I want to tell you about my family.

A note before I start: I'm going to use the word Aniyunwiya throughout this post. Aniyunwiya (ah-nee-yun-WEE-yah) is what we call ourselves in Tsalagi—our own language. It means "the Principal People." You know us as Cherokee. I'll use both, but I want you to know our name for ourselves first.

My paternal family is Afro-Indigenous—Black and Aniyunwiya—and they lived off-reservation on a farm in Mason County, West Virginia. My maternal great-grandmother was born in 1916 in Oklahoma. She was a boarding school survivor. She survived it, came home, relocated to Pennsylvania in 1949, had my grandmother in 1951, and then went missing while my grandmother was still a child. She was never found.

I'm going to come back to all of that. I need you to hold it the whole time you're reading this.

the boarding schools: what they actually were

Let me be extremely clear about what the United States government created, funded, and ran with intention and policy:

They took children. They kidnapped them. They starved families into handing them over. Parents who refused had their rations cut off or were imprisoned. Federal agents literally showed up and took children while families hid them in the woods. [¹] Oklahoma had 87 federal Indian boarding schools—more than any other state in the country. [²] Nationally, the government ran 417 schools across 37 states. By 1926, more than 80% of Indigenous school-age children—over 60,000 kids—were being forced through this system. [³]

The purpose was not education. The purpose was cultural annihilation. Richard Pratt, the founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School—the model that all the other schools were based on—said it himself in 1892: "All the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man." [⁴] This was not a rogue opinion. This was federal policy.

What happened inside:

Kids arrived and were immediately stripped of everything. Their hair was cut. They were given Western names. They were forbidden from speaking their language, practicing their customs, dancing, or praying. If they spoke their language anyway—if they whispered it, if they slipped up—they were beaten. [⁵] Sometimes their fingers were cut off. [¹] They were put to work doing heavy industrial labor for hours every day under the name of "vocational training." [⁵] They were sexually abused by the priests and nuns and federal employees running the schools. At least 122 priests and clergy members later accused of abuse had worked at 22 different boarding schools. The known abuse involved over 1,000 children. Experts say the real number was almost certainly much worse. [⁵]

Most schools had cemeteries. Some had incinerators. [¹]

In July 2024, the Department of the Interior released the final volume of their three-year Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative investigation. They found at least 973 children died in federal custody at these schools. 283 of the dead still haven't been identified. 109 of those children died in Oklahoma boarding schools specifically. [²] The DOI described how the government took "deliberate and strategic actions" to "isolate children from their families, deny them their identities, and steal from them the languages, cultures and connections that are foundational to Native people." [⁶]

The United States government has still not issued a formal apology.

My great-grandmother was born in 1916 in Oklahoma. The boarding school system was at its absolute height. She went through it. She survived it. And then she came home—and the home she came back to had been broken by the very system she'd just survived.

what the schools did to families

Here's something people don't talk about enough: boarding schools didn't just traumatize children. They destroyed the family structure itself, and that damage didn't stop when the child came home. It metastasized.

In 1949, my great-grandmother relocated to Pennsylvania. She was in her thirties by then—a boarding school survivor who had spent her whole life watching the Aniyunwiya world around her get dismantled piece by piece. In 1951, she had my grandmother. My great-grandfather—my grandmother's father—was a white man. He was married. He already had two children.

Let me sit with that for a second, because it matters.

A Native woman who survived the federal school system, who had been stripped of her language and her culture and her sense of safety, who had been relocated away from her community by the same government that had done all of that to her—she had a child with a married white man who then turned around and used that fact to take that child from her. When it came out that my grandmother was an affair baby, my great-grandfather took her. He refused to let my grandmother see her own mother.

I want you to think about the power dynamic there. I want you to think about who had legal recourse in 1951 and who didn't. I want you to think about what the courts were going to do for an Indigenous woman trying to get her child back from a white man with a wife and a home and standing in the community. I want you to think about what that man knew when he made that choice.

My great-grandmother survived a federal school designed to break her. She survived relocation. She had a daughter. And then that daughter was taken from her—this time not by the government directly, but by the power imbalances and social fractures the whole colonial system had built and maintained. The schools didn't just abuse children. They installed shame, disrupted traditional family and clan structures, dismantled the ways communities had always handled kinship and belonging. Then they left you isolated in a world that had zero interest in protecting you.

