July 13 has been one of those dates for me ever since 2009, when my sister died at just 37 years old.

Every year, when July 13 arrives, I think about her. I don’t have to look at a calendar. My heart remembers before my mind does.

This year, my friend Joe Caldwell died on Monday, July 13.

He was 97 years old.

Seventeen years apart.

My sister at 37. Joe at 97.

I don’t know what meaning to make from that. Sometimes a date is simply asked to hold more sorrow than seems fair.

But I know that July 13 will now carry them both.

More Than Barnabas Collins

By the time the news began appearing in the entertainment press, Joe was being remembered as the acclaimed novelist, playwright and television writer who helped create Barnabas Collins, the reluctant vampire who transformed Dark Shadows into a cultural phenomenon. Deadline and Variety wrote about his death and the remarkable career he carved out. He had won the Rome Prize for Literature. He wrote novels, plays, television scripts and a memoir. His books included The Pig Trilogy and In the Shadow of the Bridge, his deeply personal account of gay and artistic life in New York.

The headlines understandably led with Dark Shadows. Joe joined the writing staff in 1967 and, with Ron Sproat, developed Barnabas Collins, portrayed by Jonathan Frid. The character became the show’s breakout sensation and endured long after the original series ended.

Joe understood the deeper meaning of what he and Sproat had created: an outsider forced to conceal his nature, longing for intimacy while living under the constant threat of discovery. They wrote Barnabas as a “reluctant” vampire, a lonely man who was filled with shame over his bloodlust, and who had to hide his true identity from those who knew him.

In his memoir, Joe took particular satisfaction in the fact that the program’s homophobic producer achieved his greatest success through a character knowingly created by two gay men—two writers who had placed something of their own hidden struggle inside that reluctant vampire.

I love that.

I love the wit of it. The defiance. The subtle act of slipping truth into popular culture through a character millions of people invited into their homes every afternoon.

Joe knew something about shadows—about the lives people were required to live inside them, and about the art they made there.

But he also knew how to step into the light.

He wrote. He taught. He loved. He told the truth about his life.

That’s all true, yes.

He also lived a life of service. You see, I knew Joe from the soup kitchen.

And that is what I want people to know about him too.

I began volunteering at St. Joe’s Soup Kitchen in the West Village in 2022. Joe had been there for decades before I arrived. St. Joe’s began serving meals fifty years ago, and for most of its history Saturday was the day: every Saturday, week after week, people came through the doors to be fed. Joe kept coming too.

People who were at the soup kitchen much longer than I have been are grieving a relationship built across decades. They knew Joe through thousands of Saturdays, through changes in location and leadership, through ordinary conversations and major events. They watched each other grow older. They became family through the steady repetition of showing up.

I love Joe, and I miss him already.

I also understand that there are people at St. Joe’s whose grief carries forty or nearly fifty years of memories. There are volunteers who cannot picture the kitchen without him because, for most of their lives there, they never had to.

A soup kitchen is built to answer an immediate need: someone is hungry, so you feed them.

But over time, something else is created. A community. Friends who become family.

Nearly half a century of Saturdays.

A celebrated writer who had lived among some of the most fascinating artists and literary figures of his generation still understood that there was work to be done close to home. People needed a meal. Tables needed attention. A community needed people who could be counted on.

And Joe could be counted on.

Joe was brilliant, funny, and gloriously sharp. He loved telling stories, and after 97 years, he certainly had plenty of them. You could be doing something completely ordinary at the soup kitchen and suddenly find yourself listening to a story about another New York, another era, or one of the remarkable people who had passed through his life.

He also loved practicing his Italian with me and some of the other volunteers. Joe delighted in trying out words and phrases whenever he had the opportunity. He would speak carefully, waiting to see whether he had gotten it right, and then look pleased with himself when he had.

And when the weather began turning cooler in the fall, Joe loved his hot chocolate. It was such a simple pleasure, but now I can picture him with it so clearly. That’s how someone remains with you after they’re gone—not only through the prestigious accomplishments or the stories that make the newspapers, but through the small things. A warm cup of hot chocolate. A few words of Italian. Another story he was eager to tell.

He was affectionately known as our favorite curmudgeon.

It took me some time to understand just how extraordinary the man standing (and more often sitting) beside me week after week really was. At the soup kitchen, nobody introduced Joe by listing his awards or television credits. He was simply Joe. Then, little by little, I began discovering the rest.

He had lived through nearly a century of New York, art, literature, television, friendship, love, loss, and significant social change. He belonged to a generation of gay artists who built lives and created work in a world that often demanded silence from them. His memoir became an important record of the changing gay and artistic life of New York, including the devastating years when AIDS took so many people from that community.

The Years So Many Did Not Survive

Joe lived through the AIDS crisis in New York, although saying he “lived through it” does not fully describe what that meant.

He survived years in which friends, lovers, artists and entire circles of gay men seemed to disappear one after another. People were becoming seriously ill while the government remained largely indifferent and much of the public responded with fear, judgment or cruelty. Families sometimes stayed away. Obituaries avoided naming AIDS. Men cared for one another in hospital rooms and apartments because, far too often, nobody else would.

Joe was HIV negative and did not stand at a safe distance from any of it.

In the early 1980s, he volunteered at St. Vincent’s Hospital, which became one of the central places caring for people with AIDS in New York. He worked directly with patients as a one-on-one caregiver. He sat with people, offered companionship and helped care for men confronting an illness that was still poorly understood and heavily stigmatized. At a time when many people were frightened even to enter the room of someone with AIDS, Joe went into those rooms willingly.

That tells me a great deal about him.

It is one thing to say you care about a community. It’s another to sit beside someone who is sick when the rest of the world has decided that person is disposable.

And then the crisis became even more personal.

Years earlier, Joe had fallen deeply in love with the photographer Gale after meeting him on the Brooklyn Bridge in 1959. Their relationship was brief, but Gale remained part of Joe’s emotional life for decades—what Joe later described in his memoir as a kind of longing for a return that could never quite happen.

When they found one another again many years later, Gale had AIDS.

Joe became his live-in caregiver during the final months of his life.

He did the intimate, exhausting and often invisible work of caring for a dying person. He managed the daily realities of illness while also carrying the complicated history between them: the love that had once existed, the years of distance and whatever hope remained that emotional closeness might somehow return before time ran out.

Joe did not write about those years as though he had been a heroic figure sweeping into the room. He wrote about love, grief, responsibility and the difficult truth that caring for someone does not erase the complexity of the relationship. He wrote with such visceral honesty.

He had already volunteered beside people with AIDS at St. Vincent’s, but no amount of experience could fully prepare him to watch someone he had loved die from the disease.

Joe survived the epidemic, but he did not emerge untouched. Nobody who lived through those years and loved within that community did.

He carried the names of people who were gone.

He carried the memory of hospital rooms and apartments where friends became nurses, advocates, cooks, companions and witnesses because so many institutions had failed them.

He carried the knowledge that survival can be accompanied by gratitude, grief and even guilt—that growing older is a gift, but it can also mean becoming the keeper of stories belonging to people who never had that chance.

Perhaps that is part of why Joe continued to serve people for the rest of his life.

The man I knew at St. Joe’s Soup Kitchen had already spent years showing up for people whom society preferred not to see. During the AIDS crisis, he sat beside the sick and cared for the dying. Later, at the soup kitchen, he continued offering people his time, attention, and treating everyone with dignity.

The circumstances were different, but the instinct was the same.

Joe went toward people.

A Faith That Chose Compassion

Joe’s commitment to justice and service was deeply shaped by his Catholic faith and by the teachings of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement. But his understanding of faith didn’t begin with theology or doctrine. It began at home.

In his memoir, In the Shadow of the Bridge, Joe wrote that being Catholic felt as intrinsic to him as being Irish or being gay.

“I am close to being a congenital Catholic... it’s almost encoded in my genes to the same degree and with the same imperatives as my homosexuality.”

That sentence is powerful because his faith truly shaped the way he moved through the world.

The greatest lesson came from his mother.

As a young man, Joe once challenged her about a woman they had welcomed into their home. He believed she had recently had an abortion, and he expected his deeply Catholic mother to condemn her.

Instead, she quietly replied that if that were true, then the woman needed their love and support more than ever.

Joe wrote that the moment transformed his understanding of faith forever.

He realized that the Catholicism his mother practiced wasn’t about guilt, punishment, or deciding who was worthy of compassion.

It was about caring.

As Joe later wrote:

“It was not about sin and guilt and judgement. It was about caring—a simple caring for those most in need, no matter what.”

When I read those words, so much about Joe suddenly made sense.

Of course he cared for men dying of AIDS when so much of society turned its back on them.

Of course he spent nearly fifty Saturdays every year serving meals to strangers, who we at St Joe’s refer to as our neighbors.

He wasn’t trying to earn goodness.

He was simply living the lesson his mother had taught him as a boy.

Looking back, I don’t think Joe ever separated his faith from his service. They were one and the same.

And in a world that often mistakes religion for judgment, Joe practiced something much rarer.

Compassion.

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Joe and James

Joe had also been friends with James Baldwin.

That sentence almost sounds too extraordinary to be casually placed in the middle of this piece, but Joe’s life was filled with details like that.

He did not meet Baldwin as the towering literary figure we recognize today; the author whose words are now quoted in classrooms, documentaries, protests and speeches. Joe knew him earlier, when they were young writers in New York, moving through the same artistic and social world and trying to understand what kind of lives they might be able to build.

Both were attempting to write honestly in a culture that gave them very little room to do so.

Baldwin was Black and gay in an America that was determined to punish him for both. Joe was also a young gay writer during a time when being open could cost a person employment, housing, family, safety and sometimes freedom. Gay men learned to recognize one another through glances and carefully chosen words. They found community in certain bars, restaurants, apartments and creative circles—places where they could briefly stop pretending.

Joe remembered those years in his memoir In the Shadow of the Bridge, including his early friendship with Baldwin and the writers, actors and artists who gathered around them. It was a different New York: apartments could still be rented for almost nothing (24 dollars, Joe recalled), young artists survived on very little, and extraordinary conversations unfolded in inexpensive restaurants and smoky Village bars.

I try to imagine the two of them then.

Two young men with enormous talent, little money, and no certainty that the world would ever make room for their voices.

They could not have known where their work would lead. They could not have known that Baldwin would become one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century, or that Joe would help create a television character who would remain part of popular culture for generations.

They were simply young writers talking about books, art, love, sex, fear and the complicated business of becoming themselves.

It places Joe inside a particular history of New York: a community of gay artists who found one another when the larger world often demanded that they remain hidden. They shared ideas, encouraged one another, argued, laughed, fell in love and made art from lives that society frequently refused to acknowledge.

Baldwin would eventually leave the United States for France, seeking enough distance from American racism to be able to write about it clearly. His work would confront race, sexuality, religion, love and the terrible damage caused when people are forced to deny the truth of themselves.

Joe’s work travelled a different path, but he too understood what it meant to live in the shadows.

My Mentor, My Friend

Joe was not only my friend. He became a mentor to me as a writer.

I talked with him about my own work; the novel I have been writing over the last 10 years, the frustrations that come with it, the doubts, the questions, and the stubborn hope that keeps a writer returning to the page. Joe understood all of that. After nine published novels, a memoir, plays, and decades of writing for television, he knew that writing was not simply about talent. It was about persistence, honesty and the willingness to keep going.

There was something especially meaningful about being able to talk with him writer to writer.

I had met Joe through service, not publishing. By the time I fully understood the scope of his literary life, I already knew the man. That made his encouragement matter even more. He was not some distant celebrated author offering polite advice. He was my friend, sitting beside me, asking about my work and taking it seriously.

Then Joe entrusted me with his final manuscript.

Even now, writing that sentence feels monumental.

He asked me to share it with my literary agent, Charlotte Sheedy. The manuscript is a memoir titled The Most Fortunate Writer I Know—a title with the kind of wit and self-awareness that was so unmistakably Joe.

In the email he sent for me to share with Charlotte, Joe explained the idea behind it in his own words:

“The manuscript I’d like you to consider is a memoir titled The Most Fortunate Writer I Know—who turns out to be me—and it’s my intention to validate the title by revealing myself to the reader.”

He traced the idea back to something he had written years earlier while reviewing a biography of Eugene O’Neill for The Village Voice:

“If you want to know O’Neill, see or read his plays. If you want to know about O’Neill, read this book.”

Joe hoped readers would come to know him through his writing: his nine published novels, his earlier memoir and now this final manuscript.

He also returned to something he had once told his first editor when asked what he wanted his work to be:

“Honest, accurate, and interesting.”

That was Joe’s standard.

It is a deceptively simple description of what good writing should be, but it is also much harder than it sounds. Honesty requires courage. Accuracy requires discipline. Being interesting requires a writer to understand that truth alone is not enough; you must find the shape that allows another person to enter it.

Joe did that throughout his life.

He wrote honestly about being gay, about faith, love, longing, friendship, aging, loss and the complicated people who shaped him. He preserved parts of New York history that might otherwise have vanished. He turned his own life into stories without pretending it had been tidy or uncomplicated.

The fact that he trusted me with this final work means more than I can properly explain.

There is something sacred about being handed another writer’s unpublished words, particularly when those words may be among the last he completed. It is an act of trust. Joe believed I would place the manuscript in the right hands and advocate for it.

I intend to honour that trust.

So perhaps this is not the final word from Joseph Caldwell.

Perhaps there is still more of Joe’s voice waiting to reach readers.

Please stay tuned.

There may yet be another book from the most fortunate writer he knew—who turned out, of course, to be Joe himself.

The Sunday Before

I went to see Joe on Sunday, July 12.

He had taken a fall several months ago and was living in an elder-care facility in Brooklyn. His nephew was there visiting from Milwaukee, trying to coax him awake by pointing out that a pretty woman had come to visit.

I laughed and told him that was probably not going to do it.

I suggested that a few handsome, strapping firemen might give Joe a better reason to rally.

That was the kind of joke I could make with Joe and about Joe with affection. Joe had lived too honestly and too fully for anyone to become coy about who he was at 97.

There was tenderness in that room. There was also humor, because humor is often how love survives the unbearable parts.

I didn’t know it was the last time I would see him.

We rarely do.

Joe died the next morning.

I am deeply grateful that I went on Sunday.

I am grateful I saw him and was able to tell him how much he is loved.

Every July 13, I’ll think about my sister. Now I’ll think about Joe, too.

Both taught me something about love.

Both changed me.

Honoring Joe

If you'd like to honor Joe, read him. Read one of his nine novels, including The Uncle from Rome, In Such Dark Places, The Deer at the River, Lazarus Rising and the wonderfully titled Pig Trilogy: The Pig Did It, The Pig Comes to Dinner and The Pig Goes to Hog Heaven.

Read his beautiful memoir, In the Shadow of the Bridge.

And if you want to learn more about the remarkable life behind the gentle man I knew from St. Joe's, I've included the recent article by the Bay Area Reporter about his memoir. (Dark shadows & radiant light: Joseph Caldwell’s memoir ‘In the Shadow of the Bridge’).

Deadline wrote about him, and Variety did as well.

If you have the opportunity to be of service in your community, that would also honor this incredibly compassionate man.

If you have the means, please feel free to donate to St Joe’s Soup Kitchen

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Joe would probably be amused that people are still discovering him at 97. I have a feeling he'd be even happier if folks volunteered in his honor.

When autumn comes, I will think of Joe and his hot chocolate.

The timing is not lost on me.

Three Emmys. It’s impressive for a film about Bigfoot, but really, it’s not about Bigfoot in the way most people have been taught to think about Bigfoot.

The film is a 24-minute OPB Oregon Experience documentary directed by LaRonn Katchia, who is Warm Springs, Wasco, and Paiute. It looks at Bigfoot, or Istiyehe, through the Indigenous peoples of the Nch’i-Wána, the Columbia River. It features Acosia Red Elk, Toma Villa, Carlos Calica, and Phillip Cash Cash. It brings in oral history, dance, carving, masks, land, sound, memory, and something that cannot be explained by the usual little box the outside world likes to put our stories in.

There is a connection between the film and these wildfires raging across Canada right now. Guardian of the Land is not just saying, “Here is an Indigenous view of Bigfoot.” It’s saying, pay attention. There are older ways of knowing. There are responsibilities that come with being human. There are beings and spirits and teachings that remind us not to take more than we need.

And now it’s been recognized with Emmys for directing, photography, and historical/cultural long-form storytelling.

I think that’s worth celebrating.

While the Land Burns

A film about protecting the land is being honored while climate change is wreaking havoc.

And not in some distant, abstract, “climate change is bad” kind of way. I mean devastating wildfires that have destroyed First Nation communities.

As of mid-July, Canada had more than 850 active wildfires burning, with more than 100 of them listed as out of control. More than 2.3 million hectares had already burned. The United States is fighting 68 large fires of its own. The smoke does not care about borders. Neither does climate change.

And as usual, First Nations are carrying too much of it.

Since April 1, Indigenous Services Canada reported 54 wildland fires affecting 52 First Nations on reserve or eligible under EMAP, with 4,780 First Nations people evacuated. As of July 15 alone, 16 First Nations were being impacted by wildfires, and 1,600 people were evacuated from First Nations communities.

First Nations Burning

Namaygoosisagagun First Nation, also known as Collins First Nation, was devastated by a fast-moving wildfire near Armstrong in northwestern Ontario. People had only minutes to evacuate. Some fled by boat as the fire came toward them. Chief Helen Paavola said the entire community was destroyed in less than an hour.

Less than an hour.

Whitesand First Nation, Lac des Mille Lacs First Nation, Gakijiwanong Anishinaabe Nation, Gull Bay First Nation, Armstrong, and other northern Ontario communities have all been part of the evacuation emergency. Chiefs of Ontario also named Namaygoosisagagun, Whitesand, Kiashke Zaaging Anishinaabek, and Animbiigoo Zaagi’igan Anishinaabek as Nations being held in prayer and support as the crisis unfolds.

This is the part people miss when they talk about wildfires.

These fires don’t land evenly. Climate change doesn’t land evenly.

It follows the old colonial roads. Or maybe better said, the lack of roads. It hits communities that already deal with underfunded infrastructure, limited emergency access, housing issues, and sometimes poor communication systems.

First Nations make up about 5 percent of Canada’s population, but the federal government has estimated that First Nations communities account for 42 percent of wildfire-related evacuations.

Forty-two percent is not a coincidence.

It’s a pattern built on colonialism.

Remote communities did not become remote by accident. Infrastructure gaps did not appear out of nowhere. The fact that some communities have to evacuate by boat, train, plane, or whatever is available is not some romantic northern survival story. It’s by design.

Smoke from Canadian wildfires has been drifting across provinces, across borders, into cities that suddenly discover air quality when it reaches them. Toronto. Detroit. Chicago. New York. Suddenly everyone is looking at the sky.

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When Climate Change Follows Colonial Lines

When people hear “remote First Nation,” I think they sometimes imagine a community that simply chose to be far away.

That’s not the whole story.

Many First Nations were not “remote” in the way governments talk about them now. They were placed there. Pushed there. Boxed in there. Cut off there.

Our people had territories. Trade routes, seasonal camps, waterways, hunting grounds, sugar bushes, fishing places, burial grounds, relationships with land that were wide and alive and practical. Then came treaties that were ignored, broken, or weaponized. Then came reservations (called reserves in Canada), often small pieces of land compared to the territories people had always lived with and cared for. Then came the Indian Act, government agents, churches, railways, mining, logging, roads built around us instead of for us, and policies that made Native people strangers on our own homelands.

So when a fire comes now, it’s not just a natural disaster.

It’s a natural disaster hitting a colonial design.

That’s what I hope people understand.

If a First Nation has one road in and one road out, that’s not an accident.

If the only way to evacuate is by plane, train, boat, or waiting for someone else to decide help is coming, that’s not an accident.

If a community has limited housing, limited fire breaks, limited local emergency resources, unreliable communication, or no nearby hospital, that’s not because Indigenous people failed to prepare.

It’s because Canada has spent generations underfunding the very communities that were already carrying the heaviest load.

And then climate change shows up and exposes every crack.

The fire moves fast, smoke comes in, the power goes out, and the phones stop working.

Elders need medication. Children are scared. Pets are left behind.

People are sent hundreds or sometimes thousands of miles away from home, often to hotels in cities where they do not know anyone, carrying grief in plastic bags and backpacks.

It’s not just evacuation. For Native people, removal from home has a much older echo.

Because when First Nations are evacuated from wildfire zones, it’s not just about leaving a house. It’s about being taken from land that holds your dead, your stories, your medicines, your language, your food systems, your ceremonies, your sense of who you are. We believe that we are not separate from the land. I say again, the community of Namaygoosisagagun First Nation has been completely destroyed. Gone.

So when I say First Nations are hit hardest by climate change, I don’t mean we are weak. We are not.

What I mean is we have been made vulnerable by systems that took land, restricted movement, and underfunded infrastructure.

Our communities have always known how to live with the land.

But no people can be expected to carry colonialism, climate change, fire, smoke, evacuation, and government delay all at once, and then be told to be resilient.

Resilience is not the problem.

Neglect is.

And that’s why the teaching of Istiyehe (Big Foot, or in Ojibway we say Gichi Sabe) feels so urgent to me right now.

So when I think about Guardian of the Land winning three Emmys, I’m not just thinking about a beautiful film.

I’m thinking about the teaching.

In our Ojibway teachings, Gichi Sabe is spirit and protector.

My Nation’s Knowledge Keeper (you might say Medicine Man/ Holy Man) has told me that Gichi Sabe can walk between worlds — between this physical world and the spirit world. He is a protector of our people and a protector of the land. Giche Sabe teaches us to be honest with each other and all our relatives (including Mother Earth).

Gichi Sabe protects the land. But the teaching also asks: who else is protecting it?

We must also protect the land, as she is our mother.

And so we ask the rest of the world, who is willing to stop treating the land like a warehouse of resources and start treating it like a relative again?

You protect the water because water is life.

You protect the trees because they breathe with us.

You protect the medicines because they heal us.

You protect the animals because they are relatives.

You protect the stories because they tell us how not to lose ourselves.

And you protect the land because the land has been protecting us all along.

Where People Can Help

If people are moved by this, please don’t just sit with the sadness. Help if you can.

For direct support to Namaygoosisagagun First Nation, donations can be made through the Anishinabek Nation 7th Generation Charity, which has created a dedicated response fund for emergency support and community recovery.

People can also give to the Canadian Red Cross Canadian Wildfire Fund for broader wildfire relief across Canada.

Big news from SiriusXM Progress: The John Fugelsang Show is heading to a new weekday time slot, airing Monday through Friday from 12–3 PM ET.

