We will wrap him in bright colors. I do not know the ways of our people. I was too young when they took me, and then the school meant to make what I knew a sin. Everything I have left to share, to pass down to you will have to be good enough. All I have to tell you about being Cheyenne came from my mother, before she died, and because she was

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Jackie will come to mean more than family to you, because the idea and feeling of family will be made a lie. Your white parents will not be your real parents, and you will find that out far too late. Finding out late will set you off searching everywhere for what it might mean that you are an Indian woman, born of an Indian woman who died giving

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If only he could have convinced the Indian boy that there was no better way for it to have gone, Pratt’s attempted deliverance of the Indians from themselves to themselves, no better plan for America, no better plan for the Indians, no better plan, there was no better plan than that, he said to no one, and faced the wall, and died. Pratt would

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My mother once told me a story about a woman with a bird for a heart, who ran everywhere she went. She couldn’t stop moving. Said she was restless. Our people once lived near lakes in the north. We farmed and harvested wild rice, fished. Stayed put. My mother said that woman put the bird in our people’s hearts, and that’s what made us go wandering

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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

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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

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And the dream was only remarkable to Pratt because his dream life was essentially unlived, because he never remembered his dreams, became uncomfortable when people wanted to relay their dreams to him or to anyone else, felt the world over there, on the other side of sleep, was not to be trusted, or was made for children alone, but he got it then,

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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

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It’s been years since everyone wore masks everywhere, years since the Spanish flu. He realized he preferred to cover his face. He hates his face. The freckles. Despises them. They look like mistakes. They are from his mother. His aquiline nose and round face are from his father. He can more easily pass for white with a mask on. He was wearing a

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