WHEN YOU ARE BORN, you come into the world connected to somebody. Once that umbilical cord is severed, you become a little more distanced from the woman who birthed you, but your DNA still leaves an eternal fingerprint, your soul born to belong to this thing we call family. Sometimes those ties are broken, damaged, or met with challenges, but they are still there, asking us to look deeper, to remember how they formed us in our original state. Sometimes family becomes the people we choose, the people who move in and out of our lives to remind us that we are not alone, that we are beloved along the journey.
I was born in 1988 in an Indian hospital in Ada, Oklahoma, born to a quiet father who sang and played guitar and knew the Oklahoma red dirt we called home. I was also born a person of European descent to a mother who taught me to appreciate opera, the Eagles, and poetry in all its forms.
I was born into an America established by whiteness. While for generations, Black, Indigenous, and other people of color have struggled to be noticed, seen, and valued, we live in a nation that, from its origin, has given priority to people with white skin and Western European ancestry. Systems of whiteness, like white supremacy itself, reward those who invest in what whiteness produces: the idea that anyone who isn’t white is less-than. Whiteness both forces people into assimilation and rewards those who stay assimilated. Much of my life has been dictated by this, and more so because I am a white-coded Potawatomi woman. But as an adult, after I married and had children, the need to know myself outside the language and control of whiteness became an urgent matter, because to know myself is to teach my children to know who they are, to journey together toward that wholeness.
On a walk one winter day, I realized that the deep roots of my identity were coming to the surface, making themselves known in my daily thoughts, actions, and life choices. I was choosing to look back and remember, to understand, to ask the questions I had never asked before.
I began the journey backward, which, for me, was the miraculous journey forward.
As I put roots into the ground, every step I take brings more roots up to accept and welcome me in—into my heritage and into the woman I am slowly becoming, even in this very moment. Those roots are embedded in the soil of who God is and who God has always been, in the moments when I call Papa or Kche Mnedo, when I whisper in Potawatomi, Migwetch, Mamogosnan. Thank you, Creator.
I walk with my sons across the Chattahoochee River Trail in Atlanta where we live, and we feel the mud pulse with memory. We feel the trees tell us stories of Muscogee Creek and Cherokee people, somehow, far across time and space and blood. They tell us stories of Natives, the original inhabitants, who walked this land and who walked with Creator. In our Native, or Indigenous, identities all over North America, we are diverse, unique, with histories, languages, and stories that belong to us as peoples.
So I honor the truth: I am Potawatomi, belonging to my people, my tribe.
I belong to Turtle Island (North America), to the land that I stand on, as did my ancestors. That journey takes me deeper into myself, deeper into the heart of Mystery, the origin of everything, who knew the land’s essence before any of us did. Suddenly, I see the full circle. To find our origins, even the histories of darkness that precede us, we find truth and we expose ourselves to the reality of those who walked before us and what that reality means for our lives today.
I wanted to write a book that would bring together my own reality as an Indigenous woman and the reality that I belong to the people around me, to humanity. We are responsible for the way we treat one another and the way we treat the earth, and the aim of this book is to display my journey toward what it means to be human in all of that nuance and fullness.
Every day I find intersections with other people through conversations, through the work of storytelling. And the reality is that we all began somewhere, and every person’s story affects how and with whom they interact. So we remember where we come from and where it takes us. Who are you, and what were you birthed out of? Who holds you, who have you distanced yourself from, and what are you learning from those who came generations before you? In remembering these things, we recognize that believing in Creator-God-Mystery, whatever that looks like, means we believe that somewhere, at some point, God breathed. Somewhere, at some point, there was the reality of God and nothing else. So with that in mind we journey through our own stories, carrying our own experiences, living lives beyond the times of our own ancestors. We step through that reality in trust, and we find a depth of God we could not have known existed—a depth that holds us in a space where we can speak the truth to a time in which the powerful express their power through oppression and not compassion.
To know Mystery and to know ourselves is to know what it means to fight against any system that would oppress this earth we live on and every creature, human and nonhuman alike, who lives here; in knowing ourselves, we wrestle with the hard questions and seek out the hard truths. God, the Mystery, Mamogosnan, walks our journey and lives our history and hopes our futures just as we hope.
We start at the beginning.
We ask questions along the way.
We arrive at ourselves.
Mystery is always there.
And then we start all over again.
So I hope that in these pages, you find yourself. You may not be Native in the way that I am Native, but you belong to a people as you long for a space to know what it means to hold the realities of love, mystery, and hope. I pray that you find your own soul-origins, those origins that help you trace your steps back to those early moments of your being when you were formed and spoken to in the depths of your soul. I pray that when you journey back and find yourself there, you find the mystery of who God is and has always been. As you journey there, I am on my own journey, a Potawatomi woman’s journey, and I will share with you what it means to be a woman who is a citizen of the Potawatomi Nation and descended from European people, a woman who is a Christian and yet who fights against systems of Christian colonization that do not reflect the Christ who lives in beloved unity with everyone and everything.
This book is guided by the Potawatomi flood story. I chose to use this particular story for the book because it is a story of beginning again, something that many of us have a hard time doing. We do not hold much grace for ourselves or for others, and so we do not understand what it means to start anew, to try again, to re-create, and to imagine something that has been lost. In the flood story, Creator sees that on the earth the people are causing destruction instead of sustaining peace, and after the flood, with the help of the turtle and the muskrat, the land—Turtle Island—is created once again, a new promise for a new beginning.
Right now, we are in a flood. Right now, we are asking to begin again, to re-create and sustain what it means to be people of peace. May the flood story guide us in that pursuit.
Then may we walk into tomorrow together, side by side, with a deep and sacred knowledge burning in our bones. This is the gift of our humanity, the unfiltered essence of sacredness that we belong to and that belongs to us.
Journey with me.
We begin at the beginning.