Visionary Sovereign Voices Youth Competition Winners

When I am in the company of other Alaska Native people, my introduction sounds something
like this, “Paglaġivsi, uvlulluataq Yugtun wiinga Skavaq Iñupiaqsiñiġa Sivulluiqti taniksiñiġa
Nyché Tyme Andrew. Walluk-kuayaaguruŋa, aakaga Jacqueline Walluk, aapaga Tigran Anthony
Andrew, aakaaluga Janet Hubbard Walluk Nome-mi, aapaaluga John Anthony Andrew
Bethel-mi.” I have always learned to share who my parents and grandparents are so that I can
build new relations based on our shared ancestry. Other people in Alaska do the same, and I have
found many cousins this way.

However, the political stratification of tribal identity that has formed well beyond the past 250 years has created a rift in how we introduce ourselves and makes us now prove ourselves. My paperwork that demonstrates my status as an Alaska Native is as follows: I am a tribal citizen of Nome Eskimo Community, a descendant of Orutsararmiut Native Council (but not a tribal citizen because it’s disallowed to hold enrollment in multiple tribes), a shareholder of Calista Corporation and a descendant of Bering Straits Native Corporation (because I haven’t received shares from a will yet). In this country, you have to hold an official documentation to solidify your Nativeness.

Whereas, like in my introduction, Indigeneity is measured in relation to each other. It is here I should mention that my introduction in Iñupiatun, my ancestral language, is only a recent reemergence in my family. Because of the assimilative boarding schools that I investigate as a researcher for the Alaska Native Heritage Center, Indigenous languages were beaten out of our people. Now, as a 23 year old, I raise both this history and the language for our people. The history of assimilative boarding schools is grossly overlooked and thus, the experiences of Indigenous people across the country are too. Many of our youth are raised without learning their language and are discouraged from ever wondering why.

These histories aren’t controversial, they’ve simply happened. But it speaks to something crucial to our existence: resilience. As an Indigenous person, tribal citizen, and American, this story on language revitalization is a shared history. It demonstrates the incredible adaptivity that Indigenous people have always had. From adapting to tundra, harsh winds, blizzards, powerful tides, seasonal salmon runs, below zero temperatures like my people have endured, or the lakes rich with life and memory in the Midwest, the canyons painted golden in the Southwest, the Appalachia’s rolling hills, or the serenity of the plains— we persist. Whether it was the Russian fur traders or colonial settlers that met our hands with hostility, the legacy of stolen land and pillaging, impoverishment or underrepresentation— we persist.

Adaptavity is a strong suit for Indigenous peoples and we have even gone as far as to harness this political apparatus of tribal citizenship as a way to forge a future for our people. We use it to
protect our subsistence rights with the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, to
return our ancestors with the Native American Graves Protection Act, to bring justice to our
loved ones through the Violence Against Women Act, to protect our children from enduring a similar history of the assimilative boarding schools with the Indian Child Welfare Act and defend it through the Haaland v. Brackeen case, and to reaffirm Alaska Native sovereignty through Yellen v. Chehalis. These instances of federal intervention that serve our communities is because of our communities tireless will to persist. Indigenous people have had 250 years to become lawyers, policy makers, experts in both federal and tribal law, and we have done it.

We still have a long way to go. Our voices are discounted and thus diminished, our history is unknown and thus not shared, our culture is ignored and thus not enjoyed. There are people unable to afford groceries and rent in their remote reservation or village, barriers to healthcare and education, our sisters, brothers, siblings disappear without justice enacted. And the truth is, I don’t know what the path forward is. I know it takes us all and I know if history has proven anything, it’s that we Indigenous people know how to play the long game.

250 years is no small feat of an anniversary to celebrate, but it is also but a blink of an eye. My
people have fostered these lands for at least 12,000 years. We often say that we have been here
since time immemorial. But what does that truly mean? It literally means that our time here is
beyond recent memory. But to me, it is a promise that we will always be here in the future too.
We can’t imagine a time when we weren’t here, whether it was 250 years ago, an immeasurable
millennia ago, or centuries from today. We celebrate our existence through formidable strength
everyday.

Midway, Kelowna, Vernon, Revelstoke. Winding roads tighten with each mile, nerves following. My chest pounds, my stomach is knotted, I am filled with trepidation. Seven hours and four hundred and thirteen miles have given me time to fan the hot shame under my ribs, fed over seasons of absence. Convinced, my incapacity to live between worlds has severed ties to land and kinship– my body a vessel, my mind a graveyard. Telling a story of distance representing success, when loss is what’s been received.

