“I remember saying, like, I can’t be stuck out in the forest for too long, and I remember being told that I’m playing a character on TV. Yeah, I’m playing a character written by white man who don’t know anything about me. And here’s Shawn, ‘well, you know, I read a lot about Indian stuff. I think they’re — I think it’s real cool.’ Blah, blah. You know, that doesn’t fucking do anything for me. I’m glad you think it’s cool. You know, I didn’t say that, but that’s how I feel when I hear that shit. Like, great. It’s neat to you. What does that do? What does that do for me? Where do we go from here? Do you think that makes me feel better about it all?
“There were times where what I thought we were doing was cool. Then there were times, a lot of times actually, where I would get the scraps, especially towards the end. And I was struggling real bad, mentally. You can see it in my fucking physique as well, I was, not — I was fighting for my life working there. Doing the shit that I was doing… I remember getting scripts and just seeing the words, and just giving up. Like, there’s no way I can rewrite this. This must be what they want. If I rewrite this, it’s still going to be just this bullshit, meaningless cultural slop; using big, fancy words and sounding like an asshole.
“I remember one specifically, that I was fucking hot about[…] The writer that wrote this particular promo — I was really close with him. He hands it to me, I read it, and I’m just like, abso-fucking-lutely not, brother. What the fuck is this?
“This man’s not even from the United States. He doesn’t know any better. That was the other hard part. I’m telling you the way it made me feel, but there was no malintent on his end. You know, it’s just what I deal with in my everyday life about my cultural identity. It’s either a joke to people or it’s just ignorance. They don’t know, because this isn’t shit we teach. That particular promo was about me wanting to leave the reservation and not worry about my people’s cultural expectations. To leave the reservation and assimilate to the wider world[…] To me, that sounds like I’m leaving the reservation, to go to a fucking assimilation school, to go to Carlisle, so I can be beaten, and raped, and all the shit that happened to those kids.
“Just the fact that the word assimilate was in there; I had to give him a little history lesson.
“I’m dealing with this bullshit. I’m passing sage over an injured arm, like what the fuck am I doing on television?
“I was giving up. I decided that I would just deliver. Every big match, every storyline, just deliver. And, they were happy. I just needed to get through this shit. We can get past this, and I won’t ever have to do it again. But I just never really got there.”
