Birding While Indian

I just finished Thomas C. Gannon’s book of essays, Birding While Indian: A Mixed-Blood Memoir. A riveting, erudite and surprisingly intersectional exploration of what it means to bird, what it means to grow up part-Lakota in ground zero of the white genocide of Native Americans (South Dakota), what it means to be an outsider in what is a very white (and progressively more expensive) hobby, birding. Gannon is an English professor in Nebraska and Foucault, Baudrillard and Derrida rub shoulders with field sparrows, black-bellied whistling ducks and dicksissels.

Many people are familiar with the Central Park Birdwatching Incident during which Christian Cooper, a black birder in Central Park during spring migration, was aggressively targeted by a white woman who called the police on him for asking her to leash her dog. He caught the incident on video and it went viral. This incident took place on May 25, 2020, on the same day as George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis, and together these incidents shone a bright light on the extent of white racism in the United States, the fact of which has never been in doubt by neither Cooper nor Gannon.

It is uncomfortable to have this light shine on your face. Yet shone it must be, in this era of ICE raids of people being targeted simply for looking the way they do (remember “Asian During COVID”?).