Pútiʔ kʷu aláʔ, we stand on broken ground, cold seeping through soil, a greeting to the soles of my feet. This chill travels up my legs, my stomach, my face, which leaves red behind. I contemplate lessons, though those who’ve lived much longer than me, putting words to feelings I could never name. I’m told the pain we feel is accumulative, grown over broken language, assimilated thoughts, a colonized mind. Genetic code ties us together to this land, remembering our home – Sinixt people – remembering home when systems worked so hard to have us erased. Declared extinct; forever alive, something I know to be true, evident through my beating, bleeding heart.

My fears are put to rest, my conception of rejection bred from displaced diffidence, of disconnection from community and creekbeds. I am received as youth and loved as a child, as a paddler and our people. Townships join us as we start the beginning of our journey, from wet ground to rolling water. People whose history embeds itself in the present, our history once hidden, is cause for celebration. We are not enemies, for we’ve lived on the same land. I am pushed forward to join the youngest of us on the dugout canoe, carved from cedar and months of fingers splintered. There is not a paddle I am unwelcome from, even though my hands were vacant from the tending of this vessel, my hands spared from sharp sticks and pinprick wounds.

I am institutionalized when those early attachments are made, where cold means concrete, where buildings loom like old growth trees, and mufflers burble as caribou bellow. The land does not know me here, I don’t know how to speak to it, and it does not listen. This disposition, a cumulation of generations of stripped spirit, red skin scrubbed bright, and language bitten through belts and blood. Disregulation of the body, guilt tracing the deficits stolen from my tongue. Wounds self-inflicted, a modern-day genocide.

The Slocan River is paralleled by the Valhalla Ranges, casting a breeze through the expansive valley. The water is reflective, the sky is clear. The paddle is short, sun biting at the nape of my neck and the height of my cheekbones. To the side of the river, off of the peninsula — we land. There’s tobacco in my hand, the smell is sharp and earthy, the leaf has been harvested with care. To my left, the sharp, hollow sound of a drum sounds out. We drop our heads in prayer, letting song seize the space. Air seems to shift, weaving through limbs, inhaled by breath. The rhythm matches the beat of my heart, pulsing through my chest as I’m grounded in time. As I open my hand and the leaf slips through my fingers, fibers stick to my skin, clammy from sweat. Red illustrates history on the rocks towering above us, pictographs left through sunken pores, weathered over time. There are generations of Sinixt Indians here today. We are balanced on the precipice of recognition. For a culture so privatized in defense of exploitation, in which constitutes sharp words from thorn bushes and guarded response – the words shared between leaders and listeners land softly, beginning a process of healing, bridging gaps between community and concession.

The complexity of oppression stands between Western worlds and Indigenous wisdom. When bloody bones and disease plague historic relation, resentment builds in the gaps of transgression. In opposition, questioning tradition, practice, in light of given grace. How can we pray? What does it mean to do so? If I can’t find the language that my elders understand, if past prayers are left unanswered? When even my conviction has been colored white? We sweat in response, skin to cedar boughs, hissing embers showered, moist heat releasing under branches and blankets. Returning to the womb, held and heard. Hours of prayer, of gratitude. We pray for the men, the women, the children. For our family, elders, and ancestors. The land, the water, the salmon and trout. Everyone who’s contributed to this path, etched from generations of persistence. For the oppressed and the oppressor, in understanding deficits of identity and the need to strip away others. In gathering, we are remade in relation– to cedar and stone, to breath and body. The land teaches us again how to live as relatives, remembering to live gently, to live gratefully, and to live amongst one another.

When dawn hits, and the birds turn, chirp, and click in response, the land stirs. Frigid water lying beneath coveted wood, emitting soft fog. Our last private paddle before meeting in celebration in a few short hours. The sound of rocks snapping against each other, multiplied by every attendee, recreating the name of where we are gathered– Noisy Waters. As I dip my hands into the current, it pulls at my wrists, chilling and insistent. For some, falling into these rapids is to feel afraid. Here, it is welcome, as it is to be embraced by tm̓xʷúlaʔxʷ. She does not ask where you have been or why you have left, but guides you to purpose. Snk̓lipkn beaches, Sinixt members are first to set foot from water to land. Dirt kicking up, emulating the paddle over, as the march to the Sharpening Stone begins. Quiet humming fills earshot, generations of songs passed down come to a head as time becomes relative. The climb is short but steep, leaving chests heaving and throats coated from excursion. Here the stone stands, pulling us to place. Our matriarch leads us in ceremony, and we hang from each and every word. It takes a certain amount of trust to engage in caretaking– for each other, for tradition, for ourselves. And as we gather to the sharpening stone, it is cradled in between the gaps of connection. Hands to the stone, to shoulders, backs, and sides. Emotion I can’t name gathers in my chest, my arms shake as the air becomes stagnant. Feeling so close to grief, flowing through the points in which we are joined. This is redetermination, years of disposed land, water, and food fought for and found in resilience, resolve, and red skin.