And because Simon and I are still welcome in that space, We’re Still Here with Simon and Julie is moving too.

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Starting the week of July 13, 2026 (yes, next week), our segment will now air LIVE every Thursday from 2–3 PM ET on SiriusXM Progress Channel 127.

Yes, technically, we have been “relocated.” As Native people, we get to make at least one relocation joke, right?

But in this rare historical twist, this relocation is actually good news!

Moving from 10 PM to 2 PM means more of you may be awake, caffeinated, driving, working, avoiding work, pretending to answer emails, or sitting in your car in a parking lot having a full emotional episode over the state of things before going into the grocery store.

So yes, we’re confident we’ve found our audience.

We are so grateful to for continuing to make space for We’re Still Here, and for believing that Indigenous voices belong in these rooms. Not as a special occasion, not as a heritage month feature, but every week.

This move also means We’re Still Here gets to be part of the new daytime lineup with John and his talented crew, which feels like a big and beautiful step.

John invited us on his show as a weekly segment because Native people are still here in the news, in the culture, in the politics, in the land, in the water, in the stories.

And thanks to him, now sometimes in the SiriusXM studio, causing just enough trouble to keep things interesting.

So: new time slot, same mission. Just earlier in the day.

Catch We’re Still Here with Simon and Julie live every Thursday from 2–3 PM ET on SiriusXM Progress Channel 127 as part of The John Fugelsang Show.

And for those who don’t listen live on SiriusXM, you can catch us as a free podcast at this link — or wherever you get your podcasts:

We’re Still Here.

Or maybe I should say that better. He joined his ancestors.

That feels more true to who he was. Because Gordon was never just someone we “lost,” as if he disappeared from the story. He is still very much in the story.

And today, I’ve been thinking about him.

Gordon Tootoosis was a celebrated Cree actor, a familiar face to so many people.

But even that feels too small. Because Gordon Tootoosis was never just an actor.

He was a citizen of the Cree Nation, and he was a residential school survivor. He was an activist, a social worker, a mentor, and a band chief. He was also a dancer, a horseman, a powwow announcer, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and one of those Native men who could walk into a room and make you understand that he carried a whole world with him.

You know, the kind of person who has survived things and has absolutely no time for foolishness. That is a very specific Native uncle energy.

Gordon had it. Graham Green had it too.

A lot of us knew Gordon from the role of Albert Golo on North of 60. And if you’re Native and of a certain generation, you know that seeing an Indigenous person on television used to feel like an event. It still does, but not as much as it did twenty or thirty years ago.

These days, you can turn on a show and sometimes, Creator be praised, actual Native people are playing Native people, written by Native writers, saying things that sound like something a Native person might actually say.

Back then, if a Native person showed up on TV, somebody in the room noticed.

“Hey, that’s Gordon Tootoosis.”

It was important because we were so often invisible. Or dead. Or mystical. Or standing beside a horse, saying something vague about the wind so the white character could learn a lesson.

Hollywood and television really did love that Indian.

Gordon was not that.

Gordon’s character Albert Golo from North of 60 could have been flat in the wrong hands. He could have been another Native stereotype lined up for colonial display.

But Gordon gave him life. Albert was complicated. He could be funny, difficult, wounded, political, frustrating, charming, and fully human.

It was so refreshing to imagine that a Native character was allowed to be a whole person on television.

That may not sound radical now, but it was. Because representation is not about making Native people the stereotype, it’s about letting us be fully human.

That sounds simple, but apparently it took television and film a very long time to catch up. Look at shows like Dark Winds and Reservation Dogs. Gordon helped pave the way.

Gordon knew something about being fully human in a world that had tried very hard to make Native people disappear, shrink, and assimilate.

He Came From Leaders

Gordon came from a powerful family.

He was a descendant of Yellow Mud Blanket, the brother of the great Cree leader Chief Poundmaker, whose name still carries resistance, diplomacy, and survival.

Gordon’s father, John Tootoosis, was a major Indigenous political leader and activist fighting for Indigenous rights. He was one of the founders of the National Indian Brotherhood and a former head of the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations (FSIN). I highly recommend reading about Gordon’s father, John. I’ve provided a link if you want to read more.

Gordon’s sister Jean was one of the first registered Indigenous nurses in Saskatchewan, Canada, and spent much of her life advocating for better health care for First Nations people.

So Gordon didn’t come from nowhere.

Gordon stepped into the frame, but he brought all of that leadership, wisdom, and resistance with him.

What The Government Tried to Take

He was raised in the Plains Cree tradition by his family, including his 13 siblings, while his father was often away doing political work.

Then Gordon was taken from his home and forced to go to a Catholic residential school.

At school, he was forbidden to speak his language. And because his father was an activist, Gordon was treated especially harshly.

These schools knew exactly what they were doing.

They targeted Native families and Native children because they understood that if you could break the child and family, you could wound the Nation.

And in Gordon’s case, they also knew who his father was.

That tells you something.

It tells you this was not only about punishing a child for speaking his language. It was about punishing a family, a political legacy, and a people who refused to be quiet.

But Gordon survived.

The Work Before the Camera

After leaving residential school, he spent his early career as a social worker, specifically focusing on helping at-risk children and young offenders.

He worked with young people who were carrying the weight of the same systems our communities are still trying to survive.

Gordon knew what those young people were carrying because he had carried some of it himself. He knew what Canada and the US had done to our families. He knew what it meant to have language and culture punished.

And instead of letting pain make him distant, he used his life to help young people.

He also served as chief of his community.

And if you know anything about leadership in our communities, you know that it’s not glamorous. It’s about service and taking care of the community, especially the ones who are struggling. If one member of the circle is hurting, we all hurt. So we do our best to make sure no member is hurting.

So when Gordon later became known as an actor, he was not stepping into public life as someone who had no grounding. He had already been doing so much work.

He’d already been carrying community and responsibility.

And that responsibility showed up in his art.

Gordon was also an accomplished Indigenous dancer and rodeo roper. In the 1960s and 1970s, he toured Canada, Europe, and South America with the Plains InterTribal Dance Troupe.

I love thinking about that part of his life because it reminds us that Gordon’s storytelling began in that old way our people have always told stories: with the body, with the drum, with the circle, with the land under our feet.

Before the camera, he was storytelling in arenas.

In 1965, Gordon married Irene Seseequasis. Together they had three daughters and three sons, and they remained married until her death in 1997.

I remember how much admiration I had for Gordon when he shared the story with me about his adult daughter, who died from cancer, and how he raised her children (his grandchildren). It spoke volumes about Gordon and what kind of man he was.

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Storytelling in front of the Camera

His first acting role was in Alien Thunder (Dan Candy’s Law) in 1974, alongside Chief Dan George and Donald Sutherland.

Throughout the 1980s, he took on smaller roles in shows like Airwolf, MacGyver, and the television movie Call of the Wild. And then, in 1992, he became Albert Golo on North of 60.

He appeared in 52 episodes and earned two Gemini nominations (think Emmy nominations but Canadian) for that role.

For Native audiences, Albert Golo was significant because Gordon made him real and not a stereotype. And that sounds like such a small thing until you remember how long Native people were denied even that on screen.

After North of 60, Gordon kept working. He appeared in Legends of the Fall, Big Bear, The Edge, Blackstone, Wapos Bay, Pocahontas, and so many other productions. In 2008, he won a Gemini for his role in Wapos Bay: The Series.

Over his decades-long career, Gordon appeared in more than 40 films, along with television, stage, and voice work. Gordon wasn’t just building a career. He was helping build a path.

It was the kind of career that makes you realize he was helping carve out space where almost none had been made for Native actors.

Gordon Tootoosis as Mentor

Throughout his career, he offered encouragement, support, and training to Indigenous actors in Canada. He knew what it meant to be one of the few Native people in the room. He knew what it meant to walk onto sets where our people had so often been written badly, costumed badly, understood badly, and sometimes not understood at all.

And instead of simply surviving those rooms, he helped make them more possible for the people coming after him.

That’s part of his legacy.

In 1999, with his close friend Tantoo Cardinal, Gordon helped found the Saskatchewan Native Theatre Company.

And that’s another part of his activism that readers may not know.

That company was not just about putting on plays. It was about creating a place where Indigenous youth and artists could train, perform, reconnect with culture, language, history, identity, and story.

Because for so long, the entertainment industry treated Native people like we were only useful as stereotypes.

Put us in buckskin, on a horse, and often in the past.

Gordon was part of building something different.

A space where Indigenous people were not just characters in somebody else’s story, but the keepers of our own.

That’s why I don’t separate Gordon the actor from Gordon the activist.

The acting was part of the activism, and so was the storytelling.

Order of Canada

In 2004, Gordon was awarded the Order of Canada. And that recognition was significant because sometimes even the institutions that ignored us for generations have to admit what our people have contributed as cultural leaders and valuable citizens of Turtle Island.

He was one of ours.

Gordon, my Friend and Colleague

I knew Gordon as a friend and colleague, which is something I still feel grateful to be able to say.

Years ago, we brought him to the northern Cree community of Cumberland House to speak with our youth. We wanted them to see someone like him up close.

As a real Native man standing in front of them who had survived tragic circumstances and made a life in the arts.

That matters so much because our young people need mirrors.

They need to see themselves. They need to see people who look like them, sound like them, laugh like them, and come from communities like theirs doing things the world may have told them were not possible.

And then they need doors.

Storytelling gives young people a future.

First, it gives them a mirror. Then it gives them a door.

Gordon was both.

A mirror and a door.

For Native youth, seeing Gordon meant seeing possibility. It meant seeing that you could be Cree and successful. Native and funny. Native and serious. Native and visible. Native and complicated. Native and fully yourself.

You didn’t have to become less Native to be taken seriously.

That’s no small thing. Because the world has always been trying to make us smaller.

Gordon did not feel small. Even when he was quiet, he did not feel small.

He carried something powerful.

Brad Pitt at the Powwow

One of my favorite Gordon stories is about Legends of the Fall. Gordon played One Stab in that film, which meant he was acting with Aiden Quinn, the legendary Anthony Hopkins, Julia Ormond, and Brad Pitt.

Gordon once told me a story about Brad Pitt asking if he could attend a powwow with him. Gordon decided to bring him.

And, as you can imagine, Brad Pitt showing up at a powwow created a bit of a frenzy.

Because people are human. And Brad Pitt was Brad Pitt. And even at a powwow, people can lose their minds a little when a movie-star like Brad Pitt appears near the powwow grounds.

But Gordon said he would not take him again. Not because Brad did anything wrong and not because Gordon didn’t understand celebrity.

He understood it perfectly.

That was the point.

Gordon said he would not do it again because the attention took away from the sacredness of the gathering.

I’ve always remembered that because that tells you who Gordon was.

He knew the difference between sharing and spectacle. He knew our spaces were sacred places with song, grief, joy, and protocol.

For Gordon, it wasn’t about a celebrity appearance on our reservations. Even if the celebrity is Brad Pitt.

That’s what Gordon understood. And that’s activism too.

Sometimes activism is saying, “No, this space is sacred,” and I need to protect the circle.

Gordon could work in Hollywood spaces and still know what was not for Hollywood.

I love that about him.

One of The First People to Own My Art

I also have a very personal memory of Gordon that means a lot to me. He was one of the first people to own one of my pieces of artwork.

It was a powwow dancer in regalia.

When you are a Native artist, especially early on, those moments really are special. Someone choosing your work is not just about the piece itself. It feels like someone saying, “I see what you’re doing. Keep going.”

And for Gordon Tootoosis to be one of those people for me? That was so meaningful. I was only in my twenties back then.

Obviously, I remained very humble. Mostly (smile).

But it meant something to me because Gordon understood Native art and Powwow. He understood regalia and how our dancing was once outlawed. He understood that our dancing is evidence that we are still here.

Legacy

Sometimes I correct people when I hear them talk about Indigenous actors like they’re simply entertainers.

Of course Gordon entertained people. He was talented and funny. He knew how to hold a scene.

But he was doing more than that. He was part of changing what people thought Native people could be on screen.

He helped move us out of the background and out of the past tense.

He helped make room for Native characters who were alive, flawed, extraordinary, ordinary, and fully human.

His final film role was in Guns, Girls and Gambling, where he played The Chief. It was released in 2012, after he had already joined the ancestors.

There is something tender about that. The way art keeps moving after us. The way a voice can remain even when the body has gone to the stars with the ancestors. The way a person can leave and still appear, still teach, still remind us.

Gordon died on July 5, 2011, in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.

In 2015, the Saskatchewan Native Theatre Company changed its name to the Gordon Tootoosis Nīkānīwin Theatre Company.

That’s the kind of legacy I care about.

Not fame or celebrity.

Fame is strange. Fame is shallow. Celebrity is a weird filter that almost never shows you what is real. It turns people into symbols, headlines, and, occasionally, Brad Pitt accidentally causing a powwow traffic jam.

Legacy is different.

Legacy is the young actor who keeps going because someone like Gordon told them they could.

Legacy is the Native kid in Cumberland House who sees him on the screen and thinks, “Maybe me too.”

Legacy is the theatre that carries his name and the door he helped open.

And I think that’s why he still feels so present to me.

Because Gordon’s work was never only about Gordon. It was about community, youth, responsibility, sacredness, and survival.

All the things our people have always carried.

He knew Native youth deserved to see themselves as full human beings with futures.

And that’s what he gave.

A mirror, a door, and a continuing fire.

So today, I’m remembering my friend Gordon Tootoosis with gratitude.

For the way he showed us that being seen is powerful, but staying connected is even more powerful.

Migwech, Gordon.

You are still such a part of the story.

But I hope you’ll indulge me for a minute because this piece is less about proving Bob Dylan was secretly Ojibway-adjacent (although let me have my fun) and more about the way land, memory, place, and the people around us shape what we create.

Also, I love Bob Dylan. Deeply and probably annoyingly. So please be gentle with me.

Every once in a while, I fall into a rabbit hole that starts as “I’ll just read this one thing quickly” and then suddenly I’m three coffees deep, questioning everything I thought I knew about Bob Dylan.

This time, the rabbit hole was an academic article called Amerindian Roots of Bob Dylan’s Poetry by Emmanuel Désveaux.

I already mentioned above that I do love Bob Dylan.

I don’t always express that outwardly, but Bob Dylan is a big part of my nostalgic heart. Not in a casual “I like a few songs” way.

In the way certain artists somehow become part of your internal weather. In the way a voice can feel like a road to your past and a home you cannot quite explain.

When I was a kid, my father would play Bob Dylan records in his art studio in our basement. I didn’t realize at the time that not all kids had dads with art studios in their basements. I just thought that was normal.

So, I guess I blame my dad for my love of all things Dylan.

When I talk about Bob Dylan and Ojibway influence, I’m not trying to claim him as one of ours. Don’t worry, Chief and Council, I’m not trying to add him to the band list. Or asking him to report to the Robinson-Huron Treaty annuity office, although if he wants to split the four dollars per year, we can talk.

All I’m saying is Bob Dylan was born in Duluth and raised for part of his childhood in Hibbing, Minnesota. That’s Ojibway territory. That northern world for those who know it. I’m talking about the cold, the lakes, the copper deep in the soil, the forests, the borderlands, the long winters, and the kind of weather that makes you question every decision that brought you there.

And from my own personal knowledge, Dylan also had an Ojibway babysitter.

Now, as an Ojibway woman, I would just like to say, never underestimate the power of an Ojibway babysitter. I was a babysitter back in my youth, so I can confirm that we are pretty special.

I’m not naive enough to think that people are influenced only through books, records, professors, and literary icons.

Although that’s true, sometimes influence happens because a Native woman watched you as a child and maybe told you some of our stories.

That’ll shape a person. That could explain a lot, actually.

I’m not saying an Ojibway babysitter is responsible for Bob Dylan becoming Bob Dylan. But I am saying if a little kid from northern Minnesota spent time around Ojibway people, Ojibway women, Ojibway humor, Ojibway stories, Ojibway weather, and Ojibway land, it’s not wild to wonder what stayed with him.

The land has a way of getting into you and staying with you.

So do Native aunties.

This is why I was so fascinated when I came across Emmanuel Désveaux’s article, “Amerindian Roots of Bob Dylan’s Poetry.”

Désveaux argues that Dylan’s lyrics may contain traces of Amerindian, and specifically Ojibway, oral tradition. That’s pretty cool. He argues that this can be seen through recurring images of the North, animals, winter, red skies, women, the sun, the moon, loneliness, exile, hunger, and the haunted logic of old stories.

And I thought: yes. That’s what I’ve been hearing. An echo of those things. Maybe it’s why I’ve been so drawn to him.

Désveaux is not saying Dylan was sitting around writing Ojibway ceremony songs, or that every harmonica solo is actually a coded message from the ancestors.

Although now that I have said that, I would like someone to check.

What he is suggesting is more interesting. He is asking whether Dylan’s imagination was shaped by the cultures and landscapes around him in northern Minnesota. And that makes sense to me.

Because American artists are always being described as influenced by the Bible, Shakespeare, European poets, the blues, old ballads, the Beat writers, and white men reading other white men.

And some of that is true. Of course. But somehow, everyone forgets the land.

And this land already had stories.

The Ballad of Ira Hayes

The Ballad of Ira Hayes is a song written by Peter La Farge and tells the story of Ira Hayes, an Indigenous Pima man, a Marine, and one of the men who raised the flag at Iwo Jima. Dylan recorded it during the Self Portrait sessions, and it was later released on the 1973 Dylan album. Years later, during the Rolling Thunder Revue, Dylan performed it at the Tuscarora Reservation in New York.

The Pima Indian nation presented Bob Dylan with a special medal adorned with beads, which they mused might have been the actual beads presented to their nation when the colonizing settlers first arrived.

This was recorded in 1975, and the footage was finally released in the Netflix documentary, "Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese." If you haven't seen it already, it's well worth it. You can watch Bob on the Tuscarora Reservation here (Bob Dylan - The Ballad of Ira Hayes (HD FOOTAGE from the Tuscarora Reservation, 1975):

Long before Bob Dylan was Bob Dylan, Ojibway people were here telling stories about winter, hunger, animals, the moon, the sun, transformation, grief, survival, and what happens when human beings forget how to live in balance.

So when Dylan keeps returning to the North Country, frozen emotional landscapes, women with long hair, red skies, lonely roads, animals with strange power, and people who cannot quite return home, I don’t think it’s ridiculous to ask:

Did Ojibway country put some of that in him?

Not in a “he owes us royalties” way. Although, again, I’m willing to discuss. Just kidding, Bob, if you’re reading this.

But in the way places shape people.

In the way stories move through a region. In the way children absorb the world before they have words for it. In the way a person can grow up surrounded by Indigenous presence and later carry pieces of it into their art, whether consciously or not.

Désveaux points to Dylan’s northern female imagery, including the woman in “Girl from the North Country,” (one of my favorite songs) and later the lyric about “royal Indian blood.”

First of all, “royal Indian blood” is a very Bob Dylan thing to say, and also a very non-Native way to say it.

Indigenous nations did not need European royalty. We didn’t even have princesses. We had our own leaders, our own systems, our own clans (I’m Eagle clan, for those who may not know that), our own councils, our own laws, and our own aunties who could end an entire meeting with one glare or side-eye.

But that phrase also reveals how Native women have often been imagined in American culture: beautiful, mysterious, noble, tragic, romantic, and sometimes reduced to a monolithic symbol.

You know, colonialism tends to do that.

And that’s part of what makes this whole conversation complicated. Influence is not always clean. Sometimes it’s admiration, sometimes it’s absorption, sometimes it’s distortion, and sometimes it’s the land speaking through someone who may not fully understand what they’re carrying.

That doesn’t make the art less powerful. It makes the art more labyrinthine.

Windigo-like Loneliness

Then there’s the Windigo-like loneliness in Dylan’s work.

Désveaux connects Dylan’s “ice water” imagery to Wiitiko, or Windigo, the figure in our stories and folklore associated with endless hunger, isolation, danger, and being cut off from community.

For our people, the Windigo is not just a monster; the Windigo is a warning.

Our people have always known it’s what happens when hunger becomes a worldview. When someone consumes and consumes and is never full. When a person loses responsibility to the circle. When appetite replaces relationship.

And honestly, if that’s not also a pretty good description of America, I don’t know what is.

Dylan’s loneliness is rarely just “sad man with guitar” loneliness. It’s exile and wandering. It’s standing outside the door of ordinary life. It’s not being able to go back. It’s the ache of a person who has seen something, lost something, or become something he cannot quite explain. I’ve had countless losses in my life, so this really resonated with me.

That doesn’t mean Dylan was writing a Windigo story. But you can feel why the comparison is tempting.

Under The Red Sky

Then there’s the red sky. The red sky for my people is so significant.

Désveaux connects Dylan’s Under the Red Sky to Ojibway story traditions where the red sky can signal danger, death, and cosmic disturbance. In one Ojibway tale discussed in the article, a father tells his children that when the western sky turns red, he will be dead.

Suddenly, Dylan’s red sky feels less like a nursery rhyme and more like somebody’s auntie saying, “Something’s not right.”

And that’s the thing about Dylan. He often sounds like a nursery rhyme fell into a prophecy and then wandered into a blues song trapped in the Dust Bowl ballads.

Which, again, feels very northern and old.

The article also looks at Dylan’s constant return to the sun and the moon. Now, of course, lots of poets write about the sun and moon. Somewhere right now, a man with a guitar is rhyming “moon” with “June,” and I wish him a full recovery. (Sorry, Corey Hart!! Canadians will know what I’m talking about.)

But in Ojibway and other Indigenous traditions, the sun and moon are relatives whom we trust to mark time, seasons, cycles, birth, death, water, fertility, ceremony, and relationship.

Grandmother Moon is not just a poetic image. She’s our grandmother, and she is medicine.

So when Dylan keeps returning to strange moons, dry rivers, darkened suns, blood-red skies, and broken cosmic order, Désveaux reads those images as part of something deeper than moody folk poetry. He reads them as Ojibway influence.

Dylan’s genius, to me, has always been that he sounds like he’s remembering things that never happened to him personally but somehow belong to everyone. He writes like someone standing at the same shores of Lake Superior that I grew up around.

And maybe part of what I hear in him is the North.

Maybe part of what I love is that he sounds like he has an intimate relationship with the land. That’s what Ojibway territory feels like to me, too.

Maybe Dylan’s work is not “about the Ojibway” in any simple way. Maybe he wasn’t consciously reaching into Ojibway oral tradition every time he wrote about winter, moons, women, or red skies.

But maybe Ojibway country was reaching into him.

Maybe the land remembers even when the artist doesn’t.

