to arrive. I want to keep asking myself, "What rules are there to break? What labels are there to push past? What am I doing next?" And so here is my pledge for you. When I get on that plane to go back to the Southwest, where I will meditate and reflect on my future, where I will make an offering to the land, I will burn sage and I will think about courage for the future. I will take your letters with me when I hike out into the canyons and I will include you and your futures in that intent. If you trust me with your envelopes, then you will be part of that for me. And when I leave the canyons, I will go out and I will go to a post office and I will get your letter and I will mail it back to you and you will receive it and open it up and see the list of your courageous deeds and the hope of being inspired and the hope of remembering that it takes courage to live your best life and that you have to keep pushing forward past labels if you want to get the job done. Thank you.

Steven Harowitz:   33:44
And that is a wrap. I'd like to thank Deborah for answering this Season's question, how do we move beyond the labels people give us? If you want to, you can see the answers to this Season's question, as written by audience members from each Campfire if you visit our Facebook page at facebook.com/campfirestl. A big thank you to the Campfire team, our photographers, videographers and partners. And if you want to learn more about Campfire and the work we do, visit cmpfr.com. That's c m p f r dot com. And if you liked what you heard, please leave a review on iTunes or wherever you find your podcasts. It really does help out. Until next time.