But in the 1980s there were beginning to be lots of Indians doing so-so. Casino gambling had come to many reservations. Some were becoming rich. Leech Lake not so much, but the standard of living was getting somewhat better. My mother called to tell me she could now get a decent prime rib on the reservation. And then I was starting to understand that I hadn’t only been telling lies about who Indians were; I had been consuming lies as well. Where I had grown up and how I had grown up weren’t a separate place or way of being at all. The impassable frontier I had perceived between a Princeton and a not-Princeton, and yes, between civilized and savage, wasn’t drawn out there in Leech Lake; it was created in here at Princeton. The biggest lie seemed to be that places like Princeton are the opposite of places like Leech Lake Reservation, and therefore separate, distinct, unrelated.

It feels like common practice, among reservation Indians and everyone else, to imagine that reservations are the antimatter to the matter of America, unmeltable in the crucible of the American melting pot; dark in contrast to American light; hopeless in comparison with American hope; a ruin in a valley staring up at the city on a hill. But that lie hides a paradox: When Indians were included in the Declaration of Independence only to be excluded from its provisions (mentioned only as “merciless Indian Savages”), this gave us a kind of backdoor reality, a kind of legal existence defined by negative space. So, too, with the flimsy binary that had till that point ruled my life: By suggesting that Indian life was the opposite of American life, it accidentally suggested that we were, in fact, alive.

After my first year at Princeton my stories of suffering began to wear thin. For outsiders, sure. But for me as well. My lies had an ancillary, refractory effect: The more I created a story of the place I was from that wasn’t true, and the more I told stories about myself that weren’t true, the more I started to see what was true of my reservation and myself. And I began to miss both my community and, well, me.

What I missed wasn’t the suffering and poverty and beer bellies and Pendleton vests and half-tinted glasses. It wasn’t our broken English and our fractured Ojibwe. The longer I was away and the more stories I spun, the more Leech Lake felt like a real place with complicated people. It was in our ordinary complications, rather than the extremity of our troubles, that our personhood existed. In our affairs and subsequent divorces, in our inability to win the state championship, in our need for co-signers for car loans and in all the many good and bad decisions we made. I became a person, an Indian person, when I drank warm Coke rolling around the bottom of the canoe, or when my friend Sean flipped the Risk board before storming out to check our nets. There, at home, no outsider could erase me. I began to miss home when I came to realize that Indian life is its own pursuit. There were so many forces, veritable legions, arrayed against Native people and places. So many opportunities for suffering. So much effort spent on our erasure. So many clear messages that the “pursuit of happiness” was for others, not for me. At Princeton, age 18, I pursued pursuit. It was the next best thing.

It has been said that Native people have a great future behind us. Our cultures and our dominance figure as the past. I am ashamed to say I grew up believing this. After college, with a prestigious degree in hand, I spent a couple of years in grad school. It was the life toward which I had been led. But I was being pulled — in the manner of filings to a magnet — back to the reservation. I realized I didn’t want any of the roles that America would have me fill. I didn’t want to be an emissary from the past greatness of Indian society. Nor did I want to be a super-Indian whose story was all the more super because of what I had overcome. It seemed to me that the mediocrity of becoming a so-so Indian was the best way to avoid capture.