American Like Me

by America Ferrera

  And I’m still going to learn Spanish. But my motivation is no longer to prove myself. I just want to enjoy the gift of being able to connect to my culture and people on a deeper level.

  And also so I can confidently say in Spanish, “Sí, sé que el guac es extra.”

  Martin Sensmeier is an American actor of Tlingit, Koyukon-Athabascan, and Irish descent. He has appeared in several film and television projects, including Westworld and The Magnificent Seven. He will star in Bright Path: The Jim Thorpe Story, a biopic on legendary Native American athlete Jim Thorpe. He is also an ambassador for the Native Wellness Institute and the Boys & Girls Clubs of America.

  Martin Sensmeier

  WHEN I WAS A kid I had four T-shirts I loved, and every other article of clothing I owned didn’t matter. There was the shirt with a cartoony Maine crab on it, the shirt with Figment the Disney dragon on it, the shirt with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on it, and the top pick in my small rotation: my La Bamba shirt. Under the gold print words was a winged guitar hovering over a musical staff with music notes. The shirt was white at one point but turned yellow—because I wore it so much—and it hangs on the wall in my parents’ house to this day. Around the ages of eight, nine, and ten, I would wear it several days in a row until my mother would pull me aside and say, “Son, it’s time to wash La Bamba.”

  These shirts were important to me because I was obsessed with the fictional characters I saw on TV or in books. I wanted to be a part of their stories and would tell anyone who would listen about my favorite plots or characters. I come from a long line of storytellers and have inherited a deep love for stories. I still consider storytelling my greatest strength, and as a kid, that took the form of wildly imagining I lived within the world of all my movie heroes—even thinking cartoon characters actually existed. In my mind, they were just in some alternate reality somewhere that I could probably find if I just looked hard enough. When I was six years old I was found kneeling down in the street in front of city hall, trying to pry off the manhole cover to the sewer. I was looking for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Luckily, I lived in a very small town where everyone knew everyone, so the city hall employee just called my mom to let her know they had found me.

  I grew up in southeastern Alaska in a little fishing village called Yakutat. There are about six hundred people who live there, many of whom are from the Tlingit tribe like me. It’s a beautiful place, surrounded by the Saint Elias mountain range. There are no roads going in and out of Yakutat, but you can hop on a forty-five-minute flight to Juneau any day of the week—or take an unbearably long ferry ride. But I didn’t really leave very often, because we couldn’t afford it.

  My dad worked as a fisherman—like so many in our village—and my mom worked as a physician’s assistant, but with six kids, they had a lot of mouths to feed. We were never hungry or deprived of anything, but we were poor no matter how hard my parents worked. When they couldn’t pay the electric bill, we’d go days without power in our double-wide trailer. I remember those times as especially fun. Instead of wiggling the TV antennas to find something fuzzy to watch, my mom would bring out candles and oil lamps and we’d play board games or listen to my dad reading books to us. The propane stove still worked, so my mom would cook a great dinner. Other times, when we ran out of oil and went without hot water or heat, I’d simply shower in the school locker room, and in the evenings, we’d huddle around the stove for warmth. I never thought of these as “hard times” or even sad. It’s just how it was.

  Our village was small and peaceful. We were completely satisfied running around outside all day for fun. An example of an especially exciting day is when we’d find a particularly large snow drift to jump into from a rooftop. But mostly we played basketball. I played on competitive teams all the way up through high school. Everyone plays basketball in Yakutat, the boys, the girls, the parents, the grandparents, the doctors, the teachers, the carpenters—the janitor at my grade school named Betty played too. Basketball wasn’t just for entertainment—it was one of the many ways we stayed strong and healthy, which was a priority in my family. We either spent long spans of time inside a gym or full days playing outside. My dad was an athlete and a soldier in his younger years, not to mention a great hunter and fisherman. Discipline was a part of our everyday life. We never ate candy or junk food. We had a traditional Tlingit diet of wild game—venison, or moose if we were lucky—or fish every night for dinner, and we would work our way through a monthly $10 bag of rice.

  I did grow tired of eating the same meat and rice dinner every night. I remember one day watching the 2000 Olympics on TV and eating another plate of smoked salmon—a wild fish caught by my father and smoked by my mother, something I now consider the most amazing food on earth—that at the time seemed like no more than repetitive sustenance. While eating, I remember seeing a commercial for Burger King come on TV, seeing the burger slapped down on the bread, the juicy crisp lettuce, pickle, and tomato all falling into place in slo-mo. I thought it looked so delicious, and I couldn’t wait to one day eat food like that. All the while, I was mindlessly consuming what I now save in my freezer for special occasions, because my mother’s smoked salmon gets shipped to me in California, and I have to savor whatever amount of home I can.

  But every now and then as a kid, we’d get a treat of chicken nuggets and french fries. Or pizza, the food that I and my cool friends, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, all loved best. Sometimes my dad would take me to the local tavern in the middle of the day, before adults were drinking there, so we could order from the bar menu—always a pizza—for lunch. I’d drink a Roy Rogers and play music on the jukebox. My dad patiently allowed me to spend all his quarters to play the same song over and over again.

