cultural autobiography

it's raining, it's pouring the old man is snoring!! i woke up to a thunderstorm today. i like the rain, and thunderstorms, so i'm excited!!! ok, i'll get to my point now...

so i'm in a multicultural psych class, and we have to write a cultural autobiography. and i just don't even know how to approach it! i mean culture shapes everything!! and the thing about it is that when it's your own culture, you don't even realize how much it does shape you!! it sounds like such a cool idea for an assignment, yet i'm having some trouble getting started.

k i've grown up in rural Utah my whole life, surrounded by the LDS (Mormon) culture. my family was sorta Mormon, but not practicing. we never went to church or anything. my mom's parents were really, really into the LDS church and tried to bribe me to read the Book of Mormon as a kid! lol! most of the people i knew were Mormon, so Mormonism has been a big influence. and i was involved in the LDS church between the ages of 12 and about 17 or 18. i'm mostly white. my mom is completely white. i'm also part Native American, though. my dad is Native American. he has some white blood, too, but culturally and appearance-wise, he's mostly Native. or at least we was before he left the reservation. his whole family is either still on his reservation, or on another and they all married other Natives from various tribes. he's pretty acculturated for the most part now, into Utah Mormon culture. a lot of people growing up considered me Native American and i experienced a lot of racism, but now that i'm in college and around people who don't know my dad and have seen full-blood Native Americans more, generally people always consider me white. i look like my mom, and i'm very pale.

so i know the Utah thing, the Mormon thing, the white/Native mix, and the rural area are all things i should talk about. but trying to think in specifics how it has shaped me is kinda hard.

<font color="yellow"> i was just wondering, if anyone feels so inclined to share what kinds of stuff would you guys put in if you were writing a cultural autobiography? </font>

This is interesting, Angela. I was raised mostly by my Hungarian dad, who not only was from a different culture, he was also much older when he had me. So I also have a generational gap in addition to a cultural gap. My mom was born in the US but her parents were Macedonian. Most of my cultural influence was from my dad's side. I'll write about how this influenced me a little later -- I'm going to give it some thought first.

ooh, cool! i look forward to hearing it!!