Too often, ideas about Indigenous culture take on the shape of loss. Take, for example, the Trail of Tears. The forced removal—at the hands of the US government in the 1830s and 1840s—of the Five Tribes from their homelands in the southeast. As many as one out of every four Cherokees died on that journey. It’s an end-of-the-world story, the total destruction of a particular way of life in a particular place. It was also the only time Cherokees appeared in my K-12 education—on a death march out of my home state of Tennessee.

Here's the thing. I’m a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. There I was, alive and changing in a changing world. But even in Cherokee homes, even in conversations between one Native person and another, there can sometimes be a tendency to turn ourselves towards loss, a

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