  Para bailar La Bamba!

  Para bailar La Bamba se necesita un poco de gracia!

  My dad would humor me, and get up and dance with me in the middle of the bar. He let me relive my favorite movie, perform the song in my favorite shirt. I barely noticed how annoyed all the other adults in the bar were to hear the same song start up again and again. I mouthed the words and spun around with my air guitar, just like Lou Diamond Phillips.

  That movie was a light turning on for me—a kick-ass story about a guy just like me, who came from a poor family just like me, and dreamed really big just like me. Ritchie Valens was a Chicano character who looked like me—and he wasn’t even wearing beads and feathers. He was just a real person who I could identify with. In one scene, Ritchie’s mom angrily yells, “They don’t know who the hell they’re dealing with. My granddaddy was full-blooded Yaqui Indian.” And that was more than enough for me, because up to that point, the only Natives I’d seen on TV were Indians in John Wayne westerns, which I was also obsessed with watching. But John Wayne’s Indians were usually played by Italian actors, and they weren’t recognizable to me in any way. They made crazy yodeling sounds and behaved like animals. Even as a kid, I understood them to be made-up movie Indians, not real people we were supposed to care about.

  To me, Native people weren’t the Indians you saw in westerns. They were regular people who made up half the population of my town. They were the folks you’d see every day, the mechanics, welders, teachers, doctors, and waiters. Except for in old pictures, or at very special ceremonies, I never saw anyone wearing regalia. Everyone in my town dressed more like John Wayne than the Indians, and no one spoke the old language of my Tlingit tribe. But our kind of Native was never shown in any movies I saw. TV Indians were depicted as bad guys, hooligans, or wild, strange villains. So we always rooted for the good guys—the cowboys. My best friend across the street was a white kid, and when we played cowboys and Indians, I was always the cowboy and he was always the Indian. I had more in common with a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle than I did with a John Wayne Indian.

  But La Bamba changed everything because it showed me a face and a story I could relate to. I used to drag my well-worn VHS copy of La Bamba to my friends’ houses and beg them to wat
ch it again with me. They would cringe when I’d bring it up. It’s not exactly a movie intended to appeal to preteen boys, but I was finally old enough to know that mutant turtles weren’t actually living in the sewers. And the struggles Ritchie and his family experienced felt like my real life. I daydreamed all the time about growing up to become an actor like Lou Diamond Phillips, but it was maybe the most unlikely profession for a Tlingit kid—or any kid really—from Yakutat. At the time I would have settled for being a basketball player too. Even though I was a little bit chubby, I was a good ball player, as long as you could look past the Sharpied-on goatee I drew on my face for game day so I could look like Seattle Sonics power forward Shawn Kemp, my other idol. I was committed.

  I was teased for my chubbiness, and who knows what else. My head was in the clouds, and I didn’t care that I wasn’t a popular kid. Nobody was rich in our town, or if they were, it just meant they had slightly better TVs and trucks. Mostly I wasn’t very jealous or too harmed by their bullying, but I admit that popularity was an advantage I wished for when the school plays came around. There wasn’t a big performing arts emphasis at my grade school, and the teachers assigned roles solely through preference and favoritism. In other words, the popular kids got all the leads, and I didn’t even get the chance to audition for them. When we did Huck Finn, I was given the role of the runaway slave, Jim. And when we did Robin Hood, I played the sheriff of Nottingham—because nobody else wanted to play the villain. But joke was on them, because I had the most lines.

  I remember standing backstage before the first show, after rehearsing for four months, looking out into the audience, sweating with excitement through my costume and knowing this must be the life I was supposed to live. I was bitten by the acting bug, but unfortunately, these two plays were the extent of my theatrical career for my entire childhood. I would have jumped at the chance to do more acting, but I guess our school was just too small to put on any more plays.

  Fortunately, movies and school plays were not my only outlet for storytelling. The elders in my community had exposed me to tales of Tlingit people for as long as I could remember. Even though we never learned about our past from school textbooks, the elders made sure we knew our history—sharing stories passed down to them through the oral tradition. From memory, they would name your father, your grandfather, your great-grandfather, and carefully lay out your story that began hundreds of years ago. We would sit for hours, keeping their stories alive by listening. It was during my time sitting at the feet of elders that I learned my people had been here in Southeast Alaska for thousands of years, before the gold rush, before the fur trades, before manifest destiny or the United States of anything. But I had already seen this with my own eyes, and felt it with my own body and spirit—that this place had been our home for a long time. This tiny town without a movie theater was where my friend Anthony and I found a seven-hundred-year-old Tlingit bow out in the forest, which now sits on display in a Juneau museum.

  Even though I loved Yakutat, anytime we had a chance to visit Seattle or any other part of the Lower 48 I was all over it. Somehow I rarely thought about the world outside Yakutat as a child—it barely even existed in my mind because it was outside the bounds of my town with no roads out. But suddenly in my teen years, the world beyond Southeast Alaska became a place of opportunity and excitement. When I got to visit other cities, I’d head straight for a movie theater. Once, during a high school field trip to Seattle, with my older brother as a chaperone, we got to see the movie Training Day on the big screen, with Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke. It was a very memorable day for me. Denzel was my guy. And there was something so compelling to me about the two of them riding around LA in their car, with the palm trees in the background. I was mesmerized by those trees and wanted to go there. That was where people went to bring stories to the big screen. I never forgot.

