TIMELESS WISDOM: GENIUS TIPS FOR ENHANCED NATIVE LIVING By future Yurok elder Dash Turner 
Honey, I’m so glad you’re here. You literally look marvelous right now!
Okay, enough flattery. Boring! Let’s move on. We’re both here for a very important reason: you’re reading a book about the Native experience, and I’m writing as someone who is taking the Native experience into unprecedented directions.
During my twenty-nine long years on earth, I’ve gleaned some sacred knowledge that is clinically proven to boost your life from “mediocre” to “unforgettable.” And today’s your lucky day, because guess what? I’m about to share some of this transcendent wisdom with you.
In three… two… one…
TIP: Try to be born Yurok.
I cannot emphasize enough how much better your life will be if your mom is a gorgeous four-foot-eight Yurok woman. We Yurok (Northern California’s hottest and most popular tribe) are shorter and chattier than any other tribe in America. We are the divas of the redwoods, and we’re #1 on any respectable tribal ranking for a reason.
TIP: If that’s not possible, that’s okay.
No worries if you’ve already been born and you’re not Yurok. That’s obviously a huge bummer but it happens. Whichever tribe(s) you were born into is probably okay or whatever. My advice is to find what’s novel and interesting about your people and really make a meal of it. Let the world know!
(This extends beyond your tribe. Pay attention to all the different parts of your life, and identify what makes them special. Your hometown? Your dog? Your best friend? Your mortal enemy? You have to live in your world every day; might as well have fun with it.)
TIP: Do gas station taquitos the right way.
Now we’re getting to the practical tips. Locate the dirtiest gas station you can find. It should look like it’s been firebombed. Bonus points if there’s a sofa poking out from the dumpster. Walk into the gas station with confidence and approach the plastic taquito box. Grab the tongs with gusto to establish dominance. You’re here to win, baby. NEVER take a plump taquito—all that extra meat juice soaks through the corn. Instead go for the thinner taquitos, which are crispier and more satisfying. Eat the taquito within two minutes of exiting the gas station.
TIP: Try out a “waking up early” era.
No need to go full Jeff Bezos with a 3:30 am daily wake-up and ice bath. But I spent my senior year of high school waking up at 5:00 am for no reason and it was actually a blast. Everything’s more serene, the birds are really popping off, and you automatically lower your stress levels when there’s no longer a severe risk of oversleeping and missing English class. Live más, babe!
TIP: Take as many Jack in the Box napkins as possible.
Jack in the Box napkins are miraculous tools, God’s final gift to the world. Nothing on earth is more versatile. Those things can sop up spills, put out chemical fires, and plug holes in sinking boats. If they’d had a stack of Jack in the Box napkins onboard, the Hindenburg wouldn’t have exploded.
Grab thirty to forty napkins every time you’re at the Box. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my mother, it’s to try to live in balance with the world—and because Jack in the Box is a billion-dollar company, living in balance with Jack in the Box means taking as much as possible from them, constantly, without remorse.
TIP: Make “I love this!” your default reaction.
It’s easy to fall into a rut of doing the same stuff over and over. Playing the same music on repeat, eating the same meals, et cetera. Yawn! Boring alert! Shake things up by always engaging with new stuff, and then bully the various lobes of your brain into loving that new stuff with one simple trick: say, “Okay, LOVE that!”
Say it after you ride your bike down a new street. Say it after you try cooking camel for the first time. Say it when you find a fully dried, years-old sneeze inside your library book. Say it when a woman starts chasing you around the Christmas-tree lot with no pants on. Give it a month and I swear you’ll feel the difference!
By implementing this shift, you add 30 percent more happiness to your life and trick your brain into defaulting to this emotional reaction. Even if you don’t manage to actually “love that,” you’ll at least be able to clock the humor in any scenario. Life can suck at times, but if you pump your brain full of “thought steroids”—like this mantra I’m suggesting—you’ll make your mind way stronger and capable of deriving joy from anything. Another secret benefit? You also become way more fun to hang out with and everyone will adore you. Building a life around loving stuff (instead of existing neutrally or, worse yet, being a hater) is amazing. Can’t recommend enough.
TIP: Remember, it’s not just Rez Natives versus City Natives.
As a College Town Native myself, the classic Rez/City divide is overly simplistic. Better to let go of dichotomous modes of thinking and embrace the infinite forms that Indians can take.
TIP: Learn to drive stick shift, if possible.
It’s really cool and everyone will be impressed. Imagine you’re in an emergency scenario and you’re the only person in a group capable of driving that abandoned 1995 Toyota Tercel with a manual transmission back to civilization to get help. That’s an alpha move. That’s a Yurok move.
TIP: Get good at little stuff.
To build on the previous tip, it’s really hot in general when people have unexpected skills. You might think I’m referring to high-octane/high-glamor skills like neurosurgery, but NO. I’m referring to little stuff. Get really good at crosswords, or piercing ears, or folding fitted sheets.
Getting good at little stuff is an amazing way to be hot to everyone around you—but it also makes life feel more doable. For example, I got really good at Call of Duty as an adult gay man (which is a #diversitywin and frankly an overcoming-the-odds story deserving of a major studio biopic) and it feels amazing. Plus, proving to myself that I could be good at stuff gave me confidence that I could tackle bigger challenges in my life, like filing my taxes or defeating Satan with kung fu.
