Look. I fully understand the struggle of being disconnected from your Native heritage and having to go through all the pain and heartbreak and stress of reconnecting. I am intimately familiar with that struggle.
Which is why I’m hyper-aware of people who AREN’T actually doing that work and are instead only using their supposed heritage as a weapon or tool, something that they only bring up when it’s fun or convenient.
Native identity is not something that you can wear when you want to and take off when you don’t. It’s not a cute outfit that helps you get roles or a fun roleplay game that you can stop playing when it loses its novelty. It is love and pain and family and fear and so many amazing and terrifying things all wrapped up in a beautiful community. It’s blood and life and heritage and culture and connection, tragedy in your family history and a sunrise on the horizon. It’s a conscious decision to fight for your people, to fight for your heritage and your family even when the world is telling you to lay down and accept that you’ve lost. It’s an act of defiance against the world but also an act of simply existing.
Being Native is about so much more than a percentage or a DNA test. I wish people understood that.
