You will always want to ask her what it means, to live on the land that was taken from you, to have to still live on the land that was taken and keeps being taken. Did it feel like it kept happening in present time, not in the past but perpetually, as in a car someone steals from you with you still inside it, driving through your neighborhood, fore

Sean had always felt uncomfortable being referred to as a boy, or as a young man. But, and he knew this was the biggest but, feeling nonbinary did not mean he wasn’t a man who directly benefited from being a man. Men were a secret cult. To be a boy being groomed to be a man was to be joining a secret cult against women, and against anything not squ

I found that on the days after I drank even more than the usual amount, which often happened Saturday nights, I felt more intensely, and felt drawn to hear people talk about God. That feeling of the lingering drunkenness made everything feel loose, loose and without weight, like a cloud with no rain being moved by the wind. I’d let the sermon, the

Maybe we’ll be running our whole lives. Just keep moving. That would be okay. We’ll have strong legs, keen awareness, and big hearts, keeping ourselves and each other going like we belong to that one-day distant future, when we can look back and say this is how we made it, despite everything.

There are many stories for what happens after you die. You become light or become the dead light of stars or you swim the river in the sky or you become the soil in the earth. Angels and demons and ghosts. Anything is a story we tell ourselves about a silence. But stories are for telling after the fact. And the one true fact about the afterlife is

There were children, and then there were the children of Indians, because the merciless savage inhabitants of these American lands did not make children but nits, and nits make lice, or so it was said by the man who meant to make a massacre feel like killing bugs at Sand Creek, when seven hundred drunken men came at dawn with cannons, and then agai

The laudanum was disgusting at first, and then it went tasteless, and then the taste made a warmth, a comfort, of temperature and emotion. He came to love the feeling and taste, as he loved his spoon, with its floral design on the handle, and deep bowl to hold the good amount. The way the pain receded felt like a draining and a filling at once. His

That was the first time we performed being Indian for the white people. Some of us danced and drummed and sang—painted and feathered. I watched all the white people gather around us with that strange mix of disgust and astonishment. Later Pratt compared us to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows. Said we “out Buffalo Billed Mr. Cody.” More performances h

This line is from a letter your father sent to your mother: We belong to what we are the way a song belongs to the singer, my heart is a runner and my soul is a winter. In the letter he talks about belonging. What we belong to. And for the most part you believe he means the two of them belonging together. But in another part of the letter he is say