Meditation: Tension

Several years ago, I spoke to a group of first-year students who were taking a class on autoethnography. Before my visit, the students read one of my own autoethnographic papers, which detailed my experiences as an Indian Country researcher. Throughout this piece, I identified various forms of tension—tension between my school learning and my home learning, tension between my values and the academy’s values, and the tension inherent in the research process itself.

After speaking briefly about writing autoethnography, the professor opened the floor for questions. I can’t remember any of the questions except for one. A young man walked to the podium, cleared his throat, and said, “You write a lot about being Native and how important that is to you. So, I’m wondering how you reconcile being a Native scholar in a predominately white university.” In one very thoughtful question, this student identified the biggest tension of them all—my existence as a Native person in this colonial space.