By Jessica Mehta

When we talk of stolen sisters
we talk of bodies gone to ghost
or given back for goodness—as if 

we are

sweets snatched from superettes
discovered post-wash in sticky pockets.

When we think on stolen girls

we imagine
pluckings from roadsides,
                                     wild

By Winoka Yepa

I am a daughter of Changing Woman, the mother of Monster Slayer and Born of Water, 

the first two children of the five-fingered people, our Diné people. 

I am a child of the Weaver-Zia clan, born for the Within His Cover clan.

I am the granddaughter of the Salt People Clan and of the Water Flows Together clan.

I was born and raised in Dinétah, our people’s land, in a small town of 45,000 people located on the cusps of the Diné border. 

I am a Diné woman. 

By Brenda Mallory

Proximate Parcels is comprised of spools of industrial sewing thread that have been sliced apart to expose the individual strands. The act of cutting something apart down to its core, effectively destroying its original function, but then reforming it into a beautiful, lush object reflects my interest in how things that are broken or disrupted are often still viable and lively and enduring. The varying shades of red thread reference the complicated issues of blood quantum that determine certain Native American tribal enrollments.

By Luzene Hill

Luzene was my paternal grand­mother’s name, and when I was named for her, I was defined by a Cherokee word. The literal meaning of that word is now lost, at least as far as I’ve been able to discover, but the name itself holds a part of my family history—one that has come to inform my art and has determined the direction of much of my work.

I grew up in Atlanta with my white mother and grandparents. We made regular summer visits to Cherokee, North Carolina, but I heard the Cherokee language spoken only on rare occasions. Both my father’s parents had been sent, against their parents’ wishes, to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, founded in the late nineteenth century by Colonel Richard Henry Pratt in the wake of the U.S. government’s massive forced relocations of Native peoples. Pratt infamously followed the motto “Kill the Indian, save the man.” The school required children to speak English only, enacting a program of nonvoluntary, often violently enforced assimilation that continued, in schools across the United States, until 1978, when the Indian Child Welfare Act gave parents the right to refuse having their children placed in boarding schools. As a result of their experience, neither of my grandparents spoke their language to their children, nor did they teach it to me. I was taught to have pride in my Cherokee culture, but it was an intellectual exercise, very different from growing up and living on the reservation.

By Marina La Palma

Eras of my personal life, particularly in my youth, are indelibly marked by what my close peers were thinking about and exploring. At various points it was cinema, art history, city planning and architecture, mythology and poetry, international relations, sociology. My focus here is anthropology because it ushered me into an abiding curiosity about what humans have been up to on the planet through the many eons of our existence. As always, it was sustained reading-threads that fed and informed my views. I have kept lists of my reading since the age of ten, and I am currently composing a book with the working title My Reading Life. In it I revisit books – many of them still on my shelves – that have shaped my worldview and deeply informed my value system. Here is a selection of four: 

By Paul R. Abramson

Bruno Dössekker, aka Binjamin Wilkomirski, was a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust. He was also the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood.  Years later it was discovered that Bruno was neither Jewish, nor a concentration camp survivor. 

Rachel Dolezal, aka Nkechi Amare Diallo, was a well-known teacher (Intro to African Studies, The Black Woman’s Struggle), artist, and a civil rights leader (NAACP Branch President) of African American descent. Or, so it seemed, until her parents produced Rachel’s birth certificate. She was of German and Czech ancestry.

What about Jimmie Durham? I am a Cherokee artist, Durham stated in the 1984 Bulletin of the Alternative Museum, who strives to make Cherokee art. Lucy Lippard (1993), the eminent art critic, added substance to that affirmation in an article she wrote for Art in America.