Once again, a dream becomes a discourse
becomes a knowing becomes a privilege
built on the coquina foundation solidified by
little splinters of bone.
Where does your resilience fit into our history?
One already marked by the mistakes of
your forefathers and their cannons,
your hereditary leaving to find something more suited to your liking,
your genetic predisposition to abandoning the wake of loss.
There is nothing new in a world that seeks
to repeat itself,
and one day, you will say
you have always been
protesting for a cause
but you will never say you would die for it.
I have heard these easy cadences of words before.
The ones that slip off a scraped tongue like sweet penicillin,
pulled from an amber colored bottle by a bullet-shaped syringe.
Did it taste like manifest destiny when you took your dose of good ol’ American Patriotism?
Or was it more like that shameful redness, barred against blue and white button downs,
bashful in knowing that something you’ve done is wrong.
When you are drunk and the bottle looks like something from a CVS,
and the sky is smokey and orange, split up by gunfire and megaphones,
what will you say?
There is no need to answer.
You will be in Lisbon, or Dublin, or Edinburgh, where you find it safer.

What is an American Dream?
How do I construct it, being what I am, this body?
Mine of this dream are simple things:

A small spray of trumpet-shaped honeysuckle,
where each little emerald hummingbird is waiting a turn at the nectared velvet,
tucked in swift dollops of icing perched against kelly-green leaves and warm foliage.
I am there, body leaned in with anticipation of the chance
to pick one, pull filaments from stem, watch
while the nectar rolls down towards a soft, paler ending.
Above me, somewhere between cornflower sky and pine needle loam,
the purple finches are lingering on a note that sounds like
the kind of laugh that comes without warning.
Their bodies are small burstings of mulberry and adoration,
taking breaths so minute that each one is enough cause for rejoicing
with all little hands like fronds of fiddlehead ferns, black cohosh, yaupon holly,
spreading leniently towards me, plush and feathered,
relentlessly alive.
Here I am in the gentle confines of home, which is, to say,
that I am in and of a land that still breathes beneath your concrete and polyurethane.
It is without a convoluted politic of being.
Here, there is only loving, only tenderness,
a sweet framing of the words we’ve built into bigger ones.
I can tell you nothing of penicillins, amoxicillins, your petri dish dialects,
But I can of these:
Did you know philodendron means loving tree?
Did you know epigaea repens, a fancy name for ground laurel, means ‘I love thee only?’
That sweet sarsaparillas, with their white undersides and black fruitions,
have a scientific name that means ‘sweet-leaved?’
And that honeysuckle, growing in its unassuming way, an etching towards some body of water,
has its strongest scent at night? This is because
it travels easiest in cool, damp air, thick with the leftover day,
wading in the downy moths that take proboscis to pollen,
having waited for the hummingsbirds, the bees, those cousins of daylight
to take their share
of the nectar.

I have always loved history.

But history has not always loved me back.

As a citizen of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, I grew up obsessed with the past: the stories of my tribe, the ancestors who resisted colonization, the matriarchs whose strength still shapes the woman I am becoming, and the relatives I never got to meet but know through records, memory, and stories passed from generation to generation. I loved not only the history of my own people, but also the histories of other Tribal Nations whose brilliance, governance, survival, and ancestral knowledge were too often reduced in textbooks to caricature, tragedy, or silence.

My existence is proof of history.

I am living history. And yet “living history” is a phrase that has always stirred something complicated in me. Because as much as I loved the history of my people, I also loved American history. I loved its ideals, its language of freedom, its promise of possibility. But Native people have rarely been included in that story with honesty or dignity. In the American imagination, we have so often been cast as the savage, the obstacle, the uncivilized, the burden, the people who had to disappear so that settlers could call this land “new.” And when not portrayed as dangerous, we were portrayed as pitiable: poor, dying out, dependent, frozen in the past. Never fully human. Never fully present. Never fully sovereign.

I learned this contradiction young.

