In the spring of 1988, I had just gotten into Princeton and imagined I would be happy, unencumbered by my Indian past and fully embedded in an American future. I wanted to escape my family and the horizons established by teachers who saw Indians as capable of not much at all. I wanted to leave my fellow Indians behind as well.

No one at Leech Lake, the reservation in Minnesota where I spent my life, seemed interested in me. I was not dark enough or wild enough to count. If I could put words in the collective mouth of the reservation, it would have said: 'He's not from here.

Just look at him.' The indifference was mutual. To my mind, Leech Lake Reservation was entirely unnoteworthy. It was probably the poorest.

It seemed our reservation had been abandoned by the government, by our neighbors and by history itself; nothing happened there except a perpetual conveyor belt of suffering. At Princeton, I felt I was stepping out of my mom's Dodge Caravan and onto America's shores. I had gone from a non-place where I didn't feel like I belonged to a real place that seemed to welcome me.

Welcome, it said, with a stony embrace of split-stone walls. Welcome, it said, with its austere brick and obnoxious ivy. Welcome, it said, to the place where things happen.

Princeton was a place of possibility, where I might participate in history rather than be steamrolled by it. But of course I hadn't left this lesser place behind; I had brought it with me without even knowing. There I was at Princeton, in the nation's service, and indisputably Indian among a crowd of non-Indians.

The indisputability of my Indianness was largely a matter of contrast. I realized that my classmates and professors seemed to be shocked that I was there at all.