New WSU Press Memoir Explores One Man’s Journey in Search of His Indigenous Identity

Coming of age during an era of assimilation and cultural erasure, Tony Tekaroniake Evans was told by his third-grade teacher that Indians no longer exist. How could this be when his grandmother spoke Mohawk in the house? Thus begins a comical, informative, and heartbreaking literary journey in search of his Indigenous identity.

From childhood fantasies to altered states of consciousness, studies in cultural anthropology, and travels in Indian Country, Evans takes an uncle’s invitation to learn the deeper significance of his Iroquois traditions, yielding a personal philosophy based on Indigenous values that resist the excesses of consumer culture and could renew the American Dream. The result is his intriguing memoir, Believing in Indians: A Mixed-Blood Odyssey, newly published by Basalt Books, a trade imprint of WSU Press.

Through a revealing examination of religious, historical, and political ideas that have shaped his life, Evans provides a critique of U.S. history shaped by the dual consciousness that comes with being Indian and non-Indian. He traces a decades-long odyssey of memorable encounters with teachers, books, and conflicting ideas about Indians that reaches from his privileged upbringing in rural Georgia to adventures in New Mexico, Asia, and Europe on the path to becoming an author and journalist. Along the way, he offers candid insights on his own as well as other Native peoples’ struggles and triumphs, both today and across centuries.

The author’s close relationship with his gregarious older brother puts them both to the test when their shared idealism draws them to a reckoning with the racial, cultural, and psychological challenges stemming from being of mixed blood in mainstream, post-colonial society. With irony and wit, Evans shatters stereotypes and challenges assumptions on both sides of the cultural divide to arrive at pivotal moments during the 1990 Oka Crisis of Mohawk armed resistance, and a life-changing ceremony at the Iroquois Grand Council at Onondaga.

He finds no easy answers and instead experiences a growing sense that being Indian at all will be a political act and require a certain amount of faith. Ultimately, his story becomes an affirmation that loyalty to family, with all its quirks and heartaches, is the quintessential ideology.

Evans is an enrolled member of the Kahnawake Mohawks of Quebec and an award-winning reporter and columnist for the Idaho Mountain Express. His stories have also been published in High Country News, A&E Networks’ History.com, Atmos, Mountain Gazette, The Smithsonian’s American Indian Magazine, and other publications.

He earned a degree in cultural anthropology from the University of Colorado and won the Expatriate Scholarship to the Prague Summer Writer’s Workshop in 1996. Evans is the author of Teaching Native Pride: Upward Bound and the Legacy of Isabel Bond and other books. He has lived in Idaho’s Sun Valley region for over 30 years, and his work is supported by grants from the Idaho Humanities Council.