And maybe that’s why Dylan’s lyrics feel so ancient sometimes. Not just folk lyrics, but ancient and tied to the land.

Before Bob Dylan became Bob Dylan, there were Native nations here telling stories about the sun, the moon, hunger, animals, winter, women, children, rivers, death, rebirth, and the dangerous things that happen when humans forget how to live in balance.

So when Dylan sings from the North Country, maybe he’s singing from a place layered with all of that. Because honestly, no one in America creates outside of Native presence.

Not even Bob Dylan.

And maybe, just maybe, Ojibway territory, a land that remembers, and that Ojibway babysitter deserve a little shout-out.

At minimum.

Possibly a songwriting credit. I’m kidding. Mostly.

But if you’re reading this, Bob, thank you for listening to the land.

Migwech.

The irony is that this particular administration wraps itself in Revolutionary symbols while behaving like the very power the Revolution claimed to reject.

Not because history repeats itself neatly. It surely doesn’t. I know that for a fact.

History is messier than that. It doubles back. It hides things in plain sight, and sometimes whitewashes the history of this Nation. It gives you a gold-framed portrait of George Washington, and then a few feet away shows you a newspaper advertisement for the sale of an enslaved Black man.

That’s America, isn’t it?

The declaration and the auction block. The language of liberty and the machinery of bondage. The cry of “no kings” and the question nobody wants to ask too loudly: no kings for whom?

The exhibit was full of the familiar symbols of the American Revolution. Washington. Hamilton. Stamp Act protests. Sons of Liberty energy. Men debating taxation, representation, power, sovereignty, and whether New Yorkers should submit to authority from across the ocean.

There was a pretty cool interactive display asking whether New Yorkers should protest higher taxes.

The answer, of course, was yes.

New Yorkers have always had strong opinions. Loud ones, too. Occasionally printed, marched, shouted, stamped, and thrown into the street.

And I couldn’t help but think about today’s No Kings signs, the chants, the marches, the insistence that no president, no government, no man should be above the people.

That’s not a new American argument. It’s one of the oldest ones around.

But what the exhibit made painfully clear is that the old argument was never as simple as we were taught.

Because Revolutionary New York was not simply a city of brave colonists fighting tyranny. It was a city built on Native land. It was a port city tied to slavery and trade. It was a place where Black people were bought, sold, hunted, and also resisted. It was a place where Native nations were not gone, not passive, not in the background, but powerful political forces making decisions in a world of empires.

One panel at this museum really impacted me:

“Native nations like the Haudenosaunee were an autonomous power within colonial Britain’s orbit.”

It went on to say that after the French and Indian War, Britain claimed Indigenous lands, but rarely exercised real control, and that in 1763 Haudenosaunee power remained supreme throughout much of what today is New York State.

That’s not something America admits to very often. Haudenosaunee power remained supreme. Not vanished or conquered.

Supreme.

That single panel did what so many textbooks failed to do. It reminded visitors that when colonists were arguing about British authority, Native nations were already sovereign powers on their own lands.

The Americans were not rebelling in an empty place. They were rebelling in someone else’s homeland.

And that’s where the “No Kings” language gets complicated for me.

Because yes, no kings.

No one should rule like a monarch. No one should place himself above law, community, accountability, or the people.

But Native people have been saying that for a long time.

We said it when kings claimed our lands through doctrines written in Europe, and we said it when presidents treated treaties like something they could just ignore when it was inconvenient for them.

We said it when governors, courts, agents, churches, and schools tried to rule our families, our ceremonies, our borders, our children, our hair, our names, and our futures.

So when I hear “No Kings,” I agree.

Of course I do.

No kings. No presidents pretending the country is their personal property. No police state (looking at you, I.C.E. ).

No one above the people. And no version of freedom that depends on somebody else losing theirs.

In the exhibit, I saw a lock of George Washington’s hair preserved behind glass.

It was a small piece of a founding father, and it was kind of surreal to see. I made the joke that in a few years, someone’s gonna try to clone him with the DNA. Yes, I watch a lot of Sci-fi films.

But I stood there thinking about Native children in boarding schools whose hair was cut as an act of violence. I thought about braids taken from children who were being separated from their families, languages, ceremonies, and nations.

Hair carries identity. It carries family. It carries teachings. It carries belonging.

So the cutting of Native children’s hair was not incidental. It was not a small cruelty. It was part of the machinery. It was meant to make children feel that who they were, and where they came from, had to be removed from them.

One man’s hair becomes history.

Our children’s hair became evidence of a country trying to break them.

That contrast tells a story all by itself.

There was also a section called “City of Hope: 1783 — The First Emancipation.” It described the Birch Trials, where thousands of Black people who had escaped slavery and sought British protection had their futures decided in New York.

By the way, it was George Washington who wanted these refugees returned to slavery.

The British commander Guy Carleton refused and granted certificates of freedom to Black Loyalists who could prove their wartime service.

So even here, inside the American Revolution, freedom doesn’t behave the way patriotic memory wants it to.

Some people found liberty not through the new United States, but despite it.

Some had to flee the men we call founders. Some had to prove they deserved not to be dragged back into bondage. Some had to carry freedom papers, like passports, to leave a country that was already congratulating itself on its liberty.

That’s why I don’t really trust simple origin stories. The Revolution was a rebellion against the monarchy, yes. But it was also a fight over land, labor, power, trade, and who would get to define freedom.

There were advertisements for enslaved people in the exhibit. One announced the sale of “a Negro”. Another advertised men who had run away: Lester, Caesar, Isaac, and Mingo.

People’s names. Not “property,” no matter what the law said.

People.

I always stop at names. Because names survive the systems that tried to erase them.

Lester. Caesar. Isaac. Mingo.

Liss.

The exhibit included a portrait of Liss, short for Elizabeth, an enslaved woman who may have served as an informant for Revolutionaries. Her position inside households made her seem ordinary, even invisible, to those in power. But that invisibility could become a strategy. Enslaved people could overhear conversations, move through rooms, carry intelligence, and know things powerful men never imagined they knew.

I loved that she was there. Liss.
I recognized something true. People who are underestimated learn to listen differently. They learn the architecture of power. They know which doors open, which floors creak, which men say too much when they think no one important is in the room listening.

That’s survival and intelligence. And more importantly, that’s resistance.

Another display talked about mutual aid among Black New Yorkers. It described how Black communities seized the language of the Declaration of Independence, and later the Constitution, to fight for themselves. They built institutions, including some of the nation’s first Black churches, the first Black newspaper in the United States, and the all-Black African Grove Theatre.

That moved me deeply because that is the real work of freedom. Not just declaring it, but building it. Feeding it and publishing it. Making a church, a paper, a theatre, a meeting place, a network, and a future.

The powerful love declarations. I think maybe that’s what connects Revolutionary New York to No Kings today.

The best part of any democracy is not the men who claim to embody it. It’s the people who refuse to surrender it. The people in the streets. The people making signs. The people feeding strangers. The people documenting through their cell phones these days. The people caring for elders and kids at the marches. The people saying, “We dare.”

I saw that phrase in the exhibit too, written on a piece of paper connected to resistance against the Stamp Act:

“We dare.”

We dare to question power. We dare to refuse kings. We dare to say no. We dare to remember what the official story leaves out. We dare to insist that Native nations were not in the background of the Revolution. We dare to name slavery in the same breath as liberty. We dare to say that freedom built on stolen land and stolen labor was never complete. We dare to say that democracy is not a birthday party. It’s a responsibility.

And as America approaches its 250th birthday, we’re going to hear a lot about the Revolution.

We’re going to hear about courage and liberty and independence and the genius of the founders.

That’s okay. Tell that story. But do not tell it alone.

Tell the story of the Haudenosaunee, whose power remained supreme across much of what is now New York State.

Tell the story of Native nations making strategic alliances in a world where empires were circling their homelands.

Tell the story of enslaved people who ran, listened, fought, informed, survived, organized, and built institutions with the same language that excluded them.

Tell the story of Black Loyalists who had to leave the new United States to find freedom.

Tell the story of women whose labor and intelligence moved through the Revolution even when history tried to make them invisible.

Tell the story of the people standing at the edge of the painting.

Like this poor guy in the left corner.

Tell the story of everyone who heard “liberty” and asked, “Do you mean us too?”

Because that question is still with us today.

It’s in the No Kings signs. It’s in every protest against authoritarianism, every demand for accountability, every refusal to let one man or one party or one court or one billionaire class rule over the rest of us.

But for me, as an Ojibway woman, “No Kings” cannot only mean no monarchy.

It has to mean no colonialism, no empire, no pretending that democracy began when settlers decided they no longer wanted to answer to Britain.

It has to mean no more freedom stories that erase the nations already here.

The Revolutionary City of New York exhibit reminded me that America’s founding contradiction was not hidden.

It was right there. In the portraits, the notices, and the maps.

The question is not whether America has ever said beautiful things about freedom.

It has.

The question is whether America has ever been willing to mean them for everyone.

No kings? Yes. No kings.

But also no myths about this wonderful Nation of contradictions.

No kings. No cages.

We dare.

One of those stories is Polly Cooper’s.

Polly Cooper and The Oneida Nation

Polly Cooper was an Oneida woman from the New York colony who took part in an expedition to aid the starving Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War.

In the winter of 1777–78, she was among 47 Oneida and Seneca people who travelled hundreds of miles to Valley Forge carrying bushels of corn for George Washington’s starving troops. Polly Cooper’s role was far more than simply transporting food. She taught the soldiers how to prepare the corn correctly, sharing Oneida knowledge that turned a difficult food into nourishment.

The Valley Forge story is often told as a scene of endurance, and it was. Washington’s army was suffering terribly. Supplies were scarce, morale was low, and survival was uncertain. The Oneida relief effort met that crisis with something practical and human: food, knowledge, and especially solidarity.

The hundreds of bushels of white corn the Oneida brought required a special way of preparing it. According to the tradition surrounding Polly Cooper’s story, she stopped starving soldiers from eating it raw and told them that if they did, it could kill them by swelling their stomachs. She stayed behind after the rest of the Oneida party returned home, cooking, feeding, and caring for the troops. The Continental Army reportedly tried to pay her for her service, but she refused, saying it was her duty to help her friends in their time of need. Oneida tradition also holds that Martha Washington later gave Polly a bonnet and a dark shawl during the Valley Forge encampment, a gesture that has remained part of her legacy ever since.

There is another part of the story we have to tell. In 1779, George Washington ordered the destruction of Haudenosaunee towns and crops during the Sullivan-Clinton campaign. That was a brutal military campaign aimed at devastating Native communities, and it sits in painful contrast to the Oneida Nation’s support at Valley Forge. Both facts belong in the same history.

It reminds us that alliances in the Revolutionary era were real, strategic, and often costly. The Oneida Nation chose to support the American cause. Polly Cooper helped save lives. And the country that would later celebrate liberty also waged war in ways that brought destruction to Native homelands. That tension is part of the truth, and I think we owe it to the past not to smooth it over.

Truth is a form of Resistance

As a Native person, I still notice how casually hatred gets aimed at us, as if racism against Native people is somehow more acceptable, or easier to excuse, than racism against anyone else. You don’t have to look far to find comments like “we didn’t kill enough Indians,” and it’s sickening how often that kind of language is allowed to sit in public without consequence. When I look at the comments Native people receive online, I still see how quickly racism, dismissal, and old colonial attitudes surface, and it’s a reminder that we are still fighting to be seen with basic dignity.

That’s part of what makes telling stories like Polly Cooper’s so important to me. It’s not only about correcting the historical record. It’s about insisting on our humanity in a culture that still too often treats Native people as disposable, invisible, or already gone. Polly Cooper reminds me that we were never absent. We were here then, and we are still here now, carrying memory, knowledge, and truth, even in the face of contempt. In a world that still tries to make us invisible, telling the truth feels like a form of resistance.

As we move toward 250 years, I think we owe it to the past to tell the story more fully. Polly Cooper’s legacy is part of the foundation. The same is true of the Oneida Nation’s role in the Revolution.

Before we celebrate the nation’s birthday, we should remember who helped keep it alive.

Sources

• National Park Service, “The Oneida in the American Revolution.”

• National Park Service, “The Clinton-Sullivan Campaign of 1779.”

• Oneida Indian Nation, “Polly Cooper: From Humble Cook to Oneida Icon.”

• Oneida Indian Nation, “The Polly Cooper Shawl: Testimony to a Pact of the Revolutionary War.”

• George Washington’s Mount Vernon, “Oneida.”

• George Washington’s Mount Vernon, “Conotocarious.”

Note: Some details in this story, including the shawl tradition, are preserved through Oneida oral history and family memory.

House of Smoke & Ash was more than a dinner. It was more than a culinary event.

It was an Indigenous takeover of James Beard Awards Week in Chicago — a day built around food, land, sovereignty, storytelling, and the people who carry those systems forward.

Presented by IndigeHub, the gathering brought together Indigenous chefs, growers, producers, ranchers, artists, scientists, food advocates, and community members from across Turtle Island and beyond.

And the message was clear from the beginning: Indigenous foodways are not a trend. They are not an afterthought. They are not something to be “included” as part of the American story.

They are the foundation.

The Conversation

The day began with The Conversation, a series of talks about everything that has to happen before food ever reaches the plate: land, water, seed, policy, media, data, and story.

Simon Moya-Smith opened the room and welcomed everyone into the gathering. Simon helped set the tone right away. This was not a corporate panel or a polished food-world performance. It was a Native-led space where the conversation began with truth.

Chef , known widely as The Sioux Chef (a pretty fantastic play on words), spoke about allyship and representation in media. Sean was also there as a James Beard Award nominee, so there was something especially powerful about hearing him speak during the same week the food world was gathered to celebrate excellence. His talk focused on the fact that Indigenous food has too often been treated as a curiosity, while Native chefs and knowledge-keepers are left out of the larger story of “American” cuisine. Sean reminded the room that representation is not just about visibility. It is about authority. Who gets to tell the story? Who gets credited? Who gets resourced? Who is allowed to lead?

Jaiden Willeto spoke about seed sovereignty and rematriation. That was one of the heartbeats of the day. Seeds are not just ingredients. They are relatives. They are memory, survival, and future. Her talk connected food back to land and responsibility, reminding us that Indigenous food systems begin long before a chef ever enters a kitchen.

Geoffrey Kie spoke about water rights and food production. His talk brought us back to the basic truth that there is no food sovereignty without water sovereignty. Native food systems cannot be separated from clean water, land protection, and the right of Indigenous communities to sustain themselves.

Jason Baldes spoke about buffalo restoration. His work is about more than bringing an animal back to the land. Buffalo restoration is tied to ceremony, ecology, nutrition, treaty rights, and cultural repair. Jason was also an advisor on Ken Burns’ PBS documentary The American Buffalo, and PBS’s companion film Homecoming follows his work transferring buffalo back to Tribal lands. His talk showed how food sovereignty also means restoring relationships that colonization tried to break.

Joseph Yracheta spoke about Indigenous data sovereignty. That may sound really technical to some people, but it is deeply connected to survival. For generations, Native people have been studied, measured, categorized, photographed, tested, written about, and turned into research subjects, often without consent, without context, and without any real benefit returning to our communities. Our bodies, our blood, our stories, our health, our languages, our ceremonies, and even our grief have too often been treated as material for institutions to collect and interpret.

Joseph’s message was a strong reminder that data is not neutral. Research is not neutral. It is important to be mindful of who is asking the questions. Who holds the information? Who profits from the knowledge matters. Indigenous data sovereignty is about the right of Native Nations to govern our own information — our health data, genetic data, cultural knowledge, community histories, and the stories told about us. It’s about saying: you don’t get to study us, define us, archive us, and then leave us out of the power that information creates.

That talk was so important because food sovereignty, land sovereignty, and data sovereignty are all connected. They all ask the same question: who has the right to control what belongs to Indigenous people?

And then I had the honor of closing The Conversation.

I spoke as an Ojibway woman from Batchewana First Nation. I spoke as a writer, educator, artist, mother, and someone whose own family story carries the marks of residential schools, displacement, grief, survival, and love.

I spoke about Indigenous media and storytelling. About how this country has always tried to tell stories about us without us. How we were written into history as obstacles. How we were erased from textbooks. How we were staged in photographs as a “vanishing” people (Google Edward Curtis, the photographer) and then treated as though our survival was somehow unexpected.

But we are not gone.

We are not relics.

We are still here, my friends, telling the stories, cooking the food, protecting the land, carrying the grief, and insisting on JOY.

After I spoke, Chef took the mic. House of Smoke & Ash was Bleu’s project — her vision, her labor, her gathering, her fire. She was the one who brought so many of us into that room and helped turn an idea into something people could feel, taste, and remember.

Bleu talked about the logistics behind the gathering — the parts most guests never see — including how difficult it was simply to get buffalo to Chicago. That detail said so much. Even when Indigenous people are building something beautiful, even when we are feeding people, teaching people, and creating spaces of brilliance, we are still forced to navigate systems that were not built for us to move through easily. Bleu’s words reminded the room that this work is not only ceremonial and creative. It is practical, exhausting, complicated, and often uphill.

And still, she made it happen. I am so inspired by Bleu!

The Table

After The Conversation, the event moved into The Table, a collaborative multi-course dinner by seven Indigenous chefs. It was held at City Farm in Chicago, an urban farm setting that made the meal feel rooted in land rather than separated from it.

The seven chefs included Nephi Craig, Luis Martinez, Stephanie Baryluk, Emmie Strauss, José Contreras, Tawnya Brant, and Bleu Adams.

The dinner was a nine-course meal by seven chefs — one table, many Nations and food traditions, and one shared message: Indigenous cuisine is contemporary, ancestral, political, beautiful, and alive.

Some of the dishes included Chef Luis Martinez of Tequio Foods’ Loxicha tostada with grasshopper and chintextle spread, summer squash, chicharron, and epazote salt.

Chef Bleu Adams prepared a Ute bison tartare with chokecherry, fennel, juniper, smoked water, and cured quail egg.

Chef Emmie Strauss of Love Letter prepared porotos granados, a stew made with sweet corn, cranberry beans, and butternut squash.

Chef José Contreras of Amelia’s Mexican Kitchen prepared carne con chile with shredded beef and New Mexico chiles.

The meal was not just about what was served. It was about what was being reclaimed.

Every course carried a story about Indigenous knowledge, land-based ingredients, survival, trade, fire, kinship, and the future of Native food economies.

The Gathering

The evening then moved into The Gathering, with music, drinks, small bites, and community. It created space for chefs, growers, producers, artists, activists, and industry people to meet one another — not as guests at someone else’s table, but as architects of their own.

That is what made House of Smoke & Ash so powerful.

It refused to let Indigenous foodways be treated as a historical footnote during one of the biggest culinary weeks in the country.

It truly underscored that before there was “American cuisine,” there were Indigenous food systems.

Before the awards, before the restaurants, before the industry language, there was land, seed, water, fire, and story.

House of Smoke & Ash was a reminder.

We are still here.

Still cooking.

Still building.

Still feeding the future.

Sources and Further Reading

Native News Online — House of Smoke & Ash overview
https://nativenewsonline.net/arts-entertainment/reclaiming-the-roots-house-of-smoke-ash-brings-indigenous-culinary-sovereignty-to-james-beard-week/

IndigeHub / Givebutter — IndigeHouse at James Beard Week
https://givebutter.com/houseofsmokeandash

WBEZ / Chicago Sun-Times — James Beard Week events in Chicago
https://www.wbez.org/food-drink/2026/06/09/james-beard-awards-2026-events-chicago-brunch-restaurants-food-chefs

The Boston Globe — James Beard Awards events / parties coverage
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/06/18/metro/2026-james-beard-awards-parties-chefs/

The Academy of Natural Sciences — Sean Sherman / James Beard-nominated Turtle Island
https://ansp.org/press-room/press-releases/2026/sean-sherman-town-hall

Sean Sherman official website

https://seansherman.com/

PBS — The American Buffalo: Homecoming
https://www.pbs.org/video/the-american-buffalo-special-homecoming/

Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative — Jason Baldes / Homecoming
https://windriverbuffalo.org/homecoming-documentary-brings-the-american-buffalo-to-the-present/

PBS — The American Buffalo, About the Filmmakers
https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-american-buffalo/about-the-filmmakers

Joseph Yracheta LinkedIn post on House of Smoke & Ash
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/joseph-yracheta-582a133a_this-was-a-great-event-im-so-lucky-to-activity-7475237249681383425-Jfss

I’m 53.

Which sounds fake, because in my head I’m still somewhere between 15 and 20. The rest of me, however, is a woman who still wants to dance all night at a concert but now has to sit down occasionally to catch my breath, will absolutely misplace her keys, and will wake up wondering why her back hurts when she didn’t even do anything interesting to deserve it.

I was born in 1973.

In Ojibway, I was born during Ode’imini-giizis, the Strawberry Moon in June. The Heart Berry Moon. Which, my daughters would tell you, feels about right, because I have had a lifelong love affair with strawberries.

I’m not even kidding. There was a time when my then-teenage daughter left an actual note in our fridge that said:

“Put the strawberries down + eat some protein!!”

Which still makes me laugh.

First of all, rude.

Second of all, accurate.

Third, I feel like being born under the Strawberry Moon should come with some kind of exemption. I’m honoring the season. I’m communing with the berry. I’m living in accordance with my Ojibway lunar assignment.

Please respect my culture.

June’s Strawberry Moon is named for sweetness, for the heart, for the first berries coming back after a long winter. A moon about tenderness and return and remembering that life keeps offering itself again, even after the hard seasons.

Also, apparently, a moon that produces women like me.

So make of that what you will.

My First Year on Earth Was Not a Quiet One

Nixon was president in ‘73.

Watergate was happening then. The Senate hearings were on television. People were watching men in suits explain crimes with straight faces. The president of the United States was unraveling in public while trying very hard to look like he was not unraveling in public.

Which, as a political tradition, has really held up.

1973 was the year of missing tapes, secret recordings, resignations, denials, and grown men standing at microphones trying to look calm while the whole house was on fire and filling with smoke.

Nixon would later go on television and say, “I am not a crook,” which is one of those sentences that does not usually make people think, “Well, case closed.”

His vice president, Spiro Agnew, resigned that year too, because apparently even the backup scandal had a scandal.

And while all that was happening, Native people were not sitting quietly off to the side.

In 1973, Wounded Knee was occupied for 71 days by Oglala Lakota people and members of the American Indian Movement. The whole country was watching Washington lie to itself on television, while Native people were standing on treaty land, demanding that this country remember promises it had spent generations trying to forget.

