The Picture

n his 1962 essay “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” James Baldwin wrote of his Harlem childhood that “every Negro boy—in my situation during those years, at least—who reaches this point realizes, at once, profoundly, because he wants to live, that he stands in great peril and must find, with speed, a ‘thing,’ a gimmick, to lift him out. .” A gimmick can be the difference between life and death in America for Natives as well. Two gimmicks which do not define Natives but certainly define the country we live in are reflected by these statistics: Natives volunteer for the United States military at a higher rate per