What is your debut book, All I See Is Violence, about?   All I See is Violence is a historical fiction narrative of what the death of antebellum and the turn of modernity would have looked like in the almost post-apocalyptical burgeoning United States of America in 1876, the dawn of the nation state and the beginning of structural Native American oppression. I’ve woven 1876 against the end of 1972 on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation, the middle of the American Indian Movement, nearly a century later and the Native Americans are still battling the US government and plenary power.

What inspired you to write it?   I was inspired by a brief conversation at a Musqueam feast, I used to assist the indigenous  elders in an aboriginal kitchen garden, I would do the heavy digging and they would tell me all their stories, that feast it was the first time I tried herring eggs on sea kelp and I made a pumpkin cheesecake with a pumpkin I had grown which was wildly popular, a Cheyenne elder I was perched next to on a stump indulging in the cake I made looked at me and said, “Did you know that their were female warriors?” I did not know and that led me down a rabbit hole of archival digging and sure as shit there most certainly was female Indian warriors, lots of them, and General Custer met them in the field.

As we approach the 150th anniversary of the 1876 Battle of Little Big Horn, what do you hope that your poignant retelling of this catastrophe story will do for Americans?   My greatest hope is that in honoring the battle of Little Big Horn is that we have reverence for the catastrophic impact of war and the lasting reverberation of it and the wisdom to no longer engage in such violence, a very poignant message for where we at globally. 

How do you feel your book depicts the harsh reality of life for Native Americans, past and present?   My book is a glimpse into worldview we haven’t been privilege to experience much of yet, I am a registered Indian, my mother was military and faced the unjust nature of colonization, and in this shattering I think we can all see at our very core we strive and will fight for the same thing, love, and that’s something we don’t need to fight over but can unify and gain strength from. 

What challenges have you had to overcome as an indigenous writer?   Challenges as a writer are prolific and now, we’re contending with AI, which I have never used and more than likely never will. Challenges as an indigenous writer, well I have all the socio economic and cultural chaos that comes from being an Indian and found myself more often than not the only indigenous person at my university, my life experience being so different from the people I found myself surrounded by it was alienating and also liberating, it demonstrated the resolve I have as a person and strengthen my writing by growing compassions to those around me, I am the first person from both sides of my family and my adopted family to attend and graduate from university, and I did so with no support as I was the first person to attend higher education, and writing it’s been the same experience, I’ve done everything on my own, through dedication and resolve and have made some amazing connections, such as my friendship with the historian Dr. Robert Mallet, who cross verifies my research and did so for All I See is Violence, I actually have a historian bibliography for the work I did on that novel. 

You feel that educating the non-indigenous community on the history of Native Americans is an integral path forward. Why?   Definitely, welcome to the land of the free and the home of the brave, if you’re in North America you’re on my ancestor’s land and there’s much we need to remember and learn from them, they were an advanced civilization that was systematically destroyed and many non-indigenous Americans fought with the Indians and for the Indians, and they are slowly being eradicated from the historical narrative. 

What needs to be known about the history of Native Americans?   The most important thing that needs to be remembered about the Native Americans is that we had and have a tremendous amount of agency and that all these historical policies are still affecting us today and that these policies intentionally make it very difficult to obtain something like higher education, and freedom and choice of living.  

Just how does a community navigate the chaos of cultural suppression, loss, and genocide?   How do we navigate the chaos of genocide and the loss of land, its first acknowledging what happened and the actors that inflicted it and them its unifying to find solutions because we’re now all in this together, if you live in North America this history is your history, this loss is your loss and we all have the choice to use this knowledge, facing the truth no matter how horrific and transmute that to wisdom and guide us to something different and better for all. 

Do you believe indigenous history and a people’s identity have been structured around falsehoods? Why?   There are several books and university papers stated that our history has been structured and based upon an idealized and fake version of what it means to be an Indian. This has been done internationally and goes back to dawn of the printing press, we are either romanticized and disappearing, or beings capable of only great depredations, crimes of savagery, depending on what the government thought it needed to get the voters to vote the way they wanted it go, thus the Indian never stood a chance, between forced relocation and a federal policy of extermination we are and were a victim of circumstance, so we watched Italians play Indians in westerns, and the romanticization from the Last of the Mohicans and Dances with Wolves, even more modern adaptations still falling short, again there are very few actual indigenous people writing, media or in history, there’s an organization called TAAF, Tribal Alliance Against Frauds, that’s calling and suing hundreds of people and organizations in North America from professors, academics, scientists, doctors, writers, actors, journalists and politicians who have claimed indigenous ancestry, and they are not.

Why did you choose to use the medium of fiction to bring forth a truth that you feel is missing?   I’ve chosen fiction because history is traditionally passed down through stories and myths in all cultures and I wanted a medium that was accessible to everyone, not something that is merely argued over in an academic institution but something that can serve globally for we are living in a time where the world is very small and the information is prolific and much of the information we are being bombarded with is distorted and useless. 

Foreword Clarion Reviews calls your novel “potent.” Kirkus Reviews says it is “richly orchestrated,” and Publishers Weekly BookLife says this is “a work of art.” Are they all right?   Richly orchestrated and a work of art, I drew inspiration from modern writers such as Hemingway, Owens and T.S. Elliot and also the antiquated Shakespeare, I used poetry lyricism, reiteration and symbolism, structuring it as a tragedy, nothing like it exists so I am proud to see it is a work of art, and art in its highest form is a reflect of spirit and spirit is what all indigenous ceremonies are structured around connecting you to, so I would so this novel is a ceremony, a ghost dance. 

Your book won the IBPA Book Award Gold for General Fiction. Were you surprised to see such acclaim for your book?   I was very surprised as I did not know that it was submitted or selected and very delighted and even more delighted when I received an actual award, it’s a magