![]() It took me about five years to really acknowledge what was going on and decide to find a different spiritual path. ![]() ![]() For about four or five years I tried walking that way, but I saw a lot of contradictions. And many of those people in that church were mixed-blood (although the were assimilated), they told me to just be “normal” because this was the “normal” way to follow Jesus. There’s this idea of a super-spiritual existence outside the flesh, and Western identity is all rolled up into that. Without knowing it at the time, I was faced with what I came to understand years later as this Platonic dualistic dilemma. After that the people in my church basically told me to cut my hair and get rid of my native posters-those things were all “of the flesh.” I started following Jesus at that time and was miraculously delivered from the addiction. John Mohawk, the editor there, would later become a major influence in my life in terms of my intellectual journey and understanding Indigenous rights. It was something of an underground rag for the Indian movement. I’ve always had a native identity, and in high school I used to receive the Akwesasne Notes, which was a newspaper published by the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne. Randy Woodley: Both my parents are mixed blood Cherokee, although assimilated. Alexandria Barbera: Tell us a little bit about your background. ![]()
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