I think a lot of people see me being white coded and assume that means I’m reconnecting and don’t know much about being Native, so I want to share my history and let everyone get to know me.

I was born in Oklahoma City to a Cherokee mother. My father was a heavy drug user and was also very abusive. My mom sent me to stay with my Cherokee grandmother when I was very young while she divorced my dad because she was afraid he’d hurt us or her.

Since the divorce when I was maybe 2ish, I saw my dad maybe a handful of times and not in the last 20 years. I’ve been told he’s Native, but I know very little about him or his family or if that’s true. Nobody used their legal names which makes genealogy hard.

I know that almost everyone in my dad’s family is rough and most have been to jail a few times. They fight a lot, a lot have stabbed people, and one of my uncles apparently killed another uncle while that uncle was trying to kill my grandpa. So I don’t care to know them.

My mom, also a drug user, went to jail a few times. She had a temper & would get in fights, but she wasn’t abusive to us kids. She had several boyfriends, the most notable was Earl, a Choctaw man who she was with for a while and was my sister’s dad.

We were extremely poor and we lived in a trailer in McClain county, which is in the Chickasaw Nation, then we moved into a house my great grandma owned (also McClain). We grew up immersed in Native culture, but a lot was very pan-Indian, & Grandma taught us about being Cherokee.

When I was 5, my mom overdosed. She was rushed to the hospital and survived, but they had to report the event to child protective services. My grandma went to a judge and got an emergency order granting her custody before we could be taken into foster care.

From then on, I lived with my grandparents, both Native (though my grandfather never bothered to enroll, he could though). My grandpa was in the navy and wasn’t home a lot, especially the early years. They always said he was the head of the house, but we all knew gma ran things.

Almost every year, especially when we were little, we would go to our family’s reunion, all descendants of the original enrollee I claim for citizenship, my gg gma Becky. We would go early to see my aunt (my great gma’s sister, daughter of my original enrollee gma).

We’d pick blackberries and help her make jelly and cobbler. Then we’d go fishing and play with our cousins. She had several acres of land to play on. Her house and the Reunion were in Sequoyah county, which is in the Cherokee Nation.

All together, I spent half my life in either Cherokee or Chickasaw Nation and 90% of the family I knew were Native. The rest of my childhood we were stationed in various places, but always called Oklahoma home. My grandparents moved back after retiring.

About 10 years ago, my mom got sober and so did her then boyfriend, who is Chickasaw and to whom she is now married.

Because of how chaotic my life was growing up and how horrible my family is about paper work and procrastinating everything until it’s absolutely necessary to get done (we very much ran on Indian time), my family always said “we’ll get your Indian card next time we’re home.”

I didn’t enroll until I was 23, but I always knew I could and through whom I could and I was always immersed in being Native. I always felt uncomfortable claiming Native because my gma looked Native (despite her blue eyes she got from her dad), but I didn’t.

My grandma wouldn’t let me not claim Native though. She always said if I could only claim 1 identity, it should be Indian. She said I was Cherokee before I was anything else. I didn’t understand it at the time, but I do now.

When I enrolled, it was around the same time I was in a history class where the racist professor joked about the trail of tears meaning “now there’s a bunch of Cherokees in Oklahoma driving their Cadillacs to the casino.”

I decided to dive in head first and learn everything I could. A lot had been lost in my family, including the language, due to colonization, but a lot just simply sunk beneath the surface and as I’ve learned more, I’ve learned how much culture we had and I learned passively.

So long story short, I’m Cherokee, I’ve always been Cherokee, and all I’ve ever been is Cherokee.

Also, I listened to other Cherokees besides my family for almost a year before I would even publicly speak because I didn’t want to assume my family’s way of being Cherokee, which is most of what I knew, was the only or even main way of being Cherokee.

And then it was only because I had heard many experiences that supported or contextualized what I had learned. If I don’t know something, I try not to speak on it.