And near the end of that same year, the Menominee Restoration Act was signed, reversing termination and restoring federal recognition to the Menominee people. Which is a very government way of saying, “Oops, we tried to erase you, but you are still here.”

So no, the year I was born was not a quiet one.

It was Watergate. It was Wounded Knee.

It was the sound of a country cracking open and dealing with some pretty nasty truths.

So when I say I was born in 1973, I don’t just mean bell-bottoms and avocado-colored kitchens (yuck) and people smoking in places they absolutely should not have been smoking (also yuck).

I mean I was born in a year when this country was already looking at itself in the mirror and saying, “Oh no.”

People were probably sitting around thinking, “Well, this is certainly as bad as American politics can ever get.”

Anywayyyyy. (Looking at you, current president.)

Happy birthday to me from 2026.

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The Knicks and I Are Having a Moment

Also born in 1973, at least in the way I like to imagine these things, is my lifelong relationship with cosmic timing.

Because the Knicks just overcame a 29-point deficit in Game 4 of the NBA Finals and are now one win away from their first championship since 1973.

My birth year.

I don’t want to say the Knicks and I are spiritually connected, but we have both spent 53 years being put through the wringer, occasionally underestimated, ferociously doubted, and somehow still refusing to leave the stage.

Honestly, I respect it.

Some people age gracefully.

Some people rebuild for five decades, make everyone nervous, cause chest pain across an entire city, and then come roaring back like the Knicks did last night.

I kind of feel like I’m in my comeback season too.

Not in a “new year, new me” way. Please. I’ve lived too much life for that.

More like: still here, still laughing, still standing, still capable of surprising myself.

And apparently still dangerous in the fourth quarter.

The Star People

And then there was Star Wars.

The first movie my parents ever took me to see was Star Wars at a drive-in theater.

A drive-in.

Which now sounds like something from another civilization.

You sat in the car. You watched a giant screen under the night sky. The sound came through that little speaker you hooked onto the window, or later through the radio, and for a few hours the whole world was headlights, popcorn, blankets, and space.

I was just a little kid, but I remember the feeling of it.

That opening scroll.

That music.

That sense that something enormous had entered the world and somehow I was there for it.

And I was all in. Completely.

I still am. Massively.

I think part of why Star Wars got into my bones so early is because Ojibway people are star people too. Our Elders teach us that we come from the stars and will return there.

That may sound poetic if you are hearing it for the first time, but it is not just poetry.

For Ojibway people, the stars are relatives, teachers, maps, and memory. Our stories don’t separate earth from sky, or ancestors from the stars, or survival from imagination.

We come from people who knew how to read the water, the weather, the animals, the moon, the plant medicines, the seasons.

And the stars.

So when I was a little girl in the back seat of a car, looking up at a movie screen and watching a story about empire, resistance, old teachings, chosen families, and stubborn little bands of people refusing to disappear, something in me understood it.

Maybe not in words yet.

But somewhere deeper. Familiar.

And then when I became a mom, I took my daughters to Star Wars films.

Because of course I did.

That’s what you do with the stories that raised you. You hand them over. You sit beside your children in the dark and watch their faces light up the way yours did. You pretend you are just going to a movie, but really you are passing along a little piece of your own childhood and hoping it finds a place in them too.

And then, just this month, as an early birthday celebration, I went to see The Mandalorian and Grogu with some of my dearest friends, my older daughter, and her wife.

Which is ridiculous and beautiful to me.

My parents took me to Star Wars.

I took my daughters.

And now one of my daughters is grown, married, sitting beside me at a new Star Wars movie while I am turning 53 and still absolutely delighted by a tiny green child with ancient eyes.

That’s not nostalgia. Well, okay, it is a little nostalgia.

But it’s also memory.

It’s the way stories travel with us.

It’s the way the child you were gets to sit beside the woman you became.

It’s the way love sometimes looks like a movie ticket, popcorn, a photo with your people, and everyone agreeing that Grogu is obviously Native American. I would argue he’s Ojibwe, but I know other nations will fight me on that.

UPDATE: And because this whole birthday post has apparently become a meditation on cosmic timing, here is one more thing I somehow forgot to include when I originally posted this on June 11, 2026.

I met Mark Hamill.

Yes.

Luke Skywalker.

And he was genuinely excited to tell me that Star Wars: A New Hope had just been dubbed in Ojibway.

The first movie my parents ever took me to see was Star Wars at a drive-in theater. Decades later, I’m standing with Mark Hamill while he tells me Luke Skywalker now speaks Ojibway.

I mean.

Come on.

And maybe that’s why Star Wars still matters to me.

Because under all the lightsabers and ships and dramatic family dynamics, there is this idea that the empire is not inevitable.

That a small group of stubborn, unlikely people can still resist on a grand scale.

That resistance still matters.

That the future is not only built by the people with the biggest weapons and the cruelest world views.

Lately it really does feel like we are the Jedi and the Resistance in some deeply stupid space rebellion, while Jabba the Hutt, Vader, and Palpatine have all somehow found jobs in the current administration.

I have Lived Through Several Futures

I have now lived through several versions of “the future,” and I would like to file a complaint.

Sorry, Jetsons but there are no flying cars.

No helpful robot butler. And I don’t trust Alexa, so I don’t use that.

No sleek silver jumpsuit. Although I do own a sleek silver dress, so that will have to do.

No wise little alien showing up to calmly explain the universe to me, although honestly, an Elder could have done that part better anyway.

When I was a kid, I also watched Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, which imagined the future as 1991.

Back then, 1991 sounded impossibly futuristic. I expected ape leadership, social collapse, jumpsuits, and maybe Ricardo Montalbán looking elegant while everything fell apart.

Then 1991 arrived.

There was no ape takeover. No dramatic new world order.

Just regular life, Michael Bolton ballads with too many wind machines, Vanilla Ice aftershocks, and music that made you understand why grunge had to happen.

Honestly, I feel like the apes could be doing a better job than what this country currently has.

At the very least, they might have made the menu font bigger.

Instead, we got phones that recognize your face but nobody talks on, cars that can parallel park themselves while I still cannot remember where I parked mine, and artificial intelligence that can summarize a lawsuit but still cannot tell me if I left the stove on.

We got watches that tell us to stand up, breathe, drink water, and calm down. Who needs a spouse these days?

We got refrigerators with Wi-Fi, which feels deeply unnecessary. I don’t think I need my lettuce connected to the internet.

I come from people who knew how to read the land and elements. Now I have a phone yelling at me because I ignored a calendar notification I never asked for.

This is not what my ancestors fought for. Although, to be fair, they probably would have enjoyed muting a few people.

And then there is two-factor authentication.

My God.

The computer sends a code to my phone. My phone asks for my face. My face needs better lighting. By the time I finally get in, the code has expired from old age.

This is 53, apparently.

I’m old enough to remember when phones were attached to walls and people had the decency to be unreachable.

I’m at the age where “I’m just going to rest my eyes for a minute” is no longer just a sentence. It’s a freaking portal.

I say it at 8:47 p.m. and wake up the next day like I was returned by a woodland spirit.

I’m at the age where sleeping wrong is not just “sleeping wrong.” It’s a full chiropractic emergency.

At this age, I judge restaurants by the loudness of the music and the size of the font on the menu.

Can we talk about this? Seriously.

Reading Glasses are Community Care

Reading glasses have become their own form of community care. My friends and I don’t pass around cigarettes or lip gloss anymore. We pass around readers. That means “reading glasses” for all you people under 45.

“Who has the 2.0s?”

“Try mine.”

“No, those are too strong.”

“Wait, are these mine?”

“No, yours are on your head.”

This is what care looks like now. Someone loves you enough to hand you the correct magnification so you can find the chicken dish you like on the menu.

So no, the future didn’t arrive the way I thought it would.

But here we are.

The Knicks are still here. I’m still here. A little banged up. Not always graceful. But still capable of a comeback.

Maybe that’s what being born in 1973 means for me this year.

Maybe it means you can be counted out for decades and still have a run left in you.

Maybe it means you can trail by 29 points and still come back.

There’s still another candle, another laugh, another morning.

Another chance to look around at all of this ridiculousness and beauty and think, somehow, somehow, we are still in the game.

Even if I have to borrow someone’s readers to see the score.

I thought of the grandmothers who carried water in clay water jars. The women who braided children’s hair before boarding and residential schools cut their hair short. The aunties who stirred soup on wood stoves while speaking a language they had once been punished for carrying in their mouths.

I thought of how Indigenous women have always governed.

Long before there were podiums and campaign signs, our women understood diplomacy. They understood kinship obligations. They understood that leadership was never meant to rise above the people, but to move among them like roots beneath a forest floor, holding everything together where nobody could see.

The maple tree doesn’t announce itself while making sap.
The river doesn’t boast while carrying life downstream.

And yet both sustain entire worlds.

A Building Full of Ghosts

Deb Haaland is Laguna Pueblo. She is a 35th-generation New Mexican. She has already carried history into rooms where Native women were never meant to stand. She was one of the first Native American women elected to Congress. Then she became the first Native American to serve as a U.S. Cabinet secretary, leading the Department of the Interior.

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The Department of the Interior was never just another government office to us.

It was tied to lands, treaties, removals, resource extraction, boarding schools, and the long bureaucratic machinery that tried to manage Native people instead of honoring Native nations. So when Deb Haaland walked into that department as Secretary of the Interior, she was not simply taking a job.

She was entering a building full of ghosts.

There’s something profound about seeing an Indigenous woman walk into institutions built during the long years of our attempted erasure. Buildings raised on lands where our ancestors once gathered medicines and held ceremonies. Departments that signed papers dividing territories they could never truly own.

I don’t think the tragic history disappears because one Native woman enters those spaces.

The land remembers too well for that.

But perhaps history bends a little.

Maybe the doors open differently now.

The Ancestors Felt It Was Necessary

In The New Yorker, Haaland said something that feels like the heart of this whole moment:

“When I think about why I am really here,” Haaland says, “it’s like I’m here because the ancestors felt it was necessary.”

We call that blood memory.

Because when an Indigenous woman enters a room like that, she does not enter it alone. She carries the grandmothers, the children, the languages, the ceremonies, the songs nearly silenced and still somehow sung. She carries the people who were never invited into those buildings, but whose lives were shaped by every decision made inside them.

She carries the ancestors who were treated as obstacles to settlement, wards of the state, subjects of policy, and problems to be solved.

So when Haaland walked into the Department of the Interior, she was not simply making history.

She was bringing history with her.

A Pueblo woman standing inside a federal agency that had helped oversee so much Native dispossession and saying, in effect:

We remember.

When the Government Had to Look Back

And then she did something even more important than making history.

She made the government look at itself.

As Secretary of the Interior, Haaland launched the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, the first comprehensive federal effort to investigate the boarding school system in the United States. That mattered not only politically, but personally. Her own family, like so many of ours, carried the wounds of those schools. Her grandparents were taken as children. So when she spoke about boarding schools, she was not speaking from a policy memo.

She was speaking from blood memory.

For generations, Native families carried those stories in silence, grief, anger, and survival. Children taken. Hair cut. Languages punished. Names replaced. Families left to stitch themselves back together without apology, records, or answers.

Under Haaland’s leadership, the Interior Department began documenting the schools, the graves, the records, the money, the churches, the laws, and the machinery that made Native child removal possible. She helped create the Road to Healing tour, where survivors and their descendants were invited to speak directly to the federal government, often for the first time.

Generations of Native families had carried these stories in kitchens, ceremonies, treatment rooms, community halls, and private grief. And then, at last, the government had to sit down and listen.

At least it was something.

It doesn’t heal everything. It doesn’t return every child. It doesn’t erase the sound of doors closing behind little ones who should have been home, hearing their own languages, eating their own food, sleeping near the people who loved them.

But it interrupts the lie that America tells itself about our history.

The Work of Remembering

Haaland’s work at Interior reached beyond the boarding school investigation.

She created a Missing and Murdered Unit within the Bureau of Indian Affairs to address the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people. She moved to remove a racist slur against Native women from federal place names. She supported bison restoration and helped push conversations about public lands toward tribal consultation, conservation, and Indigenous stewardship.

None of this fixes history.

But it does something.

It places Native life back into the record. It says our grief is not folklore. Our land is not empty. Our women are not disposable. Our children were not unfortunate footnotes in some distant chapter of American progress.

They were loved.

They were stolen.

They were mourned.

They are remembered.

That is part of what Haaland carried into the Interior Department. Memory.

And memory, when held properly, can become a form of accountability.

New Democratic Primary Recognition

With her victory in the New Mexico Democratic primary, Deb Haaland stands at the edge of another possible first. If elected governor in November, she would become the first Native American woman ever elected to govern a U.S. state.

Representation alone will not return land, clean poisoned water, protect every sacred place, or undo centuries of federal violence. We know better than to confuse symbolism with justice.

But symbols can still carry medicine.

Especially when they are attached to someone who knows what it means to come from a people, not just speak for one. Someone who has known struggle as a single mother. Someone who has moved through public life with Pueblo roots, military family discipline, organizing experience, and the kind of steadiness that does not need to perform power to possess it.

I think many Indigenous people recognized that feeling watching Deb Haaland.

Not triumph exactly, but recognition.

The recognition that despite every policy meant to disappear us, we are still producing leaders rooted in community and memory. We are still raising daughters who know how to carry both tenderness and strength together in the same hands.

Another Way to Measure Power

Colonial systems often measure power through domination.

Through extraction.

Through how much can be owned, controlled, fenced, or consumed.

But many Indigenous teachings ask a different question altogether:

How well did you care for what was entrusted to you?

The water.

The children.

The stories.

The animals.

One another.

Perhaps that’s why this moment feels significant to so many of us. Because Indigenous leadership carries with it another way of imagining responsibility.

Leadership is not supposed to be a performance of importance. It’s supposed to be a practice of care.

That idea feels almost radical in a country that keeps confusing cruelty with strength and wealth with wisdom. But our people have known this for a long time. You do not prove your power by how much you can take. You prove it by what you are willing to protect.

The First Thaw Beneath the Ice

In our teachings, we are reminded that all things carry spirit. Even wounded things. Even places burdened by difficult memories.

Especially those places.

Healing does not arrive all at once like thunder. More often it comes the way spring arrives in the north. Slowly and patiently. First, a thaw beneath the surface. Then water moving under ice. Then spring plant shoots pushing upward where everything once appeared barren.

That’s what this moment feels like to me.

A thaw.

A shift.

A door opening in a place where our ancestors were once considered the enemy of this country.

The Places That Remember

I wonder sometimes what our ancestors would think seeing Native women standing at the center of rooms where decisions about land and water are made.

I wonder if they would grieve the cost of what was lost to get here.

I wonder if they would smile knowing the songs survived anyway.

Likely both.

Our people understand that joy and grief often travel together. We know what it means to laugh at the kitchen table after a funeral. We know how to tell jokes in the middle of a disaster. We know how to carry heartbreak and still make soup. Still braid hair. Still light the fire. Still show up.

That’s survival too.

And maybe that’s what I felt hearing the news about Deb Haaland.

Like the first warm wind after a hard winter.

We Are Still Here

Deb Haaland’s victory doesn’t end the work. It doesn’t undo the laws, the removals, the hunger, the schools, the graves, the maps, the lies.

But it does remind us of something powerful.

The systems built to erase us are now being entered by the very people they failed to disappear and bury.

And when Deb Haaland says she is there because the ancestors felt it was necessary, we all believe her.

Because sometimes reckoning doesn’t move like a tornado.

Sometimes it moves like water under ice.

Sometimes it moves through women who carry clay jars, stories, grief, laughter, and entire nations in their hands.

Sometimes it walks into a building full of ghosts and refuses to be haunted into silence.

A reminder from the ancestors:

We are still here.

*A necessary fashion note, because Indigenous brilliance includes contemporary fashion designers. Deb Haaland is wearing an Emme Studio dress designed by my friend Korina Emmerich of Relative Arts NYC, where I’m proud to be one of the resident artists and community members.

Resources and Further Reading

Associated Press. “Former Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and ex-Mayor Gregg Hull to face off for New Mexico governor.”
This article reports Haaland’s win in the New Mexico Democratic gubernatorial primary and explains that, if elected in November, she could become the first Native American woman governor in U.S. history.

Casey Cep, The New Yorker. “Deb Haaland Confronts the History of the Federal Agency She Leads.”
This profile explores Haaland’s work as Secretary of the Interior, her family’s connection to the boarding school system, and her efforts to make the federal government confront its own history. It is also the source of the quote: “When I think about why I am really here, it’s like I’m here because the ancestors felt it was necessary.”

U.S. Department of the Interior. “Secretary Haaland Announces Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative.”
This official announcement explains the launch of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative in 2021, the first comprehensive federal effort to investigate the legacy of federal Indian boarding school policies in the United States.

Bureau of Indian Affairs. “Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative.”
This page provides background on the initiative, including the investigative reports, the official list of federal Indian boarding school sites, and the federal effort to document the history and impact of these policies.

U.S. Department of the Interior. “Secretary Haaland Announces Major Milestones for Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative.”
This release covers the later stages of the initiative, including the second and final investigative report, the Road to Healing tour, and recommendations for addressing the intergenerational impacts of the boarding school system.

U.S. Department of the Interior. “Secretary Haaland Creates New Missing & Murdered Unit to Pursue Justice for Missing or Murdered American Indians and Alaska Natives.”
This source explains Haaland’s creation of a Missing and Murdered Unit within the Bureau of Indian Affairs to address the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people.

U.S. Department of the Interior. “Interior Department Completes Removal of ‘Sq___’ from Federal Use.”
This source documents the federal effort under Haaland’s leadership to remove a racist and sexist slur against Indigenous women from federal place names.

U.S. Department of the Interior. “Interior Department Announces Significant Action to Restore Bison Populations.”
This source details Haaland’s work supporting bison restoration, including the use of Indigenous Knowledge and partnerships with Tribal Nations.

U.S. Department of the Interior. “Interior Department Issues Guidance to Strengthen Tribal Co-Stewardship of Public Lands and Waters.”
This source explains federal guidance issued under Haaland’s leadership to strengthen the role of Tribal governments in stewardship of public lands, waters, and wildlife.

Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report, Volume I.
This report documents the federal government’s role in targeting American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children through boarding school policies.

Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report, Volume II.
This follow-up report expands the findings of the first report and includes further documentation of boarding school sites, deaths, institutional records, and recommendations for healing and accountability.

This is Native land.

Newark sits on Lenape land. The United States sits on Indigenous homelands taken through violence, broken treaties, forced removal, boarding schools, massacres, and laws built to erase Native people while still using Native names for towns, rivers, streets, and states.

So when the U.S. government calls migrants “illegal,” a lot of Native people hear something more insidious than a policy debate.

We hear a settler nation pretending it has always had the right to decide who belongs here.

That’s why the fight over Delaney Hall isn’t just about one center. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka announced Tuesday that the city is suing to shut down the ICE detention center, citing reports of unsafe conditions and lack of proper medical care.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has denied those allegations and criticized the protests outside the facility. Nothin’ to see here, folks. Look the other way is what they hope people will do.

But we must not look the other way.

This is no longer just Baraka, activists, and families saying something is wrong. New Jersey has stepped in.

On June 2, Attorney General Jennifer Davenport and the state Department of Health filed a complaint against GEO Group, the private company operating Delaney Hall, after state health inspectors were allegedly blocked from conducting a full inspection. Inspectors were reportedly allowed into only part of the facility and barred from key areas, including the medical unit, sleeping areas, bathrooms, and showers.

The allegations from inside are even more disturbing. Detainees have reportedly told relatives and advocacy groups that the water tasted metallic and undrinkable, that people were denied medical care or necessary medications, and that illnesses like the flu or COVID-19 were spreading through the facility like wildfire. In late May, the Department of Health also received a report that a detainee had been taken to University Hospital with tuberculosis.

In a locked facility, public health is not optional. It’s the bare minimum.

This is why Indigenous people have trust issues. Systems that hide people also hide harm. They separate families, control movement, control information, and then ask the public to believe whoever holds the keys to these cages.

A detention center on Lenape land, run by a private prison company, holding migrants who may themselves come from Indigenous communities across the Americas, should not be able to operate behind a wall of denial.

The Bigger Picture

From an Indigenous view, the question is bigger than Delaney Hall.

Who gave this government the moral authority to cage people on stolen land?

Migrants are often talked about as if they are invading something pure and settled. That language is not accidental. It makes people afraid. It turns workers, parents, children, asylum seekers, and displaced people into a threat.

But many migrants are Indigenous themselves. Many come from lands divided by borders they did not create. Some are Maya, Zapotec, Mixtec, Garifuna, Nahua, Quechua, Aymara, and from many other Native nations across the Americas. They are not foreign to this hemisphere. They are moving across lands that were connected long before the United States, Mexico, Canada, ICE, or Border Patrol existed.

The border did not make them outsiders.

The border made their movement illegal.

When Native people say migrants are not immigrants, it’s a challenge to the story this country tells about itself. The United States likes to call itself a nation of immigrants because that sounds generous.

But settlers did not simply arrive. They invaded. They occupied. They built borders through Indigenous territories and then acted like those borders were natural.

They were not.

They still are not.

Let Them In

Delaney Hall is part of that same story. DHS says the claims are false.

Fine. Then open the doors.

Let inspectors in. Let doctors in. Let families know what is happening. Let the people inside speak without fear.

If the conditions are humane, scrutiny should not be a problem. Right? If they are not humane, then the problem is not the protesters. The problem is the detention center cages.

For Indigenous people, we know what it means when governments say they are acting in the name of law and order. We know what it means when people are rounded up, relocated, separated from family, processed, and disappeared into systems designed to bury them.

The paperwork changes, but the logic doesn’t.

There is a long memory here for Indigenous people, and that memory should make everyone suspicious of any government that uses legality to cover cruelty.

A law can be violent. A border can be violent. A detention center can be violent.

This country keeps pretending migration is the crime instead of asking what forced people to move in the first place.

War, poverty, climate collapse, trade policies, gangs, political violence, land theft, and generations of colonial extraction do not come out of nowhere.

People move because something moved them.

And when they get here, the same country built on stolen Indigenous land tells them they have no right to exist here.

That’s the hypocrisy.

Migrants are not the threat. The threat is a government that cages people, denies harm, and blocks oversight.

Newark is right to ask what’s happening inside Delaney Hall.

New Jersey is right to demand full access for health inspectors.

But the rest of us should ask the older question.

How did a settler country built on stolen land become so comfortable deciding who belongs?

