My mother was a Mohawk, born and raised on a reservation, and when I was a kid, she would take me there to visit her relatives.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
My mother's Mohawk and my father is Scottish/German from Nova Scotia.
My family is Native American, and I was raised with Native American ceremonies.
My mother was the center of the family.
Whenever I played Columbus, Ohio, I dropped in to see my close friend, a medium who had mysterious powers. Her Indian guide was Mohawk.
My mom was a free spirit, and she brought me up to be a free spirit.
I remember hearing stories from my mother and father about their parents and grandparents when they were taken off the reservation, taken to the boarding schools, and pretty much taught to be ashamed of who they were as Native Americans. You can feel that impact today.
My father was a schoolteacher and my mother came from a teacher's family.
My mother birthed three children and she adopted myself and another African-American son. My adoptive parents were Finnish. I grew up in a white picket neighborhood.
My mother came from an Irish family of 11 kids and, of course, had a sister who was a nun, so I spent time at a convent and with an aunt and uncle who lived in New York and took me to the theater.
My Native American heritage was not embraced by our family, and we grew up African-American, so I didn't have a lot of access or history to that line of my family.