  But acting was still a figment of my imagination. Like a town with no roads in, there was no charting a course to that destination. I had become a great basketball player, and going out for a college team was a real option for me, but it wasn’t a dream I thought worth chasing. I had never seen a Native player in the NBA. I also couldn’t picture myself becoming a fisherman, because the fishermen never leave Yakutat, and I’d internalized the universal advice that in order to be successful, you have to leave home. So I settled for college in Anchorage, where I could learn welding and make a good salary.

  Attending the University of Alaska Anchorage was not easy. I was just a village boy who grew up in the country, and now I was living in a big city of three hundred thousand people. I missed the community and the pace of Yakutat, and I was scared. I comforted myself by finding a gym where I could play basketball and make some friends. I settled in, and eventually loved the electives more than the welding classes. I took courses on Native American studies, philosophy, and psychology. For the first time I learned the confusing and devastating history of genocide, and all about the people who are fighting for my human rights still to this day. I started considering the effects of history on my life and began to recognize the power and mandate in me to tell stories—my story, or any stories that would inspire others.

  I longed for home, but at the same time the palm trees were calling me. I wanted to take my desire to tell stories to the big screen and become an actor, but I couldn’t afford the pursuit in any way, shape, or form. It seemed crazy to choose an acting career when I could make $75K per year in an entry-level position with an oil drilling company—something a lot of my friends were doing. So I took a job on Alaska’s North Slope that paid me more money than I knew what to do with and gave me two weeks off every single month.

  For a young man who has never had any money, this was thrilling. The combination of having a lot of money and a lot of free time was a win-win. With my first big paycheck I flew to California to see a Lakers game. And it wasn’t too long before I spent all my time off the rig in Los Angeles. Two weeks at work, and two weeks in LA. I would go months without flying home to Yakutat, and every time I visited, it was like a punch in the gut to see my parents getting older, my nieces and nephews getting bigger, and the town ever the same—beautiful and peaceful. It was painful to stay in Yakutat for just a few days and turn around and leave again. But acting classes compelled me to return to Los Angeles any time I could. Maybe just maybe, I could be like the poor-boy Ritchie Valens who finally made it big because he never gave up on his dream. When I finally took the plunge and moved to California full-time, I wasn’t getting acting parts, and I slowly spent all my oil money until I found myself delivering pizzas to get by. Cowabunga, dude, it was not the future of palm trees and artistic expression that I had dreamed of.

  Then one day in California, I got a phone call from my parents that an elder in our village had passed away. It was not the first funeral or important occasion I had missed, being away from home so often, but it was especially difficult news as this elder had been very close to me and my family, and I had been called to serve as a gravedigger. In our tribe, when there is a death, we band closely together as a community to care for one another and ensure a safe passage to heaven for the dead. We do not send the deceased to a morgue, funeral home, or cemetery all alone. Their spirit is still with us until they are in the ground, so someone is always by their side, accompanying them on their journey. We do not fear the dead or believe in the kind of ghosts invented by Hollywood. We celebrate the dead and connect with them in their presence until the burial is complete. To be asked to dig this elder’s grave was a deep honor and an important spiritual responsibility, but I didn’t have enough pizza money to buy myself a plane ticket home. I was gutted.

  I beat myself up pretty badly over this. It was a huge sacrifice to both me and my family to live so far away from home, and I started to wonder if it was really worth the cost. I had grown up daydreaming about being the next Lou Diamond Phillips and tried to justify leaving Yakutat as the only way I could ever become an actor who could bring important stories t
o the screen. I wanted to change kids’ lives the way mine had been changed by La Bamba. But I also began to feel very suspicious about that idea I had been sold for so long that you can’t be successful unless you leave home. I would often hear famous actors, athletes, or musicians give speeches or interviews and say if they’d never left home, they would still be stuck in whatever horrible small town, inner-city hood, or suburban nightmare they grew up in. But I wasn’t buying this idea anymore. I didn’t have to leave Yakutat to become a storyteller. Yakutat made me the storyteller I already was. The elders, the people, the landscape, and the rhythm of the whole place made me who I was. And yet, it also shaped the very dreams and goals that compelled me to leave it. This was a very confusing position to be in.

  I imagined myself going home and forgetting California altogether. It was—and still is—easy to picture myself being very happy going back to Yakutat to stay forever. There are people there revitalizing the Tlingit language, running day cares, coaching basketball, preserving our history, sharing our ancient stories, hunting for game to feed our elders who would otherwise eat off government assistance. When a child is sick, the village pitches in to care for him or her. When my brother-in-law has a day off, he goes around fixing everyone’s boilers for free so they have hot water again. My nephew watches movies on DVD over and over again, just like his uncle did, and children all over town run around in the sunshine and snow, under the shadow of the mountains, with the water sparkling light and life into their everyday. It is a beautiful place—not one you need to escape. And even if you wanted to escape from Yakutat, it is not a place you can ever truly leave.