I grew up in Oklahoma, where thirty-eight federally recognized tribes call home, carrying both my Seminole identity and my American citizenship long before I had the language to explain the tension between them. I was often the only Native student in my class. Before I knew what it meant to be a dual-citizen Indigenous person, before I understood what it meant to walk between worlds, I was just a little Indian girl sitting in classrooms that asked me to celebrate the very histories that had harmed my people. I was the third grader making paper boats for Columbus Day and racing them across a kiddie pool to “conquer the New World.” I was the fifth grader dressed in a prairie skirt, pulling a covered wagon across the playground, staking “unclaimed land” with an American flag, and then celebrating the land run with a picnic of “real American food.” I was the child standing in a “living history museum,” assigned a Revolutionary hero, while quietly noticing which truths were celebrated and which were left out: genocide, dispossession, enslavement, and the deliberate erasure of Native Nations.

And still, somehow, I loved this country in a complicated way.

Because I also understood what the United States represented to so many people: hope. A place where immigrants came searching for safety, opportunity, and reinvention. A place built around an unfinished promise that people from different backgrounds, languages, cultures, and faiths could belong. I saw that even when the nation failed to live up to its ideals, those ideals still held power. They still made people believe a better future was possible.

That belief stayed with me.

In high school, Hamilton gave me another language for that contradiction. It was imperfect, of course, but it brought the American founding to life in a way that felt expansive, urgent, and unexpectedly inclusive. It was about revolution, voice, immigration, resilience, and the fight to shape a nation’s future. Watching performers who looked more like the real America claim space inside that story helped me imagine that perhaps I belonged in it too, not as a relic of the past, but as someone with something to say about the future. It made me dream bigger.

That dream took me to Columbia University on a full scholarship, where I studied history, decolonial thought, and Native and Indigenous studies. There, I found a voice grounded in education, advocacy, and responsibility. My path led me to Washington D.C., where I served at the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Education and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of Tribal Relations. My work became rooted in sovereignty, government-to-government relationships, tribal self-determination, cultural revitalization, and the federal trust responsibility.

Later, at Oxford University, where I earned my Master of Public Policy as an Eisenhower Global Scholar, I was often the only Native person in the room. In those moments, I became not just a student, but a representative, a storyteller, and, in many ways, an informal diplomat. I found deep purpose in helping international audiences understand that Tribal Nations are not symbols, not historical footnotes, and not special interest groups. They are sovereign governments with living cultures, political authority, and enduring responsibilities to their people. As a Seminole woman abroad, I felt even more clearly that my identity was not divided between being Native and being American, but sharpened by the responsibility of carrying both with honesty. It was there that I realized how deeply proud I was to be both Native and American, and how much I wanted to spend my life helping build a more honest relationship between those identities.

Today, I work as a Tribal Healthcare Policy Analyst at the University of Oklahoma’s Native Nations Center for Tribal Policy Research, where I lead research under an NIH-funded initiative focused on improving cancer outcomes in Native American communities. My work examines the structural barriers that shape health outcomes for the thirty-eight federally recognized tribes in Oklahoma and across Indian Country. Every day, I work to translate complex healthcare and policy systems into actionable information that can support tribal sovereignty, self-determination, and healthier futures for Native communities.

That is what the American 250th semiquincentennial means to me.

It is not a simple celebration. It is not blind patriotism. It is not forgetting. For me, it is a moment to tell the truth and to ask what kind of country we want the next 250 years to be.

My dream is a United States that finally embraces a respectful sovereign-to-sovereign relationship with Tribal Nations not just in language, but in practice. A country that honors treaties. That upholds the federal trust responsibility. That treats tribal consultation as a duty, not a formality. That makes room for Native representation across every level of government. That supports land rematriation, community healing, cultural revitalization, and true tribal self-governance. That understands Tribal Nations not as barriers to America’s future, but as essential to it.

For me, the semiquincentennial means hope.

Hope that the next 250 years can be more honest than the last. More equitable. More
collaborative. More peaceful. More accountable. My dream is that “liberty and justice for all”
becomes more than a phrase recited by children with their hands over their hearts. I want it to
become a practice embodied by this nation’s laws, institutions, and relationships.

I am living history. But I do not want Native people to exist only as evidence of survival.

I want us to exist as evidence of what becomes possible when sovereignty is respected, truth is
told, and justice is finally practiced.

That is my vision for the future of America.

As the United States prepares to ignite the sky with fireworks for its 250th anniversary, many in the Pae
ʻĀina o Hawaiʻi will look at the horizon with a complex gaze—a reminder of the 133 years of colonization and regression since the illegal overthrow of Hawaiʻi in 1893. For Kānaka Maoli (indigenous peoples of Hawaiʻi), the year 1776 is a distant bell that eventually rang out the warning of a changing world. To dedicate oneself to the lāhui Hawaiʻi (the nation/people of Hawaiʻi) is to live in the tension between two realities: the “Republic” as it defines itself, and the land as it remembers us.

