SANTA FE—Britta Andersson, one of the few students of non-Native American heritage to attend IAIA, will receive her bachelor of fine arts degree in creative writing this May. She came to the school with eyes open—aware of her own cultural background, yet purposefully unaware of culture as a barrier to cultivate the mind and friendships. This was the key to her unexpected and rewarding journey to write.

Andersson was intimately familiar with race and class issues growing up in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. It is a city surrounded by the Coeur d'Alene, Spokane, Kootenai, and Kalispel tribes, as well as the bands of the Colville Confederated tribes and the Kootenai-Salish, or Flatheads.

Ironically, the city of Coeur d’Alene and Kootenai County is also a national seat to Aryan white supremacy activities.

Roots from a Different Perspective

“I had a lot of run-ins with people who judged myself and others strictly on the basis of race and social status—which is crazy,” Andersson said of her experiences in Coeur d’Alene. “These relationships and experiences growing up in Idaho were profound, and will impact my entire perspective of humanity ... I guess I learned early on that I did not condone labels.”

The perspective she carried from her youth grew to a strong willingness to experience the world and all humanity with interest and rigor. As her father is from Sweden, Andersson traveled to her family’s native country in 1997 to learn the language and history. She lived in the village of Stöllet, Sweden for one year, and studied in a school with refugees from Bosia, Somalia, and Montenegro.

During her time there, she bonded with her classmates from other countries, but had a difficult time making friends with other Swedes. Nonetheless, Andersson said it was a great time for her to learn more about where her father came from and to establish a stronger relationship with her grandparents.

When she returned, she attended the University of Idaho, where she played on the women’s soccer team. She quit the school after two years. “I got fed up with the scene, the superficialness of the campus and students.”

From Europe to Latin America

After leaving the University of Idaho, she returned abroad. “I was traveling through Europe. I wanted to learn Spanish in Spain, but ran out of money. So I went to Scotland to earn the pound (money).” She worked in a pub and at the Edinborough Fringe Festival until she made enough money to continue her travels.

From Europe, she found her way to Latin America. “I wanted to continue to broaden my horizons, even though I wasn’t in (a) university. I wanted to learn Spanish,” Andersson said. And she did ultimately achieve her goal to learn the language, spending time in the highlands of Guatemala. There, she worked with a non-governmental organization called El Centro Experimental para el Desarrollo de la Pequeña y Mediana Empresa Rural Sociedad Civil (CEDEPEM)—an organization involved with Indigenous rights, social and environmental issues.

Somewhere in the midst of her travels, she heard about IAIA from a friend while attending a session of the National Congress of American Indians in Spokane, Wash., in 2001. “I met a recruiter from IAIA who encouraged me to apply–to send in a portfolio, so I did,” Andersson said.

Transcending Boundaries

She confessed that her interest in IAIA at the time was based more on location than a “calling” or thought-out professional plan. “I didn’t really know about writing or what I wanted to do. I just wanted to get out of Idaho.”

She was in Mexico when she called home and heard the news from her mother that she’d been accepted to IAIA. “I just went back to Idaho, packed up my things, and drove down!”

Although she was nervous her first day on the IAIA campus in Fall 2002, she soon found herself at ease. According to Andersson, “The energy on campus was really welcoming.”

“(I) didn't see myself as any different than any Native student I would potentially encounter at IAIA,” Andersson said. She looked at her involvement as a student, and that of other students, with an attitude of equality.

Andersson recalls moments, however, when her “non-Native status” became an issue among her peers or faculty, and there were heated debates in certain classes. Students would discuss, for example, the validity of non-Native writers writing on Native issues; feelings and opinions were sometimes quite passionate.

“But in the end they were debates that needed to happen,” Andersson said. She emphasized the importance of dialogue, rather than dwelling on the conflict.

Birth Into a New World

While taking part in cultural discussions that were in stark contrast to the “superficialness” of her previous college experience, it was also in her studies at IAIA that Andersson was exposed to a new world—the open expanse of poetry.
Among her most important experiences at IAIA, Andersson noted with a firm declaration, “Poetry! I didn't really know to what extent it existed prior to IAIA.”

Her immersion in this newfound realm and the time she invested to develop skills have paid off: She was recently accepted to the master of fine arts program at New York University.

Her immediate plans have recently changed, however, and Andersson deferred her attendance to NYU for one year, until Fall 2008—for good reason. Namely, to spend time with her newborn son, Aksel Yacine Boukhalfa, who was born in April.

“Aksel has impacted every avenue of my life ... his existence will only make the journey more interesting!” Andersson said. With slate-blue eyes the color of his mother’s, Aksel is a mirror of his mother’s unified view of the world: “His father is Hakim Boukhalfa, from Algeria… so we have a Swedish-African-American child!”

Living her beliefs in education and through her new family, Andersson can truly say of her newborn son, “He's nothing but peace.”

Academics Grounded in Humanity

Britta Andersson takes many memorable experiences from IAIA as she graduates this spring. Some of her highlights were Stephen Fadden’s amazing ability to tell stories, the community gatherings, barbeques, graduation ceremonies, and lunches.

Above all, and perhaps underlying it all, she considers the relationships she developed here as the most important. “I realized that the Native environment is much more supportive and community-oriented than most communities I have experienced,” she said.

She mentioned the “friendships, friendships, friendships… many beautiful, beautiful friendships” and “a sense of community and support among the students and faculty” as essential aspects of her undergraduate work at IAIA, along with her discovery of poetry.

Andersson plans to continue writing, reading, and following the work of her peers at IAIA “as they grow in their ability to express and create poetic works that will impact Native and non-Native poetics.”

We may wonder how IAIA with educational opportunities from a Native perspective would appeal to a student like Andersson: traveler, poet, new mother, half-Swedish, of “non Native status” from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.

We find clues in her personal vision for her future and that of her family: “Live a simple life, and maintain an open perspective on the world.”

Chameleon - Poem by Britta Andersson

Your voice is a chameleon on an adobe wall.  Red midday, then brown, and black when clouds suffocate the moon’s white spine from your back.  The color of Kawabata’s tongue and James Dean’s lips; somewhere between pink and orange and the hour the sun boils itself toward the shade of a droughted pinon.  What cruel tones that wear the pigments of sounds like a scouring pad on skin.  I am easily removed from who I am and you, as your voice swarms beneath my hands like a plastic bag through wind.  Where did you learn that language of unscathed shadows and blooming plums?  What was the temperature the second day you recognized their ghosts in your closet?  I listen for no mouth, not even the faceless alphabet of your many names, but when it is twilight and I am drenched in the scent of books, your echo mutates and enters.    Copyright © Britta Andersson 2007

 

Copyright © 2007 IAIA Chronicle