Here is how To Help

DEMANDS:
1. An immediate in-person meeting with Governor Mikie Sherrill @mikiesherrill at Delaney Hall to directly observe conditions and hear testimony from detained individuals
2. The immediate release of vulnerable detainees, including elderly individuals, pregnant women, young people, pregnant women and those with serious medical conditions.
3. Meaningful review of immigration cases and habeas filings
4. An end to what they describe as coercive pressure to sign deportation or voluntary departure document

ACCOUNTS TO FOLLOW on Instagram:
@iceoutofnj
@cosechanj
@sol.jerseycity
@immigrationcoalition
@estamosunidosnj
@framed.unrest

SUPPLIES NEEDED:
instant ice packs
goggles without vents that are impact-rated/ shatterproof (ANSI 87.1 or MIL-PREF 32432)
P100 respirators and filters
helmets/hard hats
knee & elbow pads
shin & wrist guards
hearing protector earmuffs
sudecon wipes
folding chairs
charged portable chargers
retractable keychains/tool lanyards

DO NOT BRING THESE SUPPLIES, THERE IS A SURPLUS:
Dawn dish soap
paper towels
surgical and kn94/kn95 masks
gloves
baby wipes
gauze
dressings
saline
cough drops
baby shampoo

Visit @5calls to find information to call your senators

Follow and support @the_ilrc on Instagram for more resources and to support nationwide immigration law and policy reform efforts.

Not “testing our institutions,” which always sounds to me like something said by people who still want to believe the walls are fine even though the kitchen is full of smoke.

Destroying it.

And I just sat there for a minute, thumb hovering over the screen, because yes. That is true. But also, Native people recognize the room.

Not in a smug way. Not in a “we told you so” way, though, to be fair, Native people and Black people have been telling this country a few things for quite some time and America keeps acting like it missed the memo. I mean it more like this: pull up a chair. The room you just walked into has been occupied for generations.

Native people know what it feels like.

So when people say, “They are destroying democracy,” I believe them. I do. But I also want to say, honestly, democracy was never evenly distributed here.

Maybe that’s where the misunderstanding begins. A lot of people are calling this moment in time apocalyptic because they are watching institutions shake, rights disappear, laws bend, and powerful people decide things for the rest of us. And yes, that is terrifying. But calling it “apocalyptic” is also a very Western way of seeing the world, because it assumes the end is something still coming.

Native people know better.

We have already lived through an apocalypse. We are still living through one. It came with ships, crosses, soldiers, schools, policies, maps, courts, pipelines, and clean little government words that made destruction sound inevitable and orderly.

So when people say, “This feels like the end of the world,” I understand the fear. But I also want to say: whose world?

Because for Native people, the world ended around 1492, and then we had to wake up the next morning and feed the kids. We had to bury our dead, hide our ceremonies, save our languages, protect our water, and keep going anyway.

Some people are just now feeling the stormy weather Native and Black people have been standing in for generations. This is not the apocalypse arriving. This is the machinery of apocalypse becoming visible to people who were once protected from its worst edges.

And because my brain is a strange little campfire where politics, teaching, history, and jokes all swirl around together like smoke, this made me think about Geert Hofstede.

I know. Nothing says “come sit by the fire” like a Dutch social psychologist.

But keep reading so you see what I mean.

Hofstede’s six dimensions of national culture are usually dragged into business and communication classes to talk about how societies handle power, among other things.

The six dimensions are commonly listed as power distance, individualism/collectivism, masculinity/femininity, uncertainty avoidance, short-term/long-term orientation, and indulgence/restraint.

I’m attempting to use Hofstede to explain America. Or, more specifically, I’m using him to hold up a mirror.

Because sometimes a tool from the colonial classroom becomes useful when you turn it around and point it back at the house that built the classroom.

And what it shows, at least to me, is that America is not just having a political crisis. It is having a cultural one. The values it bragged about were often not values at all. They were habits of empire, and now those habits are eating the house.

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1. Individualism without responsibility becomes abandonment

America loves the individual. The self-made man, the lone cowboy, the rugged entrepreneur, the guy in the truck commercial standing on land he probably doesn’t have permission to be on. Everything is personal freedom, personal responsibility, personal success, and even personal brand.

Don’t get me wrong, I like personal freedom. Who doesn’t?

But individualism without responsibility becomes abandonment.

It becomes your child, your problem. Your water, your problem. Your sacred site, your problem. Your deportation, your problem. Your lost job, your problem. Your healthcare, your problem. Your rights, well, we’ll see what the courts say, assuming anyone listens.

That’s what I hear in the birthright citizenship fight. The Supreme Court is weighing several major Trump-related cases right now, including his attempt to restrict birthright citizenship and his administration’s move to end Temporary Protected Status for more than 356,000 Haitian and Syrian immigrants. The birthright citizenship case comes from an executive order that would deny citizenship to some children born in the United States if their parents are not citizens or green-card holders.

Basically, the government is arguing over which babies count.

Native people know something about governments deciding which children belong. Black Americans know it. Immigrants know it. Poor people know it. Queer and trans people know it. Disabled people know it. Anyone who has ever had to prove their humanity knows it.

Many Indigenous cultures begin somewhere else. Many of our teachings remind us that a person is not just a person isolated on their own.

You are your people. You are your family, your ancestors, your obligations, your land, your water, your dead, your future generations.

You are your community.

America keeps calling this dependency because America has confused individualism with strength. But Native collectivism has always known something this country is now being forced to learn the hard way: survival is not an individual achievement. It is a collective relationship, held together by obligation, responsibility to your fellow humans and nature, and the simple truth that when one person is hurting, the whole circle feels it.

2. Power distance: when the people farthest from the harm make the decisions

Hofstede called one of the dimensions power distance, which is basically how comfortable a society is with hierarchy, and colonialism loves hierarchy. It loves forms, permits, hearings, panels, consultation sessions, folding chairs, and hierarchical titles.

Indian Country knows power distance. We know what it means when the people farthest from the harm get the most authority.

And now other people are starting to see what power does when it’s put into the hands of empire. It reaches. It goes after courts, lawyers, voters, immigrants, universities, teachers, journalists, anyone who says, “Actually, there are rules here,” and anyone who dares to stand beside the people empire has already decided are disposable.

An Associated Press review found that since February 2025, district court judges ruled the Trump administration was violating court orders in at least 31 lawsuits, including cases involving funding cuts, mass layoffs, deportations, and immigration practices.

That is not ordinary politics. That is the powerful testing the walls, and if the walls hold, they push harder.

Then there are the law firms. A federal appeals court heard arguments this month over Trump executive orders targeting major firms, including Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, and Susman Godfrey. The orders sought to punish firms that had represented or employed people Trump viewed as political enemies, and four separate district court judges had already determined those executive orders were unconstitutional.

That should scare people, and not just people who went to law school and like to say “pursuant to” in casual conversation.

When a government starts punishing lawyers for standing beside the wrong people, it is not only talking to lawyers. It is talking to everyone. It’s saying, be careful who you defend. Be careful who you represent. Be careful who you stand beside when those in power are vengeful.

3. Competition without care becomes cruelty

Another Hofstede dimension is often called masculinity versus femininity.

What he means is whether a society values dominance, competition, achievement, toughness, and winning, or whether it values care, cooperation, quality of life, and support for the vulnerable.

Look around. America loves winning. Bigger bombs, bigger trucks, bigger walls, bigger prisons, bigger pipelines, bigger flags, bigger speeches about freedom from people who are absolutely terrified of school libraries.

Some people in this country have spent a long time confusing cruelty with strength.

Cut the program, that’s strength. Mock the vulnerable, that’s strength. Ignore the sick, that’s strength. Punish the protester, that’s strength. Drill faster, deport harder, cut deeper, apologize never.

The White House’s own FY 2026 budget release said the proposal would cut non-defense discretionary spending by $163 billion, or 23 percent, while increasing defense spending by 13 percent and Homeland Security appropriations by nearly 65 percent.

It says care is waste. It says science is optional. It says education is suspicious. It says health can be trimmed. It throws money at the border, which means the border gets fed before the hungry child does.

And Indian Country knows what happens when governments put survival on the chopping block. The National Indian Child Welfare Association warned that the FY 2026 budget request proposed significant cuts to federal human-service programs that Tribes access, including programs connected to HHS and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The National Indian Health Board also reported that the FY 2026 HHS proposal included eliminations or reductions to several Tribal-serving health programs, including mental and behavioral health funding streams and programs serving American Indian and Alaska Native communities.

And this is where Hofstede’s language gets a little clunky, because calling one side “masculine” and the other “feminine” already tells you something about the worldview that built the framework. In many Indigenous communities, strength was not supposed to mean domination. It was not supposed to mean winning at all costs, taking more than you need, or confusing loudness with leadership.

Many Native nations held, and still hold, a much more relational understanding of power. Women, aunties, grandmothers, clan mothers, mothers, Two-Spirit people, and caretakers have carried political, spiritual, cultural, and economic authority in ways colonial systems often refused to understand, or actively tried to destroy. Care was not treated as some soft little thing beside the “real” work of leadership. Care was the work. Feeding people was governance. Raising children was nation-building. Protecting water was law. Holding ceremony was survival. Remembering kinship was infrastructure.

Colonialism brought a harder patriarchal order with it, one that tried to shrink Indigenous women’s power, shame gender diversity, and replace relational leadership with hierarchy, ownership, extraction, and control. So when America confuses cruelty with strength, Indigenous people recognize that too. We have seen what happens when a culture decides domination is masculine, care is weak, and the land is something to conquer.

But in many Indigenous ways of knowing, the so-called feminine is not weakness. It is continuity. It is the force that keeps the people alive. It is the aunties organizing food, the grandmothers carrying language, the water protectors standing between the river and the machine, the people who know that survival is not just about fighting enemies but about keeping the circle intact.

And when a government starts treating care like waste, people begin to live in a state of fear. They wake up wondering what will be cut next, who will be targeted next, and whether anyone in power can still be told no.

Which brings us to uncertainty.

4. Uncertainty avoidance: fear as a weather system

Some people are just now learning what it feels like to wake up and wonder what rule changed overnight. Will my vote count? Will my kid be recognized as a citizen? Will my lawyer be punished? Will my school lose funding? Will my neighbor be taken? Will the court order matter? Will anyone in power be told no and actually stop?

That feeling has a name.

Uncertainty.

And in Hofstede’s framework, uncertainty avoidance is about how cultures deal with not knowing. Colonial systems hate uncertainty when it belongs to them, but they love creating it for other people.

Native people have lived with uncertainty as a daily weather system. Will the funding come through? Will the clinic stay open? Will the school have what it needs? Will the court remember the treaty? Will the sacred place still be there next year? Will the government honor its own agreement this time, or will everybody have to become a lawyer again by Monday?

And living like that does something to a people. It teaches you to plan beyond the next headline. Native communities have had to think past election cycles, past funding cycles, past court decisions, past whatever crisis the government created this week, because survival has always required a longer memory than the state wants us to have.

Which is why the next dimension matters so much.

5. Long-term orientation: this country keeps eating tomorrow

Then there is long-term versus short-term thinking, and this is where America needs to sit down and stop touching things.

This country loves to say “future generations” while behaving like we have unlimited resources. It wants what it wants now. Oil now, profit now, power now, votes now, headlines now, tax cuts now, a culture war now, a scapegoat now, a shiny distraction now. And the future can fend for itself.

Native people know this pattern because we have lived inside it. The land was the first budget cut. The first “efficiency measure” was removal. The first “school reform” was assimilation. The first “energy policy” was extraction from somebody else’s sacred place.

Many Indigenous teachings ask a different question: what will this decision do seven generations from now? Not what will it do by Friday, or by the next election, or by the next earnings call, but what will it do to the water, the children, the language, the bones in the ground, the food systems, the stories, the people who will inherit whatever mess we were too selfish to clean up.

Seven generations is an Indigenous worldview and philosophy.

People love to call Native people “traditional” as if that means stuck in the past, but a lot of our so-called traditional knowledge is actually future technology. It is what survival looks like when you stop pretending the land is a dead thing.

And every once in a while, someone outside Native circles says the thing clearly enough that people actually hear it. Maybe because it comes from someone familiar. Maybe because America sometimes needs Han Solo to explain what aunties have been saying forever.

Maybe our ancestors heard our prayers, because Harrison Ford showed up at Arizona State University and said the thing America needs to hear.

Yes, that Harrison Ford. Han Solo. Indiana Jones. The man has spent a good portion of his life onscreen running from boulders, Nazis, stormtroopers, snakes, and, on one occasion, aliens. (I might be the only person who loved Cowboys vs Aliens. Anyone else?)

Anyway, at ASU’s undergraduate commencement on May 11, 2026, Ford received an honorary Doctor of Arts and Humane Letters, and he told graduates:

“We need cultural change. We need to extend social justice. We need to respect and elevate Indigenous people that are being marginalized.” He also told them to “stand up for someone who can’t stand up for themselves,” and called that leadership.

And I know some people will hear that and think, okay, celebrity says good thing at graduation, everyone claps, someone’s auntie posts the clip on Facebook, and the machine keeps chewing.

Fair.

But I think it matters, not because Harrison Ford is suddenly the spokesperson for Indigenous survival, but it matters because he said the simple thing out loud that Indigenous people have been screaming about for decades.

You cannot talk about climate without talking about land. You cannot talk about conservation without talking about the people who have been protecting land while governments and corporations treated it like it’s disposable. You cannot talk about the future while silencing the people whose teachings were built around making sure there would be one.

And maybe that is the heart of this whole thing. Leadership is not domination. Leadership is not winning the loudest. Leadership is not cutting the most vulnerable people loose and calling it strength.

Leadership is standing beside the people the machinery was designed to grind down, and then having the humility to listen when they tell you how the machine works.

But listening requires restraint. It requires giving up the fantasy that freedom means getting whatever you want whenever you want it, no matter who pays the price. And that may be one of America’s hardest lessons.

6. Indulgence without restraint becomes greed dressed up as freedom

The last Hofstede dimension is indulgence versus restraint, and America is indulgent, but not in the fun way.

It indulges billionaires and restrains poor people. It indulges corporations and restrains climate activists. It indulges historical fantasy and myth and restrains teachers who teach the truth. It indulges extraction and restrains land defenders. It indulges people who want to rewrite the past and restrains the people who survived it.

Native restraint is different.

Ours is take what you need, don’t waste, don’t insult the animals, don’t poison the water, don’t treat the land like a disposable thing.

Don’t confuse appetite with freedom.

That last one could save the world if anyone put it on a bumper sticker.

Because what America often calls freedom is just appetite that’s waving an American flag. The freedom to take, burn, own, ignore, and never be inconvenienced by anyone else’s suffering. But real freedom requires responsibility, otherwise it’s just destruction of those who don’t fit into the elite class.

What we do with the smoke

This is why Hofstede actually helps here. His framework names the cultural sickness under the politics. Individualism without responsibility becomes abandonment. Power distance without humility becomes authoritarianism. Competition without care becomes cruelty. Uncertainty used as a weapon becomes fear. Short-term thinking eats tomorrow. Indulgence without restraint becomes greed.

That’s the machinery.

That’s what people are seeing now.

And once you see it, you have a choice. You can pretend it’s new, which is comforting but useless, or you can admit that the machine has been running for a long time and was simply pointed at Native people, Black people, immigrants, poor people, disabled people, queer and trans people, women, children, prisoners, and the land first.

That doesn’t mean nothing can be done. It means the people who have survived the machine might know something about how to live in these times without losing their minds.

This is where the listening has to come in. Listen to Native people. Listen to Black people. Listen to immigrants. Listen to the land. I mean listen like your survival depends on it, because honestly, it might.

And then do something with what you heard.

Feed somebody. Protect somebody. Put your body in the movement, as Simon says on our “We’re Still Here” segment. Tell the truth somewhere they were hoping for silence.

That is what Native people have been doing after the end of the world in 1492. Not just surviving, but carrying instructions.

So no, everything is not okay. Let’s not insult each other. But the fire is not only destruction. Sometimes it’s a warning.

Stay close to the people who know how to live after the world has already ended once.

They might teach you how to carry water, gather people, and keep yourself human while the smoke is still in the air.

Sources & Further Reading

Hofstede and cultural dimensions

Geert Hofstede. “The 6-D Model of National Culture.” Geert Hofstede.
Used for the six dimensions: power distance, individualism/collectivism, masculinity/femininity, uncertainty avoidance, long-term orientation, and indulgence/restraint.

Nickerson, Charlotte. “Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions Theory.” Simply Psychology, updated August 13, 2025.

Current Trump administration actions and democracy concerns

Chung, Andrew. “Supreme Court rulings loom in four major Trump-related cases.” Reuters, May 20, 2026.

“US appeals court questions Trump’s push to punish major law firms.” Reuters, May 14, 2026.

“Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections.” The White House, March 31, 2026.

“The White House Office of Management and Budget Releases the President’s Fiscal Year 2026 Skinny Budget.” The White House, May 2, 2025.

“Trump proposes $163 billion cut to US budget that slashes domestic spending.” Reuters, May 2, 2025.

Tribal programs, health, and child welfare

“President Trump Releases FY 2026 Budget Request with Significant Cuts to Human Service Programs.” National Indian Child Welfare Association, May 9, 2025.

“What Tribal Nations Need to Know About the FY 2026 President’s Proposed Budget: Analysis of HHS Programs.” National Indian Health Board, July 16, 2025.

Indigenous worldview, relationality, and seven generations

“Values.” Haudenosaunee Confederacy.

“What Is the Seventh Generation Principle?” Indigenous Corporate Training Inc., May 30, 2020.

“Native Knowledge 360°: How Do Native People and Nations Experience Belonging?” National Museum of the American Indian.

Celidwen, Yuria, et al. “Kin relationality and ecological belonging: A cultural psychology of Indigenous prosociality.” Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology, 2023.

Harrison Ford / ASU commencement

“Harrison Ford tells ASU’s Class of 2026: ‘This is your time.’” Arizona State University News, May 11, 2026.

Home is Where the Hogan Is

I was 11 when my parents moved me and my 6 siblings to my grandmother’s hogan on the Navajo Reservation.

Although I was born in Provo, Utah, it was our constant road trips back to our traditional homelands that shaped my identity. My favorite memories aren’t of city streets, but of summers in Mandaree, North Dakota, breaking down cardboard boxes with my cousins to use as sleds on grassy hills, and long drives across Arizona to visit relatives whose homes always smelled like coffee, frybread, cedar smoke and ash.

My father was Mandan-Hidatsa. He was fluent in the language but reluctant to teach us.

“My language belongs to a time and place that doesn’t exist anymore,” he’d say.

He was born in the 1940s, right as the federal government flooded his village and displaced his community onto what would later become the Bakken oil field. Traditionally, the Mandan and Hidatsa were renowned agriculturalists, sedentary people deeply rooted to the land and the seeds that sustained them. When that way of life was destroyed, something inside him broke with it.

I only ever saw him truly happy during the Little Shell Powwow, gossiping in Hidatsa with relatives and old friends.

My mother understood Navajo but didn’t speak it. The boarding schools had done their work, and the trauma trickled down through generations. My grandmother believed perfect English would give her children a safer future. It was always disorienting to hear my grandmother speak flawless Navajo to my mother and hear my mother answer back in English.

My parents were artists and intellectuals who met at IAIA in Santa Fe. My father was a master silver and goldsmith. My mother held a master’s degree in political science and ran an environmental nonprofit. At the time, we were what most people would consider upper middle class, comfortable, though never wealthy.

Then my father got sick from metal poisoning, and the money disappeared.

We moved into my grandmother’s one-room hogan in Cross Canyon, Arizona. No floor. No running water. No electricity.

It was in that tiny space that I watched my mother, with the help of my older brothers and sister, begin to build an empire, one Spam-and-potato burrito at a time.

My mother has always been a great cook, though not out of some romantic love for the kitchen. She simply excelled at anything she committed herself to. If she was going to make breakfast burritos, they were going to be the best breakfast burritos on Navajo.

She obsessed over details: the Bluebird flour in her tortillas, the perfectly seasoned potatoes, the exact ratio of green chile to Spam.

Years later, while sitting in a college lecture hall only weeks away from finishing a business degree, I realized what my mother’s burrito had built.

By ensuring every burrito tasted identical, my mother was practicing quality control. By identifying places like tribal offices where she could sell food, she was developing markets. With the help of my brother, who was an exceptional cook, she expanded the menu to include lunches and desserts, product diversification. Eventually she earned enough to buy a vehicle, which allowed for market expansion.

Academia gatekeeps success through language. They take fundamental human ingenuity and bury it beneath terminology intentionally inaccessible to people like my mother, people with the instincts and discipline to build empires but without the sanctioned vocabulary to describe what they’re doing.

That “hustle” eventually moved us to Window Rock, the capital of the Navajo Nation, where my mother and older sister went from working at a flower shop to owning it. Eventually, our family would own the town’s movie theater too.

To this day, my mother would never call herself a businesswoman or entrepreneur.

But I know better.

That hogan was my first boardroom.

The Anarchist and the Chef

Growing up in a family that modeled absolute mastery was difficult for a kid diagnosed with ADHD. I was always the black sheep, of my family, my community, and often even among my friends.

But looking back, “black sheep” isn’t quite right.

I was an anarchist.

I believed in autonomy and self-governance long before I had language for either one. When I was labeled “disruptive” and “uncontrollable,” when teachers insisted I had a learning disability, my mother refused to believe them. Instead, she built her own teaching methods for kids like me, kids who were tactile and needed to physically process concepts and ideas before they could understand them.

Because of that refusal, and because of my family’s relentless support, I never learned that I wasn’t supposed to build things in places where they supposedly couldn’t exist.

I just did it.

Of course, Thrasher Magazine would support a skateboarding competition built by a bunch of “crazy” Native kids in the desert dirt. Why wouldn’t they? And they did.

In the early 90s, when I started putting up flyers for a sushi pop-up at our family theater in Window Rock, adults laughed.

“Navajos don’t eat fish,” they’d say.

But then the crowds came. People were curious. Fascinated by foods they had only seen on screens. That was the beginning of my lifelong relationship with hospitality.

My ADHD made the rigid, linear structure of the kitchen difficult to navigate. I wasn’t built for the efficiency of the line, but I was built for vision. So I coaxed my brother into collaborating with me.

He was a phenomenal cook and eventually became an extraordinary chef, someone who had been replicating our grandmother’s traditional dishes since he was eight years old.

He was the architect; I was the strategist.

What the Fuck is a Widget?

Years later, sitting in business school listening to professors talk endlessly about “widgets” and “abstract economic models,” I realized I could learn the language of capitalism without adopting its culture.

“What the fuck is a widget?” I kept thinking. Why were we so obsessed with making them?