TIP: Don’t play football.
My mom “predicted” CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) back in the 1980s and thus refused to let me play peewee football, and she was actually spot-on. If any six-year-olds are reading this: steer clear!
TIP: But watching football is fine.
I don’t have a moral justification for how much this contradicts the prior tip. But waking up at 7:00 am PT every Saturday during college football season to the sound of my mother screaming, “YOU SHOULD FEEL ASHAMED!” at referees blowing calls on national television is one of my most treasured memories. If any girls or gays are reading this, please know there’s legendary drama in college football and the violence is basically World War II level. It’s like Real Housewives if the girls were given swords and encouraged to try to kill each other.
TIP: Build up a spice tolerance.
I grew up avoiding spicy foods. Picky eater vibes! The spiciest part of my diet was red Gatorade. Later on, I realized how lame it is to sweat while eating objectively unspicy foods like pepperoni pizza, so I conquered that weakness. Train your way up with little dollops of increasingly spicy hot sauces, and watch your mouth grow ever more durable. This tactic gave me acid reflux, but it was worth it because now I can go to Vietnamese restaurants and order the dishes with four red peppers next to their names. Rock on!
TIP: Sunglasses give you the edge.
Buy huge sunglasses and wear them everywhere. They’ll block half your face so suddenly nobody can read your facial expressions. You’re in total control now. What’s Dash thinking? Who knows! This is how we get our land back.
TIP: Find your Tannhäuser Gate.
In the 1982 sci-fi film Blade Runner, Harrison Ford hunts down and decommissions escaped androids. As he’s about to capture and kill a scary blond android named Roy, the android ruthlessly flexes on Harrison Ford by describing the badass things he witnessed in his life. Visceral images like “attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion” and “C-beams [glittering] in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.” Marvelous!
IMO, we should all be a little more like Roy. Less so the part about being a synthetic android (although ripping phone books in half with cyborg arms would be sick), more so the part about embracing experiences you’ll remember forever.
Nothing in my life measures up to whatever hot drama was going on off the shoulder of Orion. But I’ve had my moments, honey! I watched heat lightning for the first time from the back of a friend’s Prius outside Yucca Valley. I played beer pong completely nude at a Danish hospice in Minneapolis. I snuck into a New Jersey sewage plant alone after a gay wedding. Your life can be filled with magic; stray far from the beaten path so it can materialize for you.
TIP: Wear sunblock.
As someone whose cousin coined the Yurok word for “manboob tan,” I am a bit of a sun exposure expert. I will simply say this: sunblock is amazing, and it feels way better to wear sunblock than to Google search “safe to pop sunburn bubbles?” and “sunburn bubbles good?” the next day.
TIP: Add some throw pillows to the backseat.
Time for another car tip! Tossing some decorative pillows (and perhaps a throw blanket) into the backseat is a perfect way to transform your car from a soulless commute machine into an eclectic living room for friends and family. Beautifying communal space? There’s nothing more Native than that.
TIP: Embrace the middle finger.
Flipping off your friends and loved ones for no reason is so essential. Keep those losers on edge. Make them worry they did something wrong so now they have to be nice to you.
TIP: Don’t let the universe win.
Look, bitch. What I’m trying to say here—what all of these tips secretly amount to—is that sometimes it can feel like life is happening to you. Don’t let it.
I’m not sure if you’re a big The Price Is Right queen, but most Indians are, so I’ll assume you are too. That show has a game called Plinko, where the contestant drops a disc into a big, gridded board. The board has pegs that bounce the disc around. You have no control over where the disc goes. But as the disc falls, you pray that fate pushes it toward the exact center so you can win $10,000.
Life can feel like a game of Plinko, just a bunch of pegs pushing you around as you fall toward a random slot. But it’s not. Your life is a concatenation of your choices. How you start your day, how you treat the people around you, how you react to change. They all add up.
My endless and eternal homework for you is to try to become aware of these choices and make any adjustments you see fit. We’re Indians, so we have the power to do that.
See, there’s this idea called “linguistic relativity.” It says the ways languages are built (and all their different words, concepts, and tendencies) shape their speakers’ worldviews. Many Native folks don’t speak our tribal languages—I can only say three words in Yurok and two of them are “manboob tan.” But get this: our people’s unique worldviews are still passed down through our families. Thousands of years of culture made them too sticky to be totally eradicated by some ugly priests who made our ancestors speak English.
So a settler’s baseline emotional reaction to a problem might be anger, irritation, or impatience. But my mom always demonstrated to me how much more fulfilling it is to draw from a more Yurok emotional palette. Try to approach the problem with a little love. Laugh at yourself before someone else can. Ask your friends for help! If someone’s being rude, feel free to hold a grudge, but be classy about it.
Your people’s worldview can set you free, bitch! When you train yourself to have different reactions, habits, and behaviors, you force different feelings to the surface—and everything gets better. People are more lovable; music sounds better; sunsets look more orange (the best color). The world feels big again, instead of claustrophobically small. All those fears of loneliness, of losing control, of the grand universal Plinko board not guiding you to your desired outcome… those all fade away.
Because we Yurok know the truth: Plinko is trash. You’re better off on one of the skill games.