As a Kānaka Maoli, a proud descendant of both enrolled citizens of the Hawaiian Kingdom and the bloodline of High Chief Kaumualiʻi, I view 1776 as a forerunner to the displacement of Hawaiʻi, its cultures, its values, and its language. There is a vital truth I want Nā poʻe o Amelika (the American People) to understand: the United States did not expand itself to free territories that were “ripe for the taking.” It invaded a map already filled with sophisticated, sovereign legal systems and inhabited by people who had stewarded land for generations with complex agricultural technologies and deep
moʻokūʻauhau.

In the case of Hawaiʻi, my home, the “education” most receive overlooks the fact that the Aupuni Mōʻī o
Hawaiʻi, Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, was a recognized, independent kingdom with over 90 international
treaties, including Great Britain and the United States of America. Hawaiʻi was a constitutional monarchy
with a sophisticated legal system and an active, respected participant in global diplomacy. At a time when the U.S. still grappled with its own internal divisions, the Hawaiian Kingdom had already secured formal diplomatic recognition from the world’s great powers as an independent state. During the Civil War, which pitted Americans against one another over their shared values of liberty, the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi didn’t even possess the concept of “slavery.” We were not a “primitive” people waiting for a Republic to save us; we were a peer nation to the United States, governed by laws, treaties, and a deep-seated intellectual tradition that laid the foundation of our lāhui today. By the mid-19th century, the Hawaiian Kingdom was one of the most literate nations on Earth, with a literacy rate exceeding 90%, surpassing that of the United States at the time. We were a nation of readers, writers, and thinkers, fueled by a vibrant Hawaiian-language press.

While the American education system celebrates 250 years of progress, it fails to mention the atrocities committed against Kānaka Maoli. The tides of ʻeha and pain truly swelled in 1887 when an armed militia of businessmen forced our sovereign, King David Laʻamea Kalākaua, to sign away his executive power under the threat of violence. This paved the treacherous path for U.S. Marines to land six years later, backing an illegal coup and ultimately forcing the imprisonment of Queen Liliʻuokalani in her own palace. The indescribable sadness when citizens of Hawaiʻi watched in 1893 as their beloved Hae Hawaiʻi (Kingdom of Hawaiʻi Flag) was lowered and replaced with the United States of America. The concept of manifest destiny was a “ploy” constructed to exploit our cultures and people. We continue to feel the continuous bastardization of our culture. Our hula turned into entertainment for malihini (foreigners). Wahi Pana (sacred sites), bulldozed for large resorts. When nearly 60% of Kānaka Maoli struggle to survive in the most expensive state in the United States, I ask: For whom was this “pursuit of happiness” intended?

Recognizing that the United States was built on Native land while promising democratic intentions is the ultimate falsehood. It is a house that declines to acknowledge the foundation on which it was built. The principles of the U.S. Constitution, from justice, general welfare, and the blessings of liberty, are beautiful in their language. Still, they remain incomplete so long as “Native land” is treated as a historical footnote. Native sovereignty is not a concept of the past; it is very much present today.

Because Kānaka Maoli do not possess the same federal tribal status as Indigenous nations on the continent, my political reality is distinctly complex. To be Kānaka Maoli with an American passport is to carry a citizenship imposed by force. It is a duality where I reside within the borders of the Republic, yet my soul remains steadfastly bound to Ke Aupuni Mōʻī o Hawaiʻi. My dream hopes for tangible restoration. It is a future where the United States fully honors our inherent right to self-determination, where stewardship of our ʻāina returns to the hands of its original caretakers, and where the laws of the Republic yield to the deep wisdom of our moʻokūʻauhau. Tribal Sovereignty is an inherent right that predates the United States and survives despite it. Rarely is the cost of land displacement taught. For fifty years, the island of Kahoʻolawe, a sacred piko (center) of our navigation and sustained our people, was used as a target for live fire. This is the ultimate symbol of a Republic built on Native land: a nation that finds security by scarring the very earth that sustains its first people. To be Kānaka Maoli is my ihe (spear), and guide; it reminds me that, while America turns 250, my connection to Hawaiʻi, my kulāiwi (homeland), runs thousands of years old. Stand tall, patriots of our ancestral homelands. We paddle on together in our pursuits of civil justice… until our dignity is restored.

Kū ha’aheo e ku’u Hawai’i. Mamaka kaua o ku’u ‘āina. ‘O ke ehu kakahiaka o nā ‘ōiwi o Hawai’i
nei. No ku’u lahui e hā’awi pau a i ola mau
Stand tall, my Hawai’i. Band of warriors of my land. The new dawn for our people of Hawai’i is
upon us. For my nation, I will give my all so that our legacy lives on