The fallout spread across generations like rot through wood.

And then my great-grandmother went missing.

My grandmother grew up never knowing her mother. And then, while she was still a child, my great-grandmother disappeared entirely and was never found.

I don't know what happened to her. No one does. That's the point. That's the whole damn point.

the MMIW crisis: it isn't past tense

My great-grandmother going missing is not a historical event. It is one data point in a crisis that is ongoing right now today in 2026.

Murder is the third leading cause of death for Indigenous women and girls aged 10 to 24 in this country. On some reservations, Indigenous women face murder rates more than ten times the national average. [⁷] More than four in five Indigenous women—84.3%—have experienced violence in their lifetime. More than two in five have been raped. [⁸]

In 2023 alone, over 5,800 American Indian and Alaska Native females were reported missing. 74% of them were children. [⁹]

Here's the part that makes me want to put my fist through a wall.

In 2016, there were 5,712 reports of missing AI/AN women and girls entered into the National Crime Information Center. The federal database NamUs—the one that is supposed to track missing persons nationally—logged 116 of them. [⁸]

One hundred and sixteen. Out of five thousand, seven hundred and twelve.

That's not a data gap. That's not a technical issue. That is the United States government deciding, functionally, that Indigenous women do not matter enough to count. And if they're not counted, they're not investigated. And if they're not investigated, nobody comes looking.

On top of that—Indigenous women are routinely racially misclassified on death certificates and missing persons reports. Listed as Hispanic, listed as Asian, listed as anything other than what they are, which means the cases vanish from the datasets that would force someone to do something. [⁷] The Bureau of Indian Affairs estimates approximately 4,200 missing and murdered cases remain unsolved. [⁸]

My great-grandmother would have been one of those 5,712. Not one of the 116. She would have been one of the 5,596 who didn't even make it into the database. No file. No investigation. Just another Indigenous woman who disappeared into the gap between what this country claims to be and what it actually is.

No justice. Just silence. Just a child growing up never knowing what happened to her mother.

the language

My family spoke Tsalagi. The actual language. Not a few words, not a party trick—the language.

Most of the younger generation has lost it. And before anyone frames that as sad in the detached way people talk about things that happened to other people a long time ago: it is not detached, it is not distant, and it did not happen to other people. It happened to us. It is still happening.

I want to talk about my great-aunt for a second.

She was the one who held things together in ways most of my family couldn't, because most of my family was trying to survive in a world that had stripped them of everything and then asked them to act normal about it. My great-aunt was Baptist—because Christianity was one of the things the boarding school system forced on Aniyunwiya families across generations, and a lot of us didn't come out the other side with a clean relationship to our own spiritual practices. But she also reclaimed and continued to observe Cherokee spirituality. Both things, at the same time. She held both. The stomp dances, the ceremonies, the relationships with the land and the plants and the old ways—she kept them alive in herself even while living inside the religious tradition that had been used as a weapon against her people.

That's not contradiction. That's survival. That's what it looks like to hold onto yourself when the whole world has been trying to take you apart piece by piece for a hundred years.

She was also the one who gave the children in our family Cherokee names when they were born. All of them were animals. Mine was Kvtli—raccoon. My father started calling me Gowanii, and that's the name that stuck, the name I use, the name I sign my posts with. But I was Kvtli first. A raccoon, named in the language the United States government tried to kill.

That matters to me more than I know how to say in English. And the fact that I have to say "in English" is the whole problem.

The boarding schools didn't just beat children for speaking Tsalagi as a side effect of their other cruelties. Destroying the language was a primary objective. Language is how culture is transmitted. Language is how you pass down ceremony, story, medicine knowledge, ways of understanding the world that don't have English equivalents. The colonizers knew that. They were explicit about it. Kill the language, kill the culture—across generations, even after the physical schools were gone. [¹⁰]

It worked.

