Our heads are on flags, jerseys, and coins. Our heads were on the penny first, of course, the Indian cent, and then on the buffalo nickel, both befor… - Tommy Orange

Some of us got this feeling stuck inside, all the time, like we’ve done something wrong. Like we ourselves are something wrong … We drink alcohol because it helps us feel like we can be ourselves and not be afraid. But we punish ourselves with it.

In Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography, she talks about how someone was asking her what it’s like to come back to her childhood home in Oakland, where I also come from, and she says, “There is no there there.” She was talking about how it had been developed over and was unrecognisable. I was using that as a parallel to Native experience and the “there there” of the land before it was colonised, developed over and bordered.

You were white, you were brown, you were red, you were dust. You were both and neither. When you took baths, you’d stare at your brown arms against your white legs in the water and wonder what they were doing together in the same body.