Leaving the rez is a lot like defecting from the army. Being an Indian is a lot like being drafted, for that matter. We’re chosen people, fighting for our nation’s sovereignty, and a dying breed....

We’ve heard your rhetoric, white person, and we’re still not buying the idiots who prevail in popular culture today....

There’s a stigma that Indians where I’m from are broken and dirty. Maybe it’s the water. We boiled water most of my life on the rez because that’s how Mom said she got hepatitis....

Editor’s Note: The following was previously published in The Burrow Press Review....

When I was a little girl it wasn’t unusual to be on my mother’s lap while she spoke to women at the shelter she worked at, or facilitated healing circles, or held a ceremony for women who were victims of sexual violence. I remember their stories, their cries, and their hopes for the future....

Change doesn’t end with a court ruling....

Once on the rez I was walking my baby to a Christmas dinner when a matriarch in my community scolded me for not putting a blanket on my baby. I was shamed, and rightfully so, because nobody with a good grandma would let their baby leave the house uncovered in the cold....

Cecil the lion has me rethinking my style choices. I might opt for some hair teasing and furry suits. Maybe we’ve been going about ‘Native Lives Matter,’ all wrong. We’re silly to think the public would care about brown bodies—let’s be cats instead....

I was raised to be angry at white women. I’m not blaming it on my mom, but she often said white people brought genocide and disease. “We didn’t even have rats,” she said. “They brought them on their boats!” Smallpox this, she said, colonization that....

Watching two Native academics come to a consensus about Andrea Smith is like watching two eagles fight. No, wait, I mean egos. After Andrea Smith was outed for the second time as being non-Native, several Native academics leapt to save her from scrutiny....