My professors talked about labor, extraction, optimization, and profit margins as though human beings were interchangeable parts in a machine. I knew for damn sure no one was building anything alone, regardless of the bootstrap mythology they sold us.

I stayed in those halls just long enough to learn their language so I could move through their systems. But I walked away from that degree on principle.

I didn’t want their version of success.

I wanted to redefine what business could look like as an Indigenous person: circular instead of extractive, restorative instead of consumptive.

I knew I could build an Indigenous-centered restaurant that rejected single-use plastics, sourced locally, treated employees fairly, and operated in alignment with my values not because it was trendy, but because it was how I had been taught to exist.

So with the collective strength of my brother, my younger sister, my husband, and my children, we stopped debating theory and started building reality.

Of course I named it Black Sheep Cafe.

Our Business Model Was Mostly Vibes

The restaurant was built on very little capital and a massive amount of reciprocity. We traded pizza and beer for labor from friends who helped us scrub and polish second- and third-hand equipment I had been hoarding in storage units for years.

The building sat in the heart of Provo, Utah, a small college town that had never seen a forty- five-minute wait for a table until we opened our doors.

The original concept was supposed to be a checkered-tablecloth “rez-style” cafe. But when my brother finally agreed to become executive chef, everything changed. Suddenly there were white tablecloths, linen napkins, composed plates.

My brother belonged to that old-school brigade-kitchen generation. For someone like me, a chaotic Type B personality, he was the necessary counterweight, constantly grounding my bigger, wilder ideas.

His palate was unmatched.

One of our first major competitions featured thirty-one of the best restaurants in Utah, and all of them from Salt Lake City. We were the only restaurant from Utah County.

I had been bugging him for weeks about what we were going to serve. Four days before the event, I was practically begging him for a dish description. He barely looked up from the sauté station.

“Hog jowl tacos on blue corn tortillas with maple-bay leaf barbecue sauce and pickled jicama.”

That was it. We won Best Taste.

The most incredible part was that he didn’t even taste the completed dish until months later.

Outside of building the components and plating it, he simply didn’t need to.

I asked him once how he built dishes like that in his head.

“Food talks to me,” he said. “It tells me what it wants, when to take it off the heat, when it’s done.”

I remember thinking: “Man, what a nerd.”

Black Sheep became our test kitchen for centering Indigenous foodways, but for years we didn’t even have a category on platforms like OpenTable. We spent three years petitioning them before “Native American” finally appeared as a dining category in 2014.

Getting that recognition was both exhilarating and insulting.

Indigenous foodways are not some niche contribution to American cuisine. They are the literal foundation of it.

But our experiences working with organizations like the James Beard Foundation, attending their programming, and achieving what most people would consider “success” were increasingly dampened by a growing realization.

I looked out into the dining room and I didn’t see myself there. I saw people from all over the world enjoying what we had built, but I rarely saw another Native person sitting at those tables.

That realization stayed with me.

I knew then that whatever we were building next had to become something larger than a restaurant.

A Facebook Post and an Existential Crisis

Around that same time, I came across a Facebook post written by a childhood friend trying to build a small business on Navajo.

His experience felt painfully familiar.

Our economies on reservations are often described as “grey economies” or “cash economies,” fueled by flea markets, roadside food stands, art vendors, and informal labor networks that have existed for generations.

My friend carved weaving tools. There was a real market for them. Weaving is deeply tied to Navajo economic life. Sheep, wool, grazing permits, land access, food and economy have always been connected.

But to expand his business, he needed capital. To apply for a small business grant, he needed to print out paperwork. At the time he was living in a traditional hogan without electricity, running water, or internet access.

He drove to the library, their computers were down. He drove to the Navajo Nation Museum, the printers were out of ink. He drove to the Department of Economic Development and was told him he couldn’t use their equipment because he wasn’t an employee. Finally, he drove all the way to Gallup, New Mexico, to pay fifteen dollars at Kinko’s just to print and submit his application.

The entire ordeal took two days.

At the exact moment I was reading that story, I was sitting in a coworking office with soft lighting, high-speed internet, leather furniture, scented candles, and every imaginable convenience at my fingertips.

My heart broke. And then I got angry.

I understood something in that moment that I hadn’t been able to articulate before. The talent was never the problem. The barriers are structural, and they are not accidental. Indigenous lands are held in federal trust. Physical addresses don’t exist where federal policy never required them, which means shipping companies can’t find you. Broadband doesn’t reach you. Banking infrastructure wasn’t built for you. These are not oversights. The system was functioning exactly as designed.

People love talking about “bootstraps” in America. But what happens when the system deliberately withholds the boots?

That rage became the foundation for IndigeHub.

Because on many reservations, entrepreneurship doesn’t fail for lack of ideas. It fails because every administrative task is a maze and every permit is a decade of waiting.

We weren’t just fighting poverty. We were fighting time.

A Loophole, a Forklift and a Blackbird Walk Into a Bar

In the permitting process for micro-businesses on Navajo, there is a loophole. You can get a temporary business site lease in a matter of weeks, not years, if the business is classified as “mobile.” That tiny distinction became our strategic entry point.

One of my favorite stories is about the entrepreneur who had been trying for years to secure a permanent business site lease.

Eventually, he got tired of waiting.

He poured a concrete slab and placed a prefabricated metal building on top of it. When tribal officials inevitably arrived to tell him he couldn’t build a permanent structure without approval, he climbed into a forklift and physically pushed the entire building several feet across the dirt.

“It’s mobile,” he told them.

Nearly twenty years later, he’s still operating from that same building.

That same entrepreneur eventually offered us office space inside that building. That’s where we built Blackbird.

Blackbird was a shared commercial kitchen designed to train food entrepreneurs and create a low-barrier space for chefs to test concepts, build customer bases, and, most importantly, fail safely. No one tells you in business school that failure is inevitable. In Indigenous communities, failure carries even greater consequences because access to capital is already so limited. But if failure becomes a lesson instead of a dead end, it transforms into infrastructure.

Blackbird wasn’t just a kitchen. It was an incubator for resilience, a place where we could run Chef’s Boot Camps to ensure that the next generation of Native chefs had the skills, the confidence, and the space to actually build something of their own.

Blackbird even gave me my first opportunity to cook professionally. I still carry the scar from my first chef’s knife.

I cut myself badly across the side of my palm during service. I remember the warmth of blood pooling inside my glove while I finished the ticket I was working on. I didn’t want Chef to know.

Mostly because I was about to pass out. But when I finally showed him, there wasn’t judgment in his eyes. There was pride. He quietly cleaned the wound, spread a thin layer of super glue across it, let it dry, added another layer, and looked at me.

“Back to work.”

That was my initiation.

By then, we were finally building the ecosystem we had talked about for years. Blackbird, Black Sheep, Blue Poblano, a fast-casual concept called House of Frybread, and a future Indigenous fine dining concept called Black Lamb were finally beginning to resemble the ecosystem we had imagined for years.

We were building infrastructure.

And then COVID hit.

The Places the Map Forgot, and the People We Lost There

When news of the virus first began circulating, it was difficult to separate rumor from reality.

Then shelves started emptying. First toilet paper, then sanitizer, gloves, cleaning supplies, and eventually food itself.

We immediately understood what was coming for our communities. On Navajo, families routinely drive hours just to access groceries or haul water. Multi-generational households are common. Thousands of homes still lack basic plumbing. In terms of the global supply chain, Indigenous communities are often not even considered a link. We knew no one was coming to save us.

We stopped restaurant development entirely. Blackbird and House of Frybread became emergency relief hubs. We put out calls for donations. Cleaning supplies. Masks. Gloves. Hand sanitizer.

Within weeks we had built a volunteer network of more than one hundred people. That network became Protect Native Elders, a group of strangers working together to protect some of the most vulnerable members of our communities while the broader systems around us failed in real time.

Breweries and distilleries donated sanitizer. Hobby sewers made cloth masks. People with 3D printers produced face shields for first responders. We distributed more than 700,000 pieces of PPE and hundreds of food-grade water totes to Indigenous communities across North America.

One of the most important decisions I had ever made for Blackbird turned out to be something incredibly small: creating a geo-coded address on Google Maps.

Because so many homes and buildings on tribal lands lack standardized physical addresses, that single digital workaround allowed FedEx, UPS, Amazon, and freight companies to reach us. If their trucks couldn’t make deliveries into rural communities, we drove supplies ourselves. At one point we even partnered with an autonomous aircraft company to deliver supplies into isolated regions.

For nearly two years, we operated like that. And for nearly two years we existed inside repetition and exhaustion, receiving shipments, packing supplies, driving long distances, unloading trucks, answering calls late into the night, and sleeping just enough to do it all again the next morning.

I’ll never forget the grandfather who thanked our volunteer profusely in Navajo after receiving a 275-gallon water tote. Before that delivery, he had been hauling water miles at a time in five- gallon Home Depot buckets.

Eventually, the vaccines arrived.

But for my brother, they arrived too late.

Just months before he would have become eligible, Chef Mark Daniel Mason died from complications related to COVID. He was fifty-three.

The gap we had spent years trying to bridge with geocodes, volunteer drivers, forklifts, super glue, and pure exhaustion had finally claimed the architect of our kitchen.

The Shield and the Umbrella

For a long time after his death, I wasn’t sure how to continue. Grief does strange things to ambition. There is a particular kind of survivor’s guilt that comes from losing someone whose talent eclipsed your own. My brother was one of the most gifted people I have ever known. The idea that I was still here building while he was gone felt impossible to reconcile. If it weren’t for my husband, my best friend, the person who gave me enough space to mourn without collapsing completely, I don’t know that I would still be here.

But eventually the work called me back. Not because the grief disappeared. But because the grief clarified the stakes.

Until my brother’s death, much of our work had existed quietly under the title of “Mutual Aid.”

After Chef passed in 2021, we stepped out from under the radar. Some of the individuals involved with Protect Native Elders came with me to re-establish IndigeHub as a formal 501(c)(3).

PNE was about immediate survival. Rapid response. Temporary solutions to urgent problems. If we’re serious about Indigenous self-sufficiency, we cannot keep operating entirely in crisis mode.

But we don’t need another typical nonprofit. We need capital, resources, and infrastructure in the hands of the people already doing the work inside their own communities. That’s why we accepted the legal framework of nonprofit status for IndigeHub. Not because we believed the system would save us, but because we needed a shield.

The government can inspect our books, our reporting, our paperwork. But they do not get direct access to our farmers, our chefs, or our community members. Too many people have spent generations surviving systems that have proven themselves just as predatory and extractive as any for-profit. IndigeHub exists to stand in that gap. To act as an umbrella long enough for our people to build something they actually own.

If Indigenous communities are ever going to achieve real economic sovereignty, we cannot rely entirely on institutions that have repeatedly failed us. We have to build our own systems, restaurants, farms, kitchens, supply chains, and eventually entire ecosystems capable of sustaining us long after the grants and headlines disappear.

The Food Is Talking to Me

Because Chef and the Chefs Bootcamps were such an integral part of our programming, his death left a massive hole in our organization. I was left with a choice: let the culinary vision die with him, or find a way to carry it forward myself.

With absolutely no confidence, but with the familiar trust that the universe would provide, I decided to step into his big chef shoes.

I quickly realized that over the years, I had absorbed most of Chef’s teachings by osmosis. I knew how to build a kitchen and run a line. I knew how to create recipes and track costs. I had watched him listen to the food for decades. Where I was rusty was technique, the fine-motor discipline of the high-level kitchen.

That would change because of my relationship with the James Beard Foundation.

Through their programs and my involvement with the American Culinary Corps, I was given access to the very best in the industry. I found myself in kitchens where I could sharpen those techniques, not just to prove something to the world, but to ensure that IndigeHub had a leader who actually knew how to hold a knife.

Somewhere in that foggy, grief-stricken timeline, I turned to my husband and whispered: “The food is talking to me.”

Keeping Our Seat at the Table

There’s a current narrative that institutions like the James Beard Foundation should be abandoned entirely. There are voices calling for boycotts, claiming that any BIPOC chef who stays at the table is just looking for “white acceptance.” They say, “staying silent makes you an ally of a racist system.”

But I’ve never been silent, and I’ve never gone looking for acceptance. I’m at that table to build reciprocity.

Not all institutions are faceless monoliths. They are made up of individual people, colleagues, advocates, allies, and sometimes friends, many of whom are genuinely trying to do the right thing inside imperfect systems. I stay in those conversations because I’m looking for friction points: the places where systems quietly fail our communities.

Years ago, when the Foundation was building its BIPOC Food Fund, I pointed out that parts of the application process effectively excluded many Indigenous entrepreneurs living on reservations. The requirements assumed access to infrastructure that simply doesn’t exist in many of our communities. And to their credit, they listened. The process changed because people stayed at the table together long enough to make those changes happen.

I’ll keep working with institutions willing to move resources, visibility, and opportunity toward our communities. The James Beard Foundation has opened doors for the communities, chefs, and entrepreneurs I advocate for, and I’ve given them years of advocacy in return.

That’s reciprocity. And I’ll continue to show up as long as they continue showing up for our communities. I don’t dismiss the chefs calling for boycotts. Their experiences are very real. But restorative justice is a core tenet of my Indigeneity.

Until there is no other path, I will work toward healing first.

The View from the Seat

Some stories, though, can only be told properly when you are the host.

I had been attending Beard Week for years. I loved the collaboration, the energy, the relationship building that happens there. But sitting in those award ceremonies, I felt invisible.

Again and again, I heard phrases like “nation of immigrants” and “melting pot” used to describe American food culture. And those phrases are beautiful for the people who see themselves reflected inside them. But for Native chefs and operators, they can feel diminishing. Because Indigenous foodways are not a contribution to American cuisine. They are its foundation.

It was only in the last few years that Native chefs even began appearing on that stage. For an institution that has existed for four decades, that absence matters.

During Beard Week, entire ecosystems of community-led gatherings happen outside the official awards. Black Food Folks. Queers at Beards. Community spaces built by people who understood what it meant to navigate industries where visibility and belonging are never guaranteed. I was welcomed into those spaces. But seeing them also created a strange homesickness. I wanted that feeling for us, for Indigenous chefs, for Indigenous farmers, for Indigenous artists, for all the people who have spent generations building economies inside systems designed to erase them.

And so, with very little funding, very little sleep, and with the trust that the universe will provide,

House of Smoke & Ash was born.

Not as a rejection of the broader food world, but as an invitation into a deeper conversation. The same way we once sat across the table from the Foundation and asked them to reconsider who their systems were serving, IndigeHouse is asking the culinary world to stop treating Indigenous foodways like a historical footnote or diversity initiative. These are living economies, agricultural systems, and communities.

And just like before, I hope the industry listens.

The Architecture of Home

We aren’t building a dinner, a pop-up, or a performance of Indigeneity designed for institutional approval.

We are building a house.

A place where Indigenous chefs, artists, storytellers, strategists, and farmers can gather as hosts instead of footnotes. A place where we stop asking permission to exist.

Food is economy, but so is art, storytelling, and the relationships that allow communities to survive long after institutions fail them.

House of Smoke & Ash will exist out of sheer will because Indigenous people are still building despite every structural effort to prevent us from doing so. We are not relics, trend forecasts, or diversity metrics built for institutional comfort. We are a professional ecosystem of chefs, farmers, brewers, artists, organizers, and builders.

We are the architects of our own infrastructure.

We are still here.

*If this story moved you, the table is set. House of Smoke & Ash takes place during James Beard Awards Week in Chicago, June 13, 2026. Come be in the room. Learn more at IndigeHouse .

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It didn’t begin with one bad investigation, one ignored family, one police department that never called back, one jurisdictional mess, one pipeline, or one man camp. Those things are important in this landscape, but they are not the starting point.

If we want the truth, we have to go back further. Back before the violence was hidden in plain sight. Back before Native women were treated as disposable by colonial law. Back before the United States decided who counted and who didn’t.

Back before the invasion of settlers.

Indigenous Women Held Power

As an Ojibwe person, I want to share that our women, our Anishinaabekwewag, have always held power. Women carried knowledge. They carried medicines. They carried the work of keeping families fed, safe, and connected. They carried law, memory, and responsibility. In our way, that was never separate from leadership.

Colonial society looked at that and was afraid of what they saw. Their system was built on hierarchy, on rank, on somebody always being above somebody else - men, in particular. Our systems were not built that way. They were about balance. Responsibility. The work of keeping people alive without turning life into a contest.

Colonialism did not just bring guns, colonial borders, and religion. It came for women’s authority.

It came for kinship. It came for Native law. It came for the idea that Native women had power, leadership roles, and deep respect.

And that attack was not an accident.

It was the point.

The colonial state had to weaken Indigenous governance to control Indigenous land. It had to break family systems to make Native nations easier to manage. It had to force Christian gender roles onto Native communities to make domination feel natural. Once women’s authority was diminished, violence moved in more easily. And once that happened, the state had more room to look away.

Jurisdiction Is the Trap

Jurisdiction is not a technicality. It is one of the central wounds in this crisis.

The National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center (NIWRC) has been clear that MMIWG2S/MMIP is rooted in colonization and genocide, and in the long erosion of Tribal sovereignty. They also call federal Indian law a “maze of injustice,” which is exactly right. Too often, Tribal Nations are still blocked from fully protecting their own people while the systems around them move slowly, if at all.

So when a Native woman disappears, families do not just face grief. They face a jurisdictional maze. Who is supposed to search, investigate, and prosecute? Who is willing to move before the evidence goes cold?

Too often, the answer is a mess. Tribal police are underfunded. Local agencies assume someone else is handling it. State systems don’t always see the urgency. Federal systems are slow, inconsistent, or both. And by the time the paperwork settles, a family is left doing the work institutions should have done on day one.

That is the system.

The data tells it, too. Native women are still undercounted, misclassified, and left out of official records, which means the crisis is worse than the numbers suggest. If the state can’t even count the missing and the dead correctly, it can keep pretending the problem is smaller than it is.

That’s t part of the continued erasure.

Alice Fletcher and the Language of “Progress”

Let me tell you about Alice Fletcher. She has a complicated history with Native people. She was no hero, but fought for white women’s rights.

She was an ethnologist from New York, born 1838, died 1923. She lived with the Omaha and Sioux in the 1870s, and worked with Francis La Flesche (an Omaha man) to document Native music and stories. She was the first woman to get an honorary doctorate from Nebraska. She was a suffragist and a Member of the Women’s National Indian Association. All that sounds really good on paper.

But here’s the part that complicates it for Indigenous folks: she drafted the Omaha allotment bill in 1882 and championed the Dawes Act of 1887, which broke up communal Tribal lands into individual plots and opened the “surplus” to non-Native settlers, leading to 92 million acres of loss by 1932. She believed allotment would help Natives assimilate, but it undermined women’s communal authority over land and family. What she really did was gut the systems that gave women power and leadership.

And yet, this is the part that haunts me: Alice Fletcher heard it herself. At the 1888 International Council of Women, she quoted Native women saying, “As an Indian woman, I was free. I owned my home, my person, the work of my own hands, and my children could never forget me. I was better as an Indian woman than under white law.”

She told the story of an Omaha woman who gave away a fine horse. When Fletcher asked, “Will your husband like to have you give the horse away?” the woman “broke into a peal of laughter… Laughter and contempt met my explanation of the white man’s hold upon his wife’s property.” The woman laughed. Really Hard.

Fletcher had firsthand knowledge about women in Indigenous society: Women were equal to men in society, and often held up to be sacred. That was balance.

Before colonization, that’s how it worked for many of us. Matrilineal. Egalitarian. Women controlled agriculture, food, and kinship. Haudenosaunee clan mothers picked chiefs, and knocked the horns off their heads if they got out of line. There was no word for rape or sexual assault because it was almost non-existent in Indigenous society. The National Park Service wrote: “Women live free of fearing violence from men. The spiritual belief in the sacredness of women and the earth — the mutual creators of life — makes rape or beating almost unthinkable in Indigenous society. If it occurs, the offender is punished severely by the men of the victim’s clan family — sometimes by death or banishment.”

White women saw it too. A mail carrier said, “A white woman can go around alone among them or on the most desolate roads with perfect safety. I’d rather have my wife or daughter go around alone at night in this reservation than in the town I live in.” A schoolteacher added, “It is the only place at which I ever taught in which I never was insulted… I’ve heard the same from every woman teacher I know on the reservation.”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (white suffragist) wrote: “The original nomination of the chiefs also always rested with the women… They did not hesitate, when occasion required, ‘to knock off the horns,’ as it was technically called, from the head of a chief and send him back to the ranks of the warriors.”

Matilda Joslyn Gage (white suffragist) wrote, “Never was justice more perfect; never was civilization higher than in Native society.”

Fletcher’s own words haunt all of us as Native people: “The line of descent, feminine, was especially notable in all tribal relations such as the election of Chiefs, and the Council of Matrons, to which all disputed questions were referred for final adjudication.”

So all of these White suffragists noticed Native women’s authority to the point that they believed it could be theirs too. The National Park Service points out that Native women’s political power influenced early women’s rights thinking because it exposed the lie that women’s subordination was natural. In other words, Indigenous women were never footnotes or less than. Indigenous women were powerful, authoritative, and leaders in society. They were proof that another way already existed.

Yet, Alice Fletcher saw all this. Documented it. Quoted it. Then helped build the system that took it away from Native women. She helped replace this with a system that made Native women legally invisible under U.S. law. Colonization imposed patriarchy, making women’s bodies and lives collateral damage.

Pocahontas as Colonial Storytelling

Pocahontas is usually flattened into a Disney romance version, but the historical story is much harsher. She was born around 1596 to Wahunsenacawh, the Powhatan chief, and she was still a child when the English arrived at Jamestown in 1607. She was about 10 or 11 years old, depending on the account. Her birth name was Amonute, and Matoaka is often listed as a more private name; “Pocahontas” was a nickname, not her original identity. In 1613, English colonists kidnapped her and held her for ransom, which is the part Disney never included in their fairy tale. During captivity, she was pressured into conversion, renamed Rebecca, and used as a political object in the colony’s public story about itself. Her marriage to John Rolfe (not Smith) was treated by the English as a peace settlement, but it was also part of a larger colonial strategy to control conflict, land, and Native people. She was taken to England and displayed as “proof that colonization could be civilized”, which says more about the settlers’ propaganda than about her life. She was young, displaced, renamed, converted, and used as part of an English public relations campaign. That is why her story belongs in this Substack. It shows how early the theft started; not only of land, but of girlhood, consent, and narrative itself.

Her story is one that tried to make Empire easier to sell.

So no, MMIWG2S/MMIP is not random or accidental.

It is policy. And as I often say on SiriusXM, it is by design.