Ethnologue recorded approximately 1,520 Cherokee speakers out of 376,000 Cherokee people in 2018. A tribal tally in 2019 got it up to around 2,100—but the vast majority of those speakers are over 50. As of that same 2019 report, only five people under the age of 50 were fully fluent in the Oklahoma dialect. About eight fluent speakers die every single month. [¹¹] UNESCO classifies the Oklahoma (Western) dialect as "definitely endangered" and the North Carolina (Kituwah) dialect as "severely endangered." [¹¹] The entire Tri-Council of Cherokee tribes declared a state of emergency over the language in June 2019. [¹²]

There were once three Cherokee dialects. The Lower dialect, spoken on the South Carolina-Georgia border, has been extinct since approximately 1900. [¹¹]

By 1830—before removal, before everything—the Aniyunwiya had a 90% literacy rate in our own language, higher than white Americans of the same era, because of Sequoyah's syllabary. By the time Oklahoma became a state in 1907, that literacy rate had collapsed to 10%. [¹³] That collapse happened on purpose. It happened because children's fingers were cut off for speaking it. It happened because a generation came home from federal schools ashamed of who they were and afraid to pass it on. It happened because a language that had survived for thousands of years—spoken in these mountains and valleys since before anyone else was here—was targeted for eradication by the United States government.

My great-aunt kept it alive in herself because she decided she was going to. She kept the ceremonies. She gave us our names. And still most of the younger generation of my family has lost the language, because you cannot fully pass down what has been systematically taken, and the damage from those schools echoed outward across a hundred years.

We're trying to rebuild a house while the arsonist is still in the yard.

blood quantum: the slow-motion genocide that never ended

Okay. This one. This one really pisses me off.

"What percentage are you?"

If you have ever asked a Native person this question, I need you to understand that you are using the language of a system the United States government designed specifically to make us disappear over time. Blood quantum is not a traditional Aniyunwiya concept. It is not how any tribe determined belonging before colonization. Before the federal government got involved, Cherokee identity was based on clan relationships, community, kinship, lived experience. A non-Cherokee who was adopted into the nation could become fully Cherokee. Identity was relational, not biological. [¹⁴]

The federal government changed that. Starting with the Dawes Rolls in the late 1890s—a census taken of the Five Civilized Tribes so the government could break up communal land and allot it to individuals, which was itself a land grab disguised as administrative process—the government started assigning blood fractions to people. The purpose was transparent: if you require people to be a certain fraction of Indian to count as Indian, and if Native people intermarry with non-Natives (which they do, at a rate of 54–61%, higher than any other racial group) [¹⁴], then within a few generations you mathematically eliminate the population that qualifies. No people, no treaty obligations, no land claims. Genocide by arithmetic.

Congress itself has projected that 60% of Indigenous individuals will have one-fourth or less blood quantum within the next generation. [¹⁵] That's not a natural demographic shift. That's a system working exactly as designed.

Now here's where my family specifically gets screwed:

I am Afro-Indigenous. My paternal family is Black and Aniyunwiya. And the history of Black Indigenous people—Cherokee Freedmen, people like my family—is one of the most actively suppressed and contested chapters of Cherokee history. After the Civil War, the United States required the Cherokee Nation to give full citizenship to their freed Black slaves and to Black people who had intermarried into the tribe, many of whom had Cherokee ancestry themselves. They were listed on the Dawes Rolls under a separate "Freedmen" category rather than as "Cherokee by blood," even when they had Cherokee ancestry, because the registrars classified based on race. [¹⁴]

This means Afro-Indigenous people like my family have been fighting for generations just to have our indigeneity recognized at all—by the federal government, by other Indigenous people, and by white people who want us to pick a lane. In 2007, the Cherokee Nation voted to strip Cherokee Freedmen of citizenship—a decision that was contested in tribal court and sparked years of legal and political battle. [¹⁴]

The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians requires 1/16 minimum blood quantum for enrollment. The United Keetoowah Band requires 1/4. Different rules, different rolls, different politics—all descended from systems the federal government imposed on us to divide, quantify, and ultimately erase us. [¹⁴]

Nobody asks other ethnic groups what percentage they are. Nobody asks a white person with a German great-grandmother whether they're "really" German. Nobody demands that a Black person calculate their African ancestry before they're allowed to claim their identity. But Native people—especially mixed Native people, especially Afro-Indigenous people—get interrogated constantly. Quantified. Measured. Asked to prove themselves against a standard that was invented by the same government that was trying to kill us.

When someone asks me "what percentage are you," they are doing the federal government's work for it.

the off-rez thing

My paternal family was not on a reservation. They were on a farm in Mason County, West Virginia. And I cannot tell you how many times I've seen people treat that like it means something—like it's evidence that we're not real, that we're appropriating, that we're playing at an identity we don't have.

