Please stop asking me this!

When she was growing up, Dina Gilio-Whitaker was constantly asked, "How much Indian blood do you have?" She could never figure out how to respond, which is not to say she didn't know who she was.  "I knew that I was Native, I knew that I was Colville, I knew my family up there on the reservation," she said recently. "But what I grew up with was a process of not being seen and not being recognized as being Native, because I was completely out of context.  "People think that they're being friendly or whatever when they ask you that question. But what they're really trying to understand is if you're a real Indian or not."  (Dina Gilio-Whitaker, 2016, On Columbus Day, A Look At The Myth That 'All The Real Indians Died Off')

My response to that question used to be based on my audience, but I stopped that several years ago.  Now my response is uniformly and very politely, "Would you ask me that if I said I was Italian?"  To which, the answer is always, "No" or "Of course not".  My next question is, "Why not?  Why do you ask me that if I identify my nationality as First Nations but wouldn't if I were to identify my nationality as Italian?" (Or, for that matter, any other country on Grandmother Earth)?  Some people get defensive and accuse me of being difficult or nasty or rude.  Other people actually stop and think about it, and the response after some thought is usually, "I was just curious."  These are the folks with whom I then engage in conversation in an attempt to challenge the status quo and to educate.  I try to help them see us as human beings and not commodities to be measured.