Designed through broken jurisdiction, underfunded Tribal justice, Federal delay, and state indifference. It is families forced to become investigators because the institutions that are supposed to respond do not move with enough urgency when the missing person is Native.

National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center’s work makes this painfully clear: restoring Tribal authority, strengthening victim services, improving data collection, and making real intergovernmental coordination are not nice ideas. They are the bare minimum. The crisis keeps reproducing itself because too many agencies still operate as if Native women’s lives can wait. They can’t.

Extraction Is the Modern Version

Man camps are what happens when outside industries bring a concentrated, mostly male workforce into places that were never built to absorb that kind of pressure, and situated around vulnerable populations. They strain already thin systems. They put pressure on law enforcement, housing, health care, and survivor services. And in Native communities, where jurisdiction is already fractured, and accountability is already hard to force, that pressure lands hard.

Researchers and legal advocates have linked these camps to rape, domestic violence, and sex trafficking, especially near reservations, where too many perpetrators assume Native women will not be protected. One legal analysis noted that violent victimization rose sharply in the Bakken region during the oil boom, with women seeing major increases in sexual violence. That is not a side effect, but that is the pattern.

Colonialism did not end. It changed its look.

It moved from boarding schools to bureaucracies. From the seizure of children to the seizure of jurisdiction. From land theft to extraction. From forced assimilation to policies that still make Native women carry the consequences of everybody else’s decisions.

That is why MMIWG2S/MMIP cannot be separated from sovereignty. The same system that tried to break Indigenous nations apart still depends on them being under-resourced, fragmented, and ignored enough not to fully protect their own people.

Personal

This is both political and personal for me.

I had to leave the country with my two daughters to escape violence. I returned after my stalker was behind bars.

So when I talk about this, I am not speaking from some safe academic distance. I know what it means when the systems around you are not enough. I know what it means to realize that staying might cost too much. I know what it means to have survival placed on my shoulders with little help from society.

No one should have to leave home, leave language, leave community, or leave their own life just to be safe.

Native women, girls, Two-Spirit people, and other relatives deserve safety where they are. Not after they go missing. Not after the candlelight vigil. Not after the article. Not after the hashtag.

And I’m not pretending any pre-contact society was perfect. I’m saying the lie women were sold is that women’s subordination was natural. That male domination was inevitable. That violence against women is just how the world works.

It isn’t.

That dream world people keep imagining, where women are safe, believed, respected, and free to move through the world without fear, is not a fantasy.

Parts of it already existed here on this land before Europe arrived and called us uncivilized.

What You Can Do

That’s why this crisis is not just heartbreaking. It’s infuriating.

Because the violence didn’t just happen. It was engineered. It was policy. It was land theft and jurisdiction theft and women’s authority theft and the slow, deliberate dismantling of the systems that kept us safe.

And here’s the part that keeps me up at night: those systems worked. Not perfectly. Not without flaws. But they worked well enough that white women visiting reservations in the 1800s said they felt safer walking alone at night among Native people than in their own towns.

So when people ask me what to do, I don’t have ten-point plans or hashtags. I have three words:

Give it back.

Give back Tribal jurisdiction, fund Tribal law enforcement, give back the respect and authority to women, and give back their safety. Stop letting federal agencies fail Native families without consequence. Fix the data so our relatives are counted correctly. Stop approving extraction projects without confronting the violence that follows them due to man camps.

And listen to Native women, Native families, Native advocates, and Native-led organizations that have been fighting this for generations.

Until we do, every missing woman, every ignored family, every case that disappears into the jurisdictional void — that’s on all of us.

Please follow and support NIWRC, Sovereign Bodies Institute.

Miigwetch for reading.

Sources

• National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center — Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives

• National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center — MMIWR Policy Center

• National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center — Addressing the Crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women

• National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center — The Federal Trust Responsibility and MMIW

• National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center — Government Accountability Office Releases MMIW Report

• National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center — MMIW Toolkit for Families and Communities

• University of Colorado Tallgrass Institute — Violence from Extractive Industry “Man Camps” Endangers Indigenous Women and Children

• Northwestern University Law Review — Man Camps and Bad Men: Litigating Violence Against American Indian Women

• Columbia Mailman School of Public Health — The Colonial Roots of Violence Against Native American Women

• Harvard Dash — Native American Women and the Dawes Act of 1887

• Georgetown Law — Jurisdictional Barriers to Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women

• University of Cincinnati Law Blog — Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women: Ashley Loring Heavyrunner and Jurisdictional Inadequacies

• National Park Service — How Native American Women Inspired the Women’s Rights Movement

• National Park Service — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

• The Indigenous Foundation — The True Story Behind Disney’s Pocahontas

• National Organization for Women’s History — Pocahontas

• Raven Trust — Man camps are temporary; trauma from violence lasts generations

• CRIAW — How Colonialism Affects Women

• First Peoples Law — Aboriginal Rights as a Tool of Colonialism

• Cultural Survival — Indigenous Resistance to New Colonialism

• Alice Fletcher’s Quotes (1888 Speech)- “The Legal Conditions of Indian Women,” delivered at the International Council of Women, Washington D.C., March 29, 1888. Full text: todayinsci.com

• “How Native American Women Inspired the Women’s Rights Movement” by Sally Roesch Wagner, published by the National Park Service (NPS) on their official website.

Funny because, well, it is Yoda.

The little green Jedi. The syntax-challenged uncle of the galaxy. The one who sounds like he has been sitting beside a fire for 900 years, watching everybody make the same mistakes for centuries.

But serious because Bunky Echo-Hawk’s If Yoda Was an Indian is not just a joke. It is not just Star Wars fan art with a Native twist. It is something sharper than that. A little grin with teeth.

It’s Native Pop art doing what Native Pop art does best. Resist!!

It takes the thing everyone thinks they know and turns it just enough that you suddenly have to look again.

Olena McLaughlin’s article, “Native Pop: Bunky Echo-Hawk and Steven Paul Judd Subvert Star Wars,” looks at the work of Echo-Hawk, who is Pawnee/Yakama, and Steven Paul Judd, who is Kiowa/Choctaw. Both artists use Star Wars imagery to push back against the tired, flattening, dusty little box that mainstream culture keeps trying to shove Indigenous people into.

The savage. The sidekick. The mystical environmental helper. The vanished Indian. The tragic person on horseback riding permanently into a sunset someone else painted. McLaughlin notes that Native artists have used subversion as a form of resistance, taking dominant cultural images and making them serve Indigenous stories, humour, politics, and identity instead.

Because we have been living inside other people’s stories about us for a very long time.

Hollywood gave us Tonto. Museums gave us dioramas. Textbooks gave us footnotes. Sports teams gave us mascots. Politicians gave us land acknowledgments right before approving the pipeline.

And then Native artists came along and said, Okay, fine.

You want pop culture?

Here. Hold my lightsaber.

The Force Was Never Yours Alone

One of the things I love about Native Pop art is that it refuses the little museum glass case people keep trying to build around Indigenous identity.

You know the one.

It has a beadwork label. A buckskin expectation. A flute playing somewhere in the background. Maybe a buffalo. Maybe a sepia-toned photograph of someone’s great-great-grandmother that a non-Native collector calls “haunting.”

But Native people are not props from the past. We are not only tradition, although tradition carries us.

We are also sneakers. Memes. Cell phones. Movies. Aunties on Facebook. Cousins arguing about Marvel. Rez dogs with main-character energy. Kids who know their clan and also know every line from Return of the Jedi.

McLaughlin makes this point through Echo-Hawk and Judd’s art. Their work brings together Indigenous visual language and American pop culture, not to dilute Native identity, but to show that Native people are fully present in the contemporary world. Their mashups of Star Wars and Indigenous imagery make audiences reconsider history, representation, and who gets to be imagined as part of the present.

I really believe that matters because colonization is not only about land. It’s also about imagination. It is about who gets pictured as alive, modern, funny, desirable, brilliant, complicated, and still here.

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Yoda in Pawnee Regalia

Echo-Hawk’s If Yoda Was an Indian places Yoda in specifically Pawnee dress. Not some generic pan-Indian Halloween aisle nonsense. Pawnee. The painting includes details like a roach headdress, earrings, a feather fan, geometric designs, and other elements that connect Yoda to Pawnee identity and warrior imagery. McLaughlin points out that this specificity matters because it pushes back against the lazy Plains warrior stereotype repeated in Westerns while also creating a positive Pawnee image for Pawnee youth.

For any Indigenous kid who has grown up looking at screens and wondering why the Native people are always background, always doomed, always noble, always dead, always teaching some white hero how to be spiritual before exiting the plot.

Then suddenly there is Yoda. As an elder, a warrior, and a keeper of knowledge.

And the whole thing flips.

Because Yoda is already understood by the wider culture as wise, powerful, ancient, and necessary. He is the one who carries memory. The one who trains the next generation. The one who knows that empires fall because they always mistake domination for strength.

So when Echo-Hawk makes Yoda Pawnee, he is not shrinking Pawnee culture into Star Wars.

He is expanding what the audience is allowed to see.

He is saying: you already understand this story when it wears a robe and carries a lightsaber. Now try understanding it when it is Indigenous.

That is the beautiful trap of the piece.

The non-Native viewer comes for the joke and gets handed a history lesson.

Very sneaky, and I love it!

Darth Custer, Because Obviously

Echo-Hawk also created Darth Custer, and really, the title alone deserves a moment.

Darth. Custer.

Sometimes art does not need to whisper.

McLaughlin explains that Echo-Hawk’s Darth Custer merges General Custer with Darth Vader, using the Star Wars moral universe to make people rethink federal-tribal history. The Rebel forces become the resistance. The Empire becomes oppression and erasure. Darth Vader becomes a way to see Custer not as the heroic figure of old American mythmaking, but through a Native lens.

And this is where Native humour does that thing it does. It makes you laugh before your brain catches up.

Then the laugh catches in your throat a little.

Because, of course, Custer is Darth Vader. Of course, the empire has always thought it was bringing order. Of course, the empire always has excellent branding.

That is the thing about colonial violence. It dresses itself up in costumes that inspire patriotism. It has theme music. It has statues. It has holidays. It has school curriculum. It has fireworks. It makes itself look inevitable and then calls Indigenous resistance “disruption.”

Native Pop art takes that costume off.

Or better yet, it puts a helmet on it so everyone can finally recognize the villain.

Princess Leia and the Indian Princess Problem

Steven Paul Judd’s Hopi Princess Leia works differently, but it has that same trickster intelligence.

The piece places Princess Leia into Edward Curtis’s 1921 photograph of two Hopi maidens. Leia’s famous side buns echo the Hopi squash blossom hairstyle worn by unmarried women. McLaughlin writes that the piece can be read in multiple ways. On one level, it points to the visual resemblance between Leia’s look and Hopi women’s traditional hairstyles. On another, it writes Hopi women into the Star Wars rebellion, pushing back against erasure and placing Indigenous women inside a story of resistance.

And then there is Edward Curtis.

Which means we have to talk about the old colonial camera.

Edward Curtis was a white American photographer whose work has shaped the way many non-Native people imagine Indigenous peoples, often without realizing it. In the early 1900s, he travelled through Native communities creating his massive photo project, The North American Indian, which claimed to document Indigenous life before it “disappeared.” But that idea was the problem. Curtis’s images often staged Native people as if they belonged only to the past. He was known to remove signs of modern life from photographs, like clocks, wagons, or contemporary clothing, so the images would fit the romantic “vanishing Indian” fantasy white audiences wanted to consume. In other words, his camera did not just record Native people. It helped freeze us in a colonial imagination.

As McLaughlin explains, Judd’s insertion of Leia into a Curtis image counters that idea by placing contemporary pop culture directly inside a photograph that was part of freezing Native people in the past.

That is not just clever, it’s a little act of time travel.

Judd reaches into an image meant to trap Indigenous people in the ethnographic past and drops Princess Leia into it with a blaster.

Excuse me, Edward. The women are busy joining the rebellion.

There is also another layer here, and it is deliciously uncomfortable. Judd’s caption for the work jokes about the “Hopi Indian Princess” ancestor, which McLaughlin connects to the very familiar “Indian princess grandmother” claim used by people trying to claim Indigeneity without community, kinship, responsibility, or actual relationship.

Every Native person knows this one.

“My great-great-grandmother was a Cherokee princess.”

“My grandmother had high cheekbones.”

“My family always said we had Indian blood.”

The Indian princess story is one of those colonial comfort blankets. It lets people feel exotic, spiritual, and connected to stolen land without having to deal with treaties, removals, enrollment, kinship systems, community accountability, or the fact that actual Native women were never treated like fairy-tale princesses by the colonial state.

Steven Paul Judd pokes that myth right in the ribs.

And he does it with Leia.

Perfect, Steven!! No notes.

Native Humour

Native humour can sometimes put people at ease. It’s hard to be serious when you’re laughing. Maybe they think the joke is there to soften the politics.

But, no.

The joke is often the blade.

Native humour has always been a survival technology. It lets us say the thing sideways when the direct route is blocked by somebody’s fragility. It lets us tell the truth without begging to be understood. It keeps us from turning into stone.

McLaughlin describes Native Pop Art and Lowbrow art as using humour, satire, and recognizable imagery to create entry points for audiences who may not know tribal histories. The humour allows artists to make social commentary without becoming preachy or propagandist.

Everyone is exhausted by being lectured at. But art can slip past the guards.

A painting of Yoda in Pawnee regalia can reach someone who might never pick up a book about federal Indian policy. A Darth Custer image can do in three seconds what a high school textbook failed to do in twelve years. Princess Leia in a Curtis photograph can make someone laugh, then wonder, then Google, then maybe sit with the discomfort.

So what some see as just pop culture is actually a strategic pedagogy.

We Were Never the Past

The deeper wound Native Pop art pushes against is the old insistence that real Native people belong to the past.

Mainstream culture likes us best when we are safely historic. It loves the sepia version. The silent version. The version with no land claim, no lawsuit, no protest camp, no artist statement, no joke at the colonizer’s expense.

But contemporary Indigenous artists refuse that.

They are not asking permission to be modern.

They are showing that we always were.

McLaughlin writes that Native Pop artists use recognizable images from mass culture because those images help reach wider audiences. Their work pushes back against the expectation that Native art must only look “traditional” in ways that collectors and museums have decided are authentic. I once had a gallery tell me that they couldn’t have my work in their gallery because it didn’t look “Indian” enough. I guess they wanted feathers and dreamcatchers.

That obsession with “authenticity” has always been a trap.

Who decides what is authentic?

The collector?

The museum?

The professor with a grant?

The person who thinks Native art stopped evolving the moment Europeans arrived?

Indigenous art has always changed. It has always responded to trade, movement, pressure, beauty, grief, ceremony, survival, new materials, new tools, new dangers, new jokes.

Our people adapted to horses. Glass beads. Silver. Cameras. Radio. Film. TikTok. Substack.

A lightsaber is not where the line suddenly breaks.

Visual Sovereignty

What Echo-Hawk and Judd are really practicing is visual sovereignty.

The right to represent ourselves.

The right to interrupt the image made of us.

The right to be funny, futuristic, nerdy, political, stylish, angry, playful, sacred, unserious, and deadly serious, sometimes all in the same breath.

McLaughlin argues that artists like Echo-Hawk and Judd use Native Pop to counter stereotypical representations and create powerful, positive alternatives to dominant media images. Their use of Star Wars invites non-Native audiences to reconsider their assumptions about Native people while also creating affirming images for Native communities.

That’s really important because representation is not shallow when misrepresentation has been one of the tools used against you.

A child should not have to grow up choosing between being invisible or being a stereotype.

A Native kid should get to see an elder in Yoda.

A Native girl should get to see Hopi women in the rebellion.

A Native artist should get to look at the empire’s toys and say, actually, I can use this.

Better than you did.

The Rebellion Has Always Been Indigenous

Maybe that is why Star Wars works so well in Native Pop art.

The whole story is empire, resistance, memory, stolen children, old knowledge, survival, and tiny rebel groups facing impossible machines.

I mean. Come on. We know this story.

We have been living under empires that call themselves republics for centuries. We know what it means to have sacred knowledge dismissed as superstition until Western science finally catches up and gives itself an award. We know what it means to be told our languages are dead while our people are still speaking them back to life. We know what it means to be underestimated by people with bigger weapons and poorer imaginations.

So when Native artists take Star Wars and turn it toward Indigenous presence, they are not simply borrowing from pop culture.

They are reminding us that the rebellion was never fiction to everyone.

Some of us were born into it.

And still, we make art, we laugh, we put Yoda in Pawnee regalia and make Custer wear the Vader mask. And we take the old photographs and refuse to remain trapped inside them.

We’re still here.

Still making art.

Still messing with the empire’s storyline.

So I say to you on this special May 4th Monday:

May the Force figure out how to keep up.

Source cited:
Olena McLaughlin, “Native Pop: Bunky Echo-Hawk and Steven Paul Judd Subvert Star Wars,” Transmotion, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2017.

Not the fashionista glamour, not the dresses, not who’s going or not going.

The bottles.

Because they didn’t come from nowhere. Amazon drivers have been saying for years their routes are so tight they can’t stop to use a bathroom without getting penalized. So some of them don’t stop. They urinate in bottles.

That’s where this comes from.

And now protesters have taken that reality and placed it right outside the Met Gala.

They’re leaving bottles along the walkways, near the entrances, in the spaces where people arrive dressed in hundreds of thousands of dollars of fabric.

Close enough that the staff have to rush and pick them up. Close enough that security notices. Close enough that if someone doesn’t move fast enough, a camera might catch it.

It’s meant to interrupt, and to say this is part of what built this night.

Because this year, this isn’t just the Met Gala.

This is the Bezos Met Gala.

Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos

Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos are not casual guests. They are the lead sponsors, the primary donors, and the honorary co-chairs. They helped fund the event and the exhibition it supports.

There are reports that they put in at least $10 million to secure that position. That’s not showing up as guests who donated; that’s shaping the room.

That’s influence over the guest list, the access, the proximity to culture itself.

So when people say, “Why protest here?” That’s why.

ICE Out Pins

Now let’s talk about the pins.

You’ve probably seen them. Small. Black and white. “ICE Out.” “Be Good.”

Celebrities have been wearing these pins on red carpets to signal opposition to immigration enforcement, detention, and deportation, which are systems most people never have to see up close.

And I don’t dismiss the gesture. Symbolism can matter.

But this is where it gets uncomfortable: some of the same infrastructure behind those systems — logistics, data, cloud services, surveillance, and delivery networks — overlaps with the world companies like Amazon helped build and profit from.

That’s why protesters are connecting the dots. Their signs call it “the Bezos Met Gala: brought to you by the firm that powers ICE.”

In other words, you can wear a pin that says ICE Out, but if the night itself is funded by wealth tied to the machinery of DHS enforcement, the contradiction is impossible to ignore.

So now you’ve got this strange little collision happening all at once: a pin quietly saying, “This is wrong”; an event dressed in culture, beauty, and prestige, but funded by wealth tied to ugly, massive systems of control; and outside, a protest literally laying the evidence at everyone’s feet.

This is what happens when wealth tries to launder itself. When money moves from exploitive industry to art, from extraction to aesthetics, from hard questions to applause. And suddenly, we’re not just looking at fashion or philanthropy or a fancy event. We’re looking at power trying to make itself beautiful enough that we stop asking where it came from.

There are reports that some high-profile names, including Zendaya and Meryl Streep, are skipping the event this year. Whether that’s scheduling, personal choice, or something more intentional, we don’t always get a clear answer. But in a moment like this, absence can carry weight too.

Because in a room built on visibility, not being there can say just as much as walking the carpet.

Nothing New in My World

This isn’t new. In my world, we see this all the time.

I grew up understanding that the beautiful version of a story usually comes after something has already been taken.

Land gets taken, and later there’s a plaque that whitewashes the actual story.
Resources get pulled out, and later there’s a museum wing.
Communities get pushed aside, and later, there’s a land acknowledgment read into a microphone before an event.

It’s always presented like respect. But it comes after the harm, not instead of it. And people are expected to accept that as enough.

I’ve sat in rooms where people talk about “partnership” while the actual power is nowhere near equal. I’ve watched institutions celebrate Indigenous culture while still benefiting from systems that never stopped taking from us. I’ve seen language get softer while the reality underneath is harsh and cruel.

So when I see this, when I see wealth built in one place trying to reposition itself in another, it is a glaring reminder of the same pattern.

But the thing is, once you’ve seen that pattern, you don’t unsee it.

It’s not about one event. It’s about a cycle I’ve watched my whole life
where harm happens in one place, and redemption gets staged in another.

Mind the Gap

What gets me is the gap. Jeff Bezos spends billions on space travel, yachts, private everything.

And his workers are figuring out how to get through a shift without being treated like a disposable body on a timer.

Maybe people will say that’s the cost of convenience. Fine. Then say it. But what if your son or daughter worked in those conditions? I would imagine people might care then. A lot of us would, I think.

Most of us aren’t going to the Met Gala. But we are part of the system around it.

Wait, but what if I use Amazon?

I know, I know. Almost everyone uses Amazon.

I actually don’t. But it was never some grand moral stance. It’s just how I’ve always lived. I’m a little old school. I like going into a store, touching things, talking to a person, and walking out with what I came for.

I used Amazon once or twice years ago and remember wondering how they were getting things to people so quickly. Then I learned more about the conditions for Amazon workers, and it became easy for me not to make it part of my life.

I know that’s not how most people live now. I understand why Amazon works. It’s fast, easy, and for many people, it feels necessary.

But that’s exactly why it matters. When something becomes so convenient that we stop asking what makes it possible, we should probably start asking better questions.

Because the system depends on that ease. On not thinking too hard about what’s behind it. On speed being the only thing we measure.

So I’m not standing outside of this pretending I’m better than anyone.

I’m standing here saying: I’ve always chosen a slower way, and part of that is because I want to stay connected to what things actually cost, not just in money, but in people.

And if you do use Amazon, because most people do, then at least stand with the people making it run.

If you’re benefiting from the system, the least you can do is support the people inside it.

So what can people actually do?

Not in a big, dramatic way. In the way real change usually happens—small, consistent pressure.

If you use Amazon, pay attention to the people behind it.
When workers speak up about injuries, quotas, and bathroom access, please don’t scroll past it. That silence is part of how nothing changes.

Support organizing efforts.
When workers try to unionize or push for better conditions, they’re usually up against a lot. Even sharing their stories, following their campaigns, or not dismissing them matters more than people think.

Don’t default to speed every time.
“Next day” isn’t neutral. Slowing that down when you can takes pressure off the system that’s pushing people to the edge.

