By Tia-Alexi Roberts (Narragansett, CS Staff)

This article shares the history of Indian residential schools in Canada and the colonial violence that harmed Indigenous Nations, particularly children. The content may be upsetting. If you need emotional support, please contact the 24-hour Residential School Crisis Line at 1-866-925-4419.

By Phoebe Farris (Powhatan-Pamunkey)

Every year around the 23rd of June, Mixtec people from the municipality of San Juan Mixtepec gather to celebrate their patron saint. The music echoes between their respective gathering places in Oaxaca and Lamont, California.

For decades, legal challenges have been launched with an underlying goal of undermining Tribal governance and sovereignty across the United States. Last year, in Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta (2022), the Supreme Court narrowed the scope of its previous landmark ruling in McGirt v.

My landlord hasn’t removed the wooden boards from my windows yet. So, every morning I wake up to a dark apartment. It’s disorienting as much as it is a reminder of the darkness that is consuming our island; a darkness that is both literal and figurative. Literal, because half of the island’s power has yet to be restored. Figurative, because economic disparity is palpable (and sickening), especially in this time. This time that is post-disaster.

On May 6, 2023, as England was coronating a new king after weeks of mourning the passing of their previous ruler, Mashpee Wampanoags were also taking the day to fill the void of leadership left by the death of Vernon “Silent Drum” Lopez, the chief of Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe for the last 25 years of his life.

Imagine walking through a museum in Japan and seeing a glass case containing a bronze plaque with the words inscribed on the surface, “George Washington slept here in 1776,” with the explanation that this bronze plaque was an important part of American history. As an American, you would assume that something had been lost in translation.

In Gordon, Nebraska, a small border town on the grassy expanse of the northern Great Plains, there is a gravestone in the town’s cemetery etched with one word: “Unknown.” It rests on the grave of an Indigenous woman whose body was found underneath a stone bridge in 1970 and, like many Native women before and after her, was never identified. 

This is a reflection on the shared history between Na Ñuu Savi (Peoples of the Region of the Rain) and Chumash since the origin of their respective homelands in what are now Mexico and the United States. Santa Maria is an agricultural city located in northern Santa Barbara County on the Central Coast of California. It is the second home of Na Ñuu Savi migrants from Yucha Nchaa (Santa Cruz Mixtepec) in the municipality of Ñuu Xnuviko (San Juan Mixtepec), Oaxaca.