When Tony Showa, a Navajo Indian, moved to Indiana a few years ago, he expected to find a community of Amercian Indians.

But the reality stood in stark contrast to his expectations.

"It's a whole lot different," he said. "I thought being here in Indiana, which means 'Land of Indians,' there would be more of us."

Many years ago, there were.

But in 2007, roughly 40,000 Hoosiers claim American Indian heritage -- less than 1 percent of the state's population. Among those, only about 17,000 are full-blooded. Marion County is home to approximately 3,000 American Indians.

There are no Indian reservations in Indiana today, and no federally recognized tribe. This isn't for lack of trying; the Miami Nation of Indiana, which represents the largest American Indian presence in Indiana, has been fighting for tribal recognition for nearly 30 years to no avail.

Among the other American Indians represented in the state are the Delaware, Kickapoo, Piankashaw, Potawatomi, Shawnee and Wea.

This weekend, a pow wow will be held at Eagle Creek celebrating American Indian culture, customs and traditions. In that spirit, INtake sought out local American Indians and asked them what folks should know about their culture. Among the many answers was one common refrain: We're still here.

Tony Showa

Tony Showa, 48, spent his childhood in Los Angeles. He fondly remembers how, twice a year, his family would pack up the car and drive eastward toward the clear skies of the Navajo Reservation in Arizona.

"It was back in the '60s and early '70s," he said. "We would pile into the Chevy Rambler, tie an ice-filled canvas bag to the front of the radiator and head out to the desert."

Showa, 48, has lived in various parts of the country since then, including San Diego and on the East Coast. Now a student at Indiana Wesleyan University, Showa is a member of a Pow Wow drum group and oversees spiritual ceremonies in traditional American Indian sweat lodges.

Despite the small number of American Indians in the area, Showa said he managed to gradually connect with others in the community.

"I find them," he said. "And they kind of find me, too. It's just that way. They see me and say, 'Hey, you are a brother.' "

Showa practices his spirituality with other Indians in sweat lodges -- dome-shaped saunas believed to cleanse the body, spirit and mind. It's a ritual he embraced after turning his back on Catholicism in his early 20s.

"My mother was Catholic; she still is," he said. "I was an altar boy; I went through confirmation. But it just didn't work for me -- their ideas, their thoughts, their way of praying. I am not saying it's not good, but there are different ways of praying. There is no right way and no wrong way."

Showa said that the American Indian community in Indianapolis is far smaller and more fractured than the one he knew on the West Coast, where there are "a lot more full-bloods." Also, he said, there are more Caucasians claiming to be American Indians in Indiana.

Showa said he understands that not all American Indians will look like him. It only becomes a problem when non-Indians don't have the best interests of the American Indian community in mind.

"I think the bottom line is, whether full-blooded, or half, or quarter, or even 1/32nd -- all of that is not the real issue," he said.

"The real issue is when a person isn't honest about it to get control of something. Maybe they want to say they are a chief, maybe they want to control financial stuff, maybe they want to get money. The bottom line is, they aren't being true to themselves. I would not say this is a common problem, but I have seen it here in Indiana."

Natalie McCabe

Natalie McCabe, 24, grew up on an Ojibwe reserve in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. Although she recalls her childhood fondly, she also remembers being viewed as a second-class citizen by some of her white neighbors.

"If you were brown, you were stereotyped in certain ways," she said.

Not long before her time, non-Indians who visited the area regarded the Ojibwe Indians as a tourist attraction -- curious relics of a bygone era.

"When my mom was growing up, tourists would stop in their cars and get all of the kids to line up so they could take pictures," she said.

McCabe, who has traveled extensively outside her reserve, knew that broader minds existed elsewhere. But even in Indianapolis, where she now lives as she pursues an art degree at IUPUI, she has encountered stereotypes. It's a reflection of an all-too-common assumption that all American Indians are a variation of the chief who famously shed a tear in a 1970s public service announcement against littering.

"Some people that aren't native really want to grasp the spirituality of being native," she said. "And because I'm native, they expect me to be into being one with the Earth."

And she does take her actions into consideration when it comes to the Earth. "I make a commitment to recycling, and, growing up, there were certain traditions we did to replenish the earth when we took from it -- like if we took a tree, we would plant another one."

But McCabe, like other young American Indians, lives her life just like anyone else: She listens to iPods, surfs the Internet and goes out with friends.

McCabe recently began an internship at the Eiteljorg Museum and is active with the Native American Student Association (NASA) at IUPUI. She said the group has been hard at work trying to increase relations with other minority groups as well as with the community of Miami Indians in Indiana. NASA also has helped her feel more at home while living a world away from the reserve.

Going so far from home has broadened McCabe's view of her own ethnic background.

"It's kind of strange," she said. "I never realized the extent of my Indianness until I moved here. When I grew up, I was so immersed in my own culture that I was, in a way, unaware of the differences of my culture versus other cultures."

Jody Rust

Jody Rust, 36, is part Cherokee, but her heart lies with the Navajo nation.

Rust spent more than two years teaching on a Navajo reservation after graduating from Indiana University in 1994. Although she now lives in Indianapolis and works as a case manager for the American Indian Center of Indiana, her two young daughters -- Mercedes Rust and Trinity Bitsui, both of whom are half Navajo -- will always tie her to the Navajo tradition.

Working at the American Indian Center, Rust is charged with the responsibility of helping local American Indians with health, employment and housing issues. In her time working in Indianapolis, Rust says she's noticed an alarming lack of knowledge about American Indians among non-Indians. For example, she said, classmates of one of her daughters recently refused to believe that Indians still existed.

Rust thinks the problem is symptomatic of textbooks failing to address the condition of the modern American Indian.

"I think what's missing in our education system is an understanding of what it means not just to have been an American Indian, but also what it means to be an American Indian today," she said.

As a predominantly Caucasian woman, Rust is well aware of the challenges she faces as a crusader for American Indian causes.

"There are a lot of people who might say, 'Why is she working at the American Indian Center if she's Caucasian?' " she said. "I don't go around saying I'm part Cherokee, because the stereotype is that everybody says they have Cherokee in them. But I don't really understand what's wrong with that."

In her opinion, disputes over degrees of Indianness may help explain why the American Indian community lacks a sense of unity in the area.

"It's one of the reasons why you might not hear the Indian community speaking with one voice," she said. "One of the things we want to push forward is overcoming that -- saying that it doesn't really matter so much to what degree you're native."

But Rust acknowledged that the enormous amount of diversity among different American Indian tribes makes unity inherently difficult.

"The tribes are all very different," she said. "They all have their own cultures, their own governments and their own ceremonies."

Despite the challenges ahead, Rust is optimistic about the future of the American Indian community. She pointed out that it is growing, and that the new Native American Commission of Indiana -- a governor-appointed committee of American Indian advocates chaired by Miami Nation Chief Brian Buchanan -- is gaining steam.

But she thinks the best recipe for social progress is good old-fashioned socialization.

"To understand any group, you've got to spend time with them," she said. "The whole idea behind integration is to mix groups that don't typically mix, and by doing that, things that weren't normal become normal."

Getting people to mix is the biggest challenge of all, she said.

"We're not there yet. We segregate ourselves. We all do, that's where we're comfortable. If you look at Indy, segregation still happens. Hopefully, it will change with time."