Spend locally when it’s possible.
This is a great way of keeping money and relationships closer to real people you can actually see and talk to.

Use your voice where it counts.
Public pressure is one of the only things big companies respond to. That can be a post, a comment, a conversation; something that makes it harder to ignore.

And don’t normalize it.
That’s the biggest one. Don’t accept that people losing basic dignity at work is “just how it is.” It isn’t.

You don’t have to do everything. But doing nothing is what keeps it the same.

I’m not telling anyone what to do about the Met Gala.

Go. Don’t go. Watch. Don’t watch.

But at least see it for what it is.

See what’s being picked up off the ground before the cameras roll.
See what’s funding the night.
See what gets stepped over so everything looks pretty and seamless and sanitized.

Because once you see it, it doesn’t look the same again.

Sources/Further Reading

• • Forbes — Amazon drivers suing over being forced to urinate in bottles

  • CBS News — Amazon worker complaints and company response on bathroom access

  • The Guardian — reporting on Amazon warehouse injuries and working conditions

  • The Washington Post — coverage of scheduling, surveillance, and worker pressure at Amazon

  • The Intercept / NYT — reporting on Amazon Web Services contracts with government agencies, including immigration systems

  • The Guardian / Page Six — reporting on Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez’s sponsorship and role in the Met Gala. Bezos and Sánchez named lead sponsors and donors for the 2026 Met Gala. Reports of $10M+ contribution and co-chair role

  • Elle — explanation of “ICE Out” / “Be Good” pins and red carpet protest signaling
    

We talked about ghost sightings, why we don’t whistle at night, and even a story about foretelling a death. At one point, I genuinely thought, “Should I be saying this out loud?”
…and then I just kept talking.

So many Woo Woos, so little time.

We also spoke about my roots as a citizen of the Ojibwe Nation and about our relationship to nature, animal omens, and energy.

The conversation moved between humor, mystery, and something deeper. One listener called it “beautiful and sometimes heartbreaking,” which feels like a great description of life itself.

If you’re open to something a little spooky, a little meaningful, and a little hard to explain — I hope you’ll give it a listen. Please send it out into the world!

🎧 Listen HERE on Apple Podcasts or wherever your favourite Podcasts are found.

UPDATE: If you’re not on Apple Podcasts, don’t worry, the universe provides.

My Woo Woo episode with Rachel Dratch is now up on the Woo Woo YouTube channel. Watch HERE

If you watch it on YouTube, please hit like & leave a comment there so the algorithm doesn’t bury it in the digital underworld. Would love to hear your thoughts!!

I spent time last week with my Indigenous sister-friend Brandi Morin, and I have been carrying it with me ever since.

We bounced around the city a little, since she was visiting NYC for the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Times Square was being Times Square, all noise and lights and people moving too fast, and there we were talking about ancestors, journalism, grief, responsibility, and what it means to keep using your voice when the world would often prefer you to lower it.

Brandi is Cree, Iroquois, and French, and she is one of those journalists who does not just write about the movement from a safe distance. She puts her body in it. She shows up. She bears witness in places where power would much rather have silence.

And I mean that literally. Brandi has reported from the places where Canada’s clean little myths start to crack open: Wet’suwet’en territory, residential school grave discoveries, the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, oil sands pollution poisoning Indigenous communities downstream, police raids on Indigenous unhoused people, and the long, unfinished work of Truth and Reconciliation. Her journalism has appeared in outlets such as Al Jazeera, National Geographic, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, APTN, and CBC Indigenous. She has won the Edward R. Murrow Award, the PEN Canada Ken Filkow Prize, the Amnesty International Canada Media Award, the Sidney Hillman Prize, and the Tim Giago Free Press Award. But none of those awards fully explain what her work does. Brandi goes where people have been told not to look, and then she makes it impossible to look away.

That kind of work asks something of a person. As a trauma counselor, I would say it takes from the nervous system. It takes from the spirit sometimes. It asks you to keep going even on the days when you are tired right down to the bone.

We talked about that.

In 2024, Brandi was arrested while doing her job, reporting on an Edmonton police raid of an Indigenous unhoused encampment. The charge was eventually dropped, but the message was clear enough: even witnessing can be treated as a threat when the people being witnessed are Indigenous. That is what I mean when I say she puts her body in the work. My fierce warrior sister. And I wanted to introduce you all to her.

We talked about how hard it can be to carry stories for our people out in the world. How visible work can also be lonely work. How you can be grateful for the calling and still admit that some days it feels heavy.

The Cost of Witnessing

And then, because Creator is kind, and our ancestors know the power of humour, we laughed.

A lot.

We laughed the way Indigenous women laugh when we know too much and have survived too much and refuse to become only solemn because of it. That sharp, knowing, ridiculous, LOUD, auntie laughter that shows up right beside the hard truths. The kind that does not erase grief, but refuses to let grief have the whole room.

It was good medicine.

In the photo of us, Brandi is wearing a shirt with the face of Daria Egereva, a Selkup Indigenous leader and climate activist from Western Siberia. Brandi wrote about Daria in her Substack, in a powerful piece about Russia’s war on Indigenous voices. The shirt was not just a shirt. It was witness. It was solidarity worn on the body.

It was also Brandi doing what she always does: carrying the story toward the light, even when the powerful would rather bury it.

That really moved me.

Because Indigenous struggle is not confined by borders. Neither is Indigenous resistance. It moves through land defenders, water protectors, journalists, mothers, aunties, language keepers, artists, people in prison, people in exile, people still speaking when the cost of speaking is very real.

So there we were, in the middle of all that neon spectacle, talking about ancestors and political violence and survival, while Daria’s face moved through the city with us.

There are moments when friendship feels bigger than friendship. This was one of them.

Being with Brandi reminded me that the work can exhaust us, yes. But it can also return us to ourselves. Sometimes through storytelling. Sometimes through laughter. Sometimes through an Indigenous sister who understands the things you do not have to explain.

Please read Brandi’s piece about Daria Egereva. I’m linking it here.

Indigenous Insider

Inside Russia's War on Indigenous Voices

Background: Daria Egereva is a Selkup Indigenous leader from Western Siberia, a mother, a climate activist, and one of the most respected Indigenous rights defenders in the world. On December 17, 2025, Russian authorities broke down her door in the early morning hours and arrested her. She has been detained in a Moscow prison ever since — charged with t…

Read more

3 months ago · 28 likes · 3 comments · Brandi Morin

And follow Brandi Morin’s work. In a world that keeps trying to make Indigenous women disappear, Brandi keeps making us visible.

She is doing the kind of journalism that matters. The kind that tells the truth with its whole chest. The kind our ancestors hoped would find its way through us.

Ways to Follow and Support Brandi Morin’s Work

Please do more than read this and move on.

Follow Brandi Morin. Share her work. Subscribe to Indigenous Insider, her Substack, where she reports on Indigenous resistance, land defence, environmental racism, political violence, and the stories mainstream media too often ignores.

Share her articles widely, especially the ones that make power uncomfortable. Brandi’s recent reporting has focused on Fort Chipewyan, oil sands pollution, Mikisew Cree First Nation, Treaty 8, and the ongoing fight to make governments and industry answer for what Indigenous communities have been warning about for decades.

Buy or request her memoir, Our Voice of Fire: A Memoir of a Warrior Rising, at your local bookstore or library. The University of Calgary describes the book as tracing Brandi’s journey from surviving systems of harm to finding her purpose and power through journalism.

Follow her reporting beyond Substack too. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, Al Jazeera English, The Guardian, Canadaland, VICE, ELLE Canada, The Toronto Star, The New York Times, HuffPost, Indian Country Today, APTN National News, and CBC Indigenous.

And most of all: share this article.
Share it with the people who say they care about truth. Share it with the people who need to understand what Indigenous journalists carry. Share it because stories like Brandi’s deserve to travel farther than the algorithms usually allow.

Indigenous journalism does not survive on admiration alone. It survives because people show up for it.

Apichigo Migwetch for showing up!

What the Vote Actually Did

And this is not just any patch of woods that politicians can pretend nobody will miss. The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness runs nearly 150 miles along the Canadian border. It’s over a million acres of boreal forest, rock, islands, lakes, and connecting streams. The Forest Service calls it the only large temperate lake-land wilderness in the National Wilderness Preservation System. It is also in the 1854 Ceded Territory, where the Bois Forte, Fond du Lac, and Grand Portage Bands of the Ojibway retain treaty rights to hunt, fish, trap, and gather. That fact alone can prevent mines from opening here. This is not empty land. It is living water and treaty land.

Water, Treaty, and the Old Colonial Reflex

If you poison the water and the surrounding area, it is a treaty violation.

That is what makes this vote feel so revealing. Not just disappointing, revealing.

Because when Washington looks at a place like the Boundary Waters, it still tends to see the same old colonial split screen. On one side: “resources,” “critical minerals,” “economic opportunity.” On the other: scenery, recreation, sentimentality. As if water is just the pretty part of the story. As if the real value lives underneath it. As if treaty territory is something you acknowledge when convenient and override when the market gets impatient.

A Different Political Language

That is why I keep thinking about Wab Kinew.

Wabanakwut “Wab” Kinew is a name familiar to many Canadians and all around Indian Country. Wab, Manitoba’s premier, is from the Ojibways of Onigaming First Nation in northwestern Ontario. He is Ojibway, and lately, the language coming out of Manitoba around land and energy has sounded very different from what we just heard out of the U.S. Senate. Grounded in a concept a lot of us were raised with: balance.

Manitoba’s Path to Net Zero is one of the clearest examples. The document says outright that it is shaped by Indigenous teachings, including the practice of making offerings to the land in gratitude, and that as humans take from the environment, we must give back in reciprocity. It speaks about “balancing protection for the environment with economic growth,” and later says the work is about restoring “balance” to the land so rivers, forests, and prairies can grow stronger. It is guided by the teaching of manoomin, wild rice, and frames climate policy not as a technocratic numbers game but as a responsibility to future generations. Something we as Native people call the Seven Generations rule. We don’t make decisions unless we consider how this will impact seven generations down the road.

That is not a small thing.

Language matters because language tells you what a government thinks the land is. In the Boundary Waters vote, land was treated as inventory. In Manitoba’s climate plan, land is treated as relation. Something with cultural, spiritual, ecological, and economic meaning all at once. Something you are responsible to, not just something you can monetize before the next quarter ends.

And in Manitoba, that language is not only symbolic. The province’s Affordable Energy Plan includes Indigenous loan guarantees so First Nations governments can participate in the energy transition and finance new wind partnerships. There is also real movement on Indigenous-led conservation. Right now, Manitoba, Canada, and the Seal River Watershed Alliance are advancing a proposal to protect more than 50,000 square kilometres in northern Manitoba through an Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area that would include a new national park and a new provincial park. The proposed joint management board would operate by consensus and be rooted in both science and Indigenous knowledge. That is what balance can look like when it is more than branding.

There is another line in Manitoba’s net-zero plan that I really wanted to share with you. As the province looks at development in western Hudson Bay and the Port of Churchill, the document says Manitoba should support a national marine conservation area there in order to “balance nature, culture, and economic opportunities.” I actually appreciate that sentence because it does not pretend that the economy disappears. It asks a harder question: what kind of economy, on what terms, and who gets to decide?

(VIDEO) Premier Wab Kinew, Environment and Climate Change Minister Mike Moyes, and Elder Carl Stone, to discuss Pathway to net-zero.

No Fairy Tale Across the Border

Wab Kinew’s government is not some untouched green utopia floating above extraction. Manitoba is also pushing critical minerals. Its critical minerals strategy talks about partnering with global companies, while promising high standards of Indigenous engagement and environmental regulation. And just last week, Manitoba signed a new agreement with Ottawa to speed up reviews for major projects, including Churchill Plus, a northern trade corridor tied to resource movement and private investment.

So this is not a fairy tale with heroes on one side of the border and villains on the other.

It’s more interesting than that.

What I am saying is that there is a real contrast in political worldview here. The Senate vote on the Boundary Waters came from an extractive reflex so familiar it barely has to explain itself anymore. Get the minerals. Fix the consequences later. Call the risk manageable. Pretend the water is separate from the profit. Pretend treaty land is only legally alive when it is convenient.

Wab Kinew’s public language, by contrast, comes from an Ojibway frame where balance is not softness. Balance is structure. It is accountability. It asks what you are taking, what you are returning, and whether the people most affected actually have power, not just consultation sessions and nice graphics. Manitoba will still have to prove that its own rhetoric can survive contact with capital. But at least the rhetoric starts from somewhere human. Somewhere older. Somewhere that remembers water is sacred, and we can’t exist without it.

What Balance Sounds Like to Me

As an Ojibway person, I hear that difference immediately.

I hear it because balance is not abstract in our communities. It is practical. It is every day. It is in how you harvest, how you leave something behind, how you measure wealth, how you understand consequence. It is in knowing that if you poison the water, you do not just damage a view. You damage food, ceremony, movement, kinship, memory, and the right of the next generation to arrive in a world that still knows how to sustain them.

That is what the Senate missed, or chose not to care about.

The Boundary Waters sits right on the Canadian border, but water has never respected the political ego of settler states. It moves. It connects. It carries memory and will also carry damage. In a place made of linked lakes and streams, contamination is not local for long. Which means this vote was never just about one mine proposal in one corner of Minnesota. It was about what kind of logic is governing us now. A logic that sees living freshwater as expendable if the sales pitch is tempting enough.

What Wab Kinew represents, at his best, is a different grammar of power. One where development is not supposed to outrun responsibility. One where Indigenous teachings are not ornamental, but part of how a government explains its obligations. One where “growth” is not allowed to swagger around as if it is the only adult in the room.

That does not solve everything. It does not guarantee courage to always focus on balance. It does not mean Manitoba will always get it right.

But after watching fifty senators decide the Boundary Waters was worth gambling away, I will say I know which political language I trust more.

One treats the land like it’s disposable.

The other, at least, still remembers that if you take from the water, you owe something back.

And these days, that difference feels enormous.

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What You Can Do Right Now

The Senate vote was ugly, but it did not hand Twin Metals a shovel and tell them to start digging. The company still needs federal leases reissued, still has to go through environmental review, and still needs state permits. Minnesota’s own DNR said on April 17 that nothing about the Senate vote changes the state’s permitting standards, and that there are currently no active non-ferrous mining proposals in the Rainy River watershed pending before the agency.

That means this fight is still very alive.

1. Call and email Minnesota DNR Commissioner Sarah Strommen and tell her to use every lawful tool available to keep copper-sulfide mining out of the Boundary Waters watershed. Friends of the Boundary Waters is explicitly urging people to contact the DNR and push for cancellation of Twin Metals’ state mineral leases, and Commissioner Strommen’s office lists a public phone number and email.

2. Contact Governor Tim Walz and tell him to back permanent state-level protection for the Boundary Waters watershed. His office has a public contact page, and this is exactly the moment for Minnesota leaders to decide whether they are serious about protecting water or only serious about sounding that way.

3. Contact your Minnesota state legislators and tell them to support permanent state protection legislation. Friends of the Boundary Waters is urging people to push for state-level protections, and Save the Boundary Waters points to legislation that would permanently ban sulfide-ore copper mining on state-owned lands in the Boundary Waters watershed. Minnesota’s official “Who Represents Me?” tool will tell you exactly who to call.

4. Join and support the groups doing the daily work. Friends of the Boundary Waters and Save the Boundary Waters are already organizing around the next phase of this fight, which is going to be fought in agencies, in legislative offices, in public comment periods, and very likely in court.

5. And when the permitting process opens, show up. As Simon Moya-Smith, my friend and co-host of “We’re Still Here” on John Fugelsang’s Sirius XM show always says, “put your body in the movement”. Save the Boundary Waters notes that the DNR controls the environmental review process for a project like this, and that a mine cannot proceed if a required approval is denied. Public pressure matters most when it becomes part of the record.

Resources Cited

• U.S. Senate. Roll Call Vote 119th Congress, 2nd Session: H.J. Res. 140, Vote No. 84 (April 16, 2026).

• Reuters. U.S. Senate narrowly overturns Minnesota mining ban, sending bill to Trump (April 16, 2026).

• Federal Register. Public Land Order No. 7917 for Withdrawal of Federal Lands; Cook, Lake, and Saint Louis Counties, MN (January 31, 2023).

• U.S. Forest Service, Superior National Forest. Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

• U.S. Forest Service, Superior National Forest. Tribal Relations.

• Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. 1854 Treaty.

• Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. 1854 Treaty with the Chippewa (treaty text).

• 1854 Treaty Authority. Who We Are.

• Office of the Premier, Government of Manitoba. Premier Wab Kinew.

• Government of Manitoba. Manitoba’s Path to Net Zero (PDF).

• Government of Manitoba. Manitoba’s Affordable Energy Plan.

• Government of Manitoba. Indigenous Loan Guarantee Program.

• Government of Manitoba. Securing Our Critical Mineral Future (PDF).

• Government of Manitoba / Seal River Watershed Alliance / Government of Canada. Seal River Watershed Alliance, Governments of Canada and Manitoba Announce Major Steps to Protect the Seal River Watershed (April 17, 2026).

• Seal River Watershed Alliance. Plan for Protection.

“So you’re telling me that the Moon’s many craters are from billions of years protecting Earth by pulling space rocks into her orbit. The moon who is depicted as a woman in countless cultures and timelines? You’re saying her craters and stretch marks are evidence of care? Has someone informed the poets about this?”

And I thought, the poets already know. At least the Indigenous ones do.

In Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) teachings, we call the moon Grandmother Moon. And it makes sense to us that our grandmothers would do everything to protect us.

For Ojibwe people, women have always been deeply connected to Grandmother Moon through the cycles of the body, the pull of water, and the quiet rhythms of life itself.

When you grow up with Grandmother Moon as a relative, the idea that she’s been shaping life here all along doesn’t feel especially strange. Science may eventually arrive at the same conclusion through measurements, models, and diagrams, but the underlying truth has always been taught in our communities for centuries.

What the Moon actually does

Grandmother Moon does a great deal for Mother Earth.

Her gravity is the main force behind our tides. She pulls at the oceans strongly enough to redistribute water across the planet, creating the bulges that become high and low tides as Earth rotates through them.

She also helps steady Mother Earth’s tilt. That matters more than it may sound at first. A planet’s axial tilt affects long-term climate patterns, and NASA has explained that the Moon’s gravitational presence helps keep Earth from wobbling too wildly over deep time. Earth is more stable with the Moon than it would be without her.

The relationship is ongoing. Tidal friction between Earth and Moon has gradually slowed Earth’s rotation over immense spans of time, which means the Moon has helped lengthen our days.

And then there is the surface itself. The Moon keeps a record, Earth does not. Here, wind, water, and plate tectonics keep rewriting the ground beneath us. On the Moon, old impacts remain visible. The craters are not just scars. They’re recording history. They tell scientists about the early solar system in a way Earth often cannot.

Grandmothers Protect Their Grandchildren

I think that is part of what I love about Camille’s post.

There is something so beautiful in the thought that she protects us and wears the evidence of it openly.

Her face carries the memory of impact, and instead of making her less beautiful, it makes her more so. Because those craters can be read not only as damage, but as devotion. As the visible record of a body that has been in relationship with Mother Earth for billions of years, helping hold the conditions that let life go on here. Pulling at the tides. Steadying the planet. Catching what came too close. Keeping watch in the dark.

I think that’s what moves me. Not just that she is beautiful, but why she’s beautiful.

She is beautiful in the way grandmothers are beautiful. Not because they have remained untouched by life, but because life has passed through them. Because they have absorbed pain and protected us.

And maybe that’s why the Moon feels so familiar in so many cultures, not just Indigenous cultures. She doesn’t shine with the cold beauty of something separate from us. She shines like someone who has watched over us, someone whose face tells the story of care.

The Artemis II Mission Patch

Jeremy Hansen, the Canadian astronaut on Artemis II, is wearing a personal mission patch created by Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) artist Henry Guimond of Sagkeeng First Nation in Manitoba, Canada, with the contribution of Dave Courchene III of Turtle Lodge. Hansen has said he wanted the patch to honour the teachings he has received from Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Keepers, and to recognize the importance of Indigenous ways of knowing and Indigenous Peoples in Canada.

Its shape is heptagonal, seven-sided, and for an important reason. The heptagon and the animals around it refer to the Seven Sacred Laws, the Seven Grandfather Teachings: buffalo for respect, eagle for love, bear for courage, Bigfoot for honesty, beaver for wisdom, wolf for humility, and turtle for truth.

Then there’s the bow. It represents Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, nature, and the Moon, launching her arrow with the astronauts as they travel around Grandmother Moon. And the arrow begins from Turtle Island (Mother Earth).

Grandmother Moon is there too, and she has a face, as all grandmothers do. She conveys the cycle of life, watches over the waters of Earth, regulates the tides, and feeds life.

There are stars on the patch too, the Big Dipper and the North Star, and I am happy for that. The Anishinaabe designer describes that explorers, beginning with Indigenous peoples, used those stars for navigation, and that astronauts still navigate by them in deep space. It’s a beautiful reminder that we continue to look to the sky for guidance.

Even the border means something. The silver edge represents Orion, the spacecraft carrying the crew. Inside it runs a thin blue line, which stands for the light or spirit in all of us, in humans, plants, and animals, travelling with the crew aboard the capsule. I find that so beautiful. The idea that even in all that machinery and precision, someone made room for spirit.

Looking back at Earth

At a time when the world feels meaner, louder, and more broken day by day, there’s something deeply inspiring about watching human beings leave Earth, circle Grandmother Moon, and look back at this planet as one small blue home suspended in darkness. No borders visible from that distance. No unhinged politicians. No fighting and division. No manufactured enemies. Just Mother Earth carrying all of us at once.

It’s hard to watch public life sink into cruelty and not feel something in you recoil. It’s hard to listen to the President of the United States threaten Iran in the language of civilizational destruction, warning that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran does not make a deal. And then above all that ugly, brutal noise is this mission, carrying teaching, humility, unity, and wonder.

That’s the contrast my heart can’t make sense of.

And maybe that’s the real lesson: all our reaching still begins here, on the same Earth, under the same moon, bound to one another whether we act like it or not. That, to me, is what makes this mission feel bigger than science and technology. It’s not just about where we can go.

It’s about whether we can remember how to belong to each other while we are here.

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Sources

• Camille Hernandez, Threads post quoted in essay.

• Canadian Space Agency, “Jeremy Hansen’s Patch for the Artemis II Mission.”

• NASA Science, “Tides.”

• NASA Science, “Moon Essentials from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio.”

• Reuters, “Trump says ‘a whole civilization will die tonight’ if Iran does not make a deal.”