Half Breed Drive: A Narrative Analysis

A dirt road called Half Breed Drive stretches out of Auburn, Nebraska for just a few miles, through endless cornfields, past a single mailbox. But its history runs deep, with an origin story stretching back 185 years, long before Nebraska was a state, or even a territory. This road traces the top of the western boundary of the Half-Breed Tract, a failed reservation for people rooted in two cultures but welcome in neither. The story that follows only amounts to pieces that I’ve stitched together. My dad raised me with stories, to revive in me what was almost forgotten by the generations before us. His own father was born a few years before the Great Depression began, in the largely Ihanktonwan, or Yankton Dakota settlement of Greenwood, South Dakota. He was among the first in his family born a United States citizen after the Snyder Act in 1924. I choose this term ‘Indians’ to follow suite with the language used in that particular Act. When I speak of Indians, I speak only from my own understanding of Yankton Dakota heritage, passed down from all the generations before me. With a dash of artistic license, of course. The Nemaha Half-Breed Reservation was first established by the Treaty of Prairie du Chien of 1830, which set aside land for the mixed-race descendants of French-Canadian trappers and women of the plains tribes, …show more content…
They did the best that they could with the tools that they had. They loved and cared for their children always. There is nothing less or half or un-Indian about that, or about our family story. What they knew, despite priests who refuse talk about things like blood memory, is that our ancestors would still speak to us when we closed our eyes. When we walked on the land. Those teachings and languages and ceremonies that they thought would hurt us will be what save us. Because our ancestors are alive inside us. We carry the sacred