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Show Utah ' s Indians 4 1 W E S H A L L R E M A I N : U TA H I N D I A N C U R R I C U L U M G U I D E PATTY TIMBIMBOO-MADSEN INTERVIE W, WE SHALL REMAIN : THE NORTH WESTERN SHOSHONE Interviewer: What does it mean to be feder-ally recognized, what does it mean to you to be a Northwestern Shoshone tribe member? What does it mean to be Northwestern Shoshone? Timbimboo-Madsen: I think about so long ago when Columbus came and what did he call the Indians? He thought he was in India and called us Indians; not really knowing where he was, the label he put on us and it stuck. I think about when the trappers came into the area and they came with an Indian guide probably. And they asked, what, "Who are these people?" We call them Sho-shones. Well then, it's another label given to you by somebody else. So then if you ask me who I am, I would say I'm Newe; Newe meaning "the people," the people of this area. I think you have a lot of Native American people who are going that way, the Ute, Nuche. You have Denai, the Papago people, Tohono O'odham, are going back to the traditional names. And I think that certainly for us, is our identity, not somebody else identity that was given to us. So, to recapture that, it's almost like we talk about the circle. We're coming back to where we were. And I think a lot of the stuff that we are doing to try to enrich our children's lives is what we need to do to make them whole too. Interviewer: Do you feel like you are defined by everybody else? That the Newe, the people, have been defined by the surrounding culture? Timbimboo-Madsen: I certainly think at times that they have, they have stereotyped us and it's been done by TV-you think about Buffalo Bill. Buffalo Bill started the powwow, it wasn't the In-dians. It was him. Because of what he created and at times, you saw the savage part of it, and there was also at times, the romantic part of it. But I think that in any culture there's always good and there's always bad. And that's the same way with the Indian people. But how did you deal with it? You don't blame a whole group of people for what one person did. You deal with that one person and that's the way the Indian people would deal with, with things. There was a lady who came into our encampment here last week and she says, "My word, you speak good English." And I thought, "How am I supposed to speak?" Certainly in our household, my mom and dad both spoke Sho-shone and I always thought it was a language for them. They didn't want us to hear what they were saying. So it wasn't really anything. As I got older, I realized that my mother was spanked during her school years for speaking Shoshone. And in my mind I thought, maybe that's why we were never taught. Because she didn't want us to go through what she did. I really didn't think about the way I spoke as anything different than any-body else. Only 'til I got to school, when I went to Utah State, that was probably back in about 1972, and the Indian students, the other Native Ameri-can students, came and says, "You don't act like an Indian." And that was the first time I ever hurt, I ever felt prejudice, was that my own, I thought were my own people telling me, "You're not an In-dian because you don't speak like one, you don't act like one." But it didn't, for me it really didn't matter because I felt that if they don't like me it's ok, and just move on. And after about a year I got to know more of 'em and it was ok. But I could still feel that, a little uneasiness in my life. |