Collection of interviews of contemporary indians in North America, their struggles, victories, and their contributions to the indian movement toward greater freedom, healing and autonomy. They retell experiencing in boarding schools, housing insecurities, reconnecting with their past, key influencers in their lives, and ways they have found to learn about their culture. ( )

this is a nice compilation of essays that give a pretty wide range of indigenous experiences in canada and the northern usa. too much of the north american experience usually focuses on the use, so this was a nice change to mostly be about canadian native populations.

as usual, a few essays and experiences/statistics really stood out above the rest for me.

jasilyn charger's essay on standing rock and that long protest was excellent. also impactful for me was her relating the story of how when standing rock organizers reached out to the kxl pipeline protestors, and only her group of teenagers showed up to help, and then they organized the teens for standing rock.

"According to a National Institute of Justice Research Report from 2016, 56.1 percent of Native American women have experienced sexual violence in their lifetime and 14.4 percent have experienced it in the last year. Of these women, 96 percent experienced sexual violence by a perpetrator of another race or ethnicity." this is an absolutely staggering statistic and quite the opposite of most of the sexual violence experienced by others. to me, it shows how vulnerable native women and girls are, and how non-native men are threats to them. if this was the statistic for murder, it would be a genocide. for sexual violence it should be called something equally noticeable and profound.

"Indigenous people are more often criminalized and imprisoned for acts that are linked to poverty, lack of educational and employment opportunities, lifestyles of substance use, mental health concerns and histories of sexual abuse, violence and trauma - in other words, colonialism." ( )