Mike Dashner, Ojibwe, considers himself too much a “wild ricer” to be into
the trappings of the urban scene. “My wife says I’m anti-Tommy Hilfiger,”
laughed Dashner. “But I always tease her about having to match her
clothes.”

While he was growing up, Dashner spent half his time on the reservation and
half in the city, so the urban scene isn’t new to him. He earned a
bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan in 1978 and subsequently
served as a Native adviser at the school as well as holding a position at
the Minnesota American Indian Center. Now he heads up a project for the
National Indian Child Welfare Association in Portland, a position he really
likes because he works with other motivated Indian professionals.

“It started when we came out to visit my daughter, who married one of the
Black Lodge singers and settled up on the Columbia at Wanapum near Priest
Rapids,” Dashner said. “They all encouraged me to come out, and I could see
I’d really like it here because of all the traditional influences.”

“Here,” though, ultimately meant Portland, not the remote, rural village of
Wanapum. “I’m like every other Indian person in that way, I guess,” Dashner
said. “The biggest advantage of living in the city is the opportunity for
jobs. Even now that casino money is helping some of the reservations out,
the economic base to hire professionals back into the community is pretty
thin.

“I really like my job a lot, but the downside of living in the urban
setting is the lack of a good, sizable Indian community. We do have our
cliques that come together for different reasons, like for pow wows in our
case. And we see each other every weekend and hang out together to work on
outfits.”

Still, Dashner has to contend with more mainstream influences than he
wishes. “The biggest gripe I got with the city is being away from Indian
values. For example, we recently had a baby shower for one of the ladies in
our office. She’s mixed and married a non-Native guy. The shower went nice
because it was all people from our office. But when we were walking out to
the vehicles, her husband came along and everything he had to say was all
about money and the status that comes with money. It sounded so vulgar.

“Instead of love, honor, respect and generosity like you hear in Indian
country, everything was about this whole different value system that I have
a hard time relating to.

“It’s like that with our kids, too,” Dashner continued. “Our oldest
daughter – she’s a teenager now. You know how you can’t tell your kids
anything then, and unfortunately all of their friends set the standards by
which they want to hold themselves. So there’s a big craze on
different-colored Converse tennis shoes right now.

And because she dances, she can blow money when she wins. She’s so proud of
her collection of these shoes, where I thought it was repulsive for someone
to be driven like that. My wife says she’s just trying to be like her
friends, but I’m more sensitive to this commercialism.”

That said, Dashner thinks that “one of the things I do like about this area
is that the older traditions like the longhouse are still maintained. They
have their Sunday gatherings in the long-houses and everything. That’s
different than how things are back home. Unfortunately on my mother’s and
father’s reserves, the traditions got repressed when churches came in and
dominated everything.

“So one of the things I like to do is take the kids to traditional pow wows
in small communities, like the one up at Celilo on the Columbia not far
from Portland. They always invite us to the longhouse Sunday for lunch
since there’s no restaurant to go to. I was really impressed with the kids
listening to the elders talk. We can’t force it down their throats, but if
we put them in the right situations and right environments, they can have
these other influences.

“It’s the same up at my daughter’s in Priest Rapids. We went up for the
Christmas and spring feasts. The kids would have probably wanted to do
something else, but they participated and were pretty nice. So my feeling
is that they learned a little something from the people there that were
getting up and talking about how we have a responsibility to give back to
the community. To me … the main difference between Native and non-Native
worlds is community. And I want our kids to know about that.”