Category: indigenous storytelling

“We do not write to remember what was lost.
We write to remind the land that we are still listening.”

Before I could name myself as a writer, I was a listener.
I grew up in the hush between stories—in the cadence of my grandmother’s and auntie’s voices, in the pauses that carried more truth than the sentences. She spoke in fragments, half-remembered songs that felt older than her body, words that hung in the air like incense.

The first stories I inherited were not written down. They lived in breath, in rhythm, in the pulse of kitchen light and the sound of rain on a tin roof. I did not yet know they were mythology—or that I would one day spend my life trying to rewrite them before they disappeared.

Red Lineages: A Song Made Visible

When I began writing Red Lineages, I wasn’t crafting a book of poems. I was stitching together the threads my ancestors had left behind—the syllables that survived allotment, the silences that colonial archives mistook for absence.

Every poem became an act of recovery, a slow unbraiding of what was taken and a reweaving of what remained. Some pieces came through dream, others through the steady hum of memory. In each, I heard the same heartbeat: that our languages and lineages are not past tense—they are present and pulsing, waiting for us to speak them back into being. The page, I discovered, is not a graveyard. It is a ceremonial ground.

Dreamcatcher: The Bridge Between Worlds

In Dreamcatcher: Between the Real and the Woven, I followed Dash, a Dakota Sioux girl who stumbles into a dream realm shaped by ancestral wisdom and modern ache. Her journey began as fantasy—but became a map of cultural survival.

Baumwelt, that mythic world between sleep and story, is the same world our elders spoke of when they said the spirits travel through dreams. Dash’s courage to walk between them mirrors the courage of every Indigenous storyteller who must translate myth into modern language without losing its sacred center.

We do not invent our worlds—we remember them.

Vanished on Tribal Land: Truth in the Echo

When I wrote Vanished on Tribal Land, I stepped into darker terrain—where myth meets the machinery of disappearance. The novel draws on the ongoing crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous people. It refuses the comfort of distance.

The story is not simply mystery; it is testimony. Each vanished girl in the book speaks through the wind, the rivers, the empty rooms. Their absence becomes presence. Writing it meant facing the legacy of erasure—not only by telling their stories but by indicting the silence that surrounds them.

To write such a story is to walk with ghosts—and to promise them visibility.

Bdóte: Where Rivers Remember

In Bdóte, I return to the confluence—the meeting place of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers, a sacred Dakota site and origin of our people. The land itself speaks in that work, carrying both grief and renewal.

Writing Bdóte taught me that myth is not ancient; it’s alive each time the rivers meet. Every current carries an old name. Every bend remembers the treaties broken along its banks. When I stand there, notebook open, I feel both the wound and the inheritance—the truth that the river keeps our story better than any book ever could.

The Inheritance of Silence

Colonialism doesn’t only take land. It takes language—and the right to mythologize oneself. For generations, our stories were re-told for us: edited, mistranslated, sanitized. But the body remembers what the archive forgets.

Each time I write, I ask: whose silence am I breaking? Each line becomes an offering to those whose voices were edited out of history’s margins. In this way, writing is not an act of ownership—it is one of return.

Reclaiming the Narrative

Rewriting ancestry is dangerous work. It requires tenderness, research, and reverence—not just for what was, but for what still is. It demands we listen to rivers, to elders, to languages we may not yet understand.

But it also offers healing. It reminds us that identity is not a fixed inheritance—it’s a living river, carrying memory forward even when the current splits and disappears underground.

When we write from that current, we are not inventing myth. We are participating in its continuation.

For the Next Storyteller

If you are reading this and feeling the tug of your own unnamed lineage—follow it. Ask your grandparents what songs they remember. Sit in the quiet. Let the land remind you of your origin.

Our myths were never meant to be locked in museums.
They are meant to breathe through us—through the next poem, the next painting, the next generation that refuses to forget.

The work is never about reclaiming what was lost.
It’s about remembering that it was never truly gone.