Only about 22% of Native Americans live on tribal lands. [¹⁶] The rest of us exist everywhere else in this country. And the reason so many of us ended up everywhere else is because of federal policy. The Indian Relocation Act of 1956 actively incentivized Indigenous people to leave reservations by promising jobs and housing assistance in cities—assistance that largely didn't materialize, that left families stranded in urban areas without community or support. [¹⁶] Before that, there was allotment, there was removal, there were a hundred different mechanisms the government used to push Native people off their land and scatter them.

You cannot spend 150 years deliberately displacing a people and then turn around and use "but you don't live on a reservation" as evidence that they're not Native.

My family held onto a farm in West Virginia. They held onto each other. They held onto the language as long as they could. My great-aunt held onto the ceremonies and the spirituality and the names. That is not less Indigenous. That is what survival under sustained colonial pressure actually looks like—messy, incomplete, held together with whatever you've got left.

so what do I want from you

I'm not writing this to make you feel guilty and log off. I'm writing this because people need to understand that what was done to the Aniyunwiya—and to Indigenous people broadly—in this country is not past tense. It is not history. It is active and ongoing and the receipts are everywhere if you bother to look.

My great-grandmother survived a boarding school. Then she was isolated by relocation. Then she had a child with a married white man and that man took her daughter from her. Then she went missing and was never found. My family spoke Tsalagi, and the government systematically destroyed the conditions that would have let us pass it down. My great-aunt kept the ceremonies anyway—kept them alongside the Baptist faith that had been pushed on her family by the same colonial project—and she gave us our names in the old language. I was Kvtli. A raccoon. I am Gowanii. My family is Afro-Indigenous and we have had to fight to be recognized as both things we are at every turn. The language is dying at eight speakers a month. Women who look like my great-grandmother are going missing at rates the government refuses to properly count.

This is the inheritance. This is what "American history" left out of the curriculum.

Learn it. Say their names. Don't look away.

sources

[¹] "Kill the Indian, Save the Man." Oklahoma Gazette: https://www.okgazette.com/news/kill-the-indian-save-the-man-8989677

[²] U.S. Dept. of the Interior, Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, Vol. II (July 2024)—via OU Daily: https://www.oudaily.com/news/us-department-of-interior-concludes-indian-boarding-schools-investigation

[³] National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, via EJI: https://eji.org/news/federal-investigation-finds-at-least-973-children-died-in-federal-indian-boarding-schools/

[⁴] Richard Pratt, 1892 speech. Quoted in OU Gaylord News: https://www.ou.edu/gaylord/exiled-to-indian-country/content/remembering-the-stories-of-indian-boarding-schools

[⁵] Washington Post investigation, They Took the Children (December 2024): https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2024/american-indian-boarding-schools-history-legacy/

[⁶] DOI Press Release, Secretary Haaland (July 30, 2024): https://www.doi.gov/pressreleases/secretary-haaland-announces-major-milestones-federal-indian-boarding-school

[⁷] National Indigenous Women's Resource Center (NIWRC), MMIW data: https://www.niwrc.org/mmiwr-awareness

[⁸] Bureau of Indian Affairs—Missing and Murdered Indigenous People Crisis: https://www.bia.gov/service/mmu/missing-and-murdered-indigenous-people-crisis

[⁹] Rep. Mike Simpson, House Appropriations Committee Op-Ed (November 2024): https://appropriations.house.gov/news/op-eds/simpson-we-must-address-ongoing-missing-and-murdered-indigenous-women-crisis

[¹⁰] Britannica, Cherokee Language: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Cherokee-language

[¹¹] Wikipedia, *Cherokee Language* / Georgia Tribe of Eastern Cherokee language page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_language

[¹²] Georgia Tribe of Eastern Cherokee—Language page: https://georgiatribeofeasterncherokee.org/cherokee-language

[¹³] NonDoc / Gaylord News, The Cherokee Story of Preserving an Endangered Culture (2020): https://nondoc.com/2020/03/24/cherokee-story-preserving-endangered-culture/

[¹⁴] Wikipedia, Blood Quantum Laws / Harvard Political Review, Blood Quantum and the Freedmen Controversy (2021): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_quantum_laws | https://harvardpolitics.com/blood-quantum/

[¹⁵] Harvard Political Review, Blood Quantum and the Freedmen Controversy: https://harvardpolitics.com/blood-quantum/