When I was in college, I met a girl. I will call her Lisa. We became acquainted and talked occasionally as we lived across the hall from each other. We weren't best friends or anything, but we did talk about life and where we grew up and our families and our hopes for our future. In the course of one of these conversations, I discovered she was Native American. I was surprised, because I would not have expected my very small, very white, very small town school to have attracted someone coming out of another cultural experience, which was my first lesson. Never assume. People have a lot of reasons for doing what they do, and its not always obvious at a glance.
Anyway, it turned out she was also surprised. She assumed I knew she was Native American, because it was such a huge part of her identity, it never occurred to her that anyone wouldn't immediately know that about her. It was inseparable from her sense of self, in a way that my whiteness was not, and it was a brand new idea for me.
I realized then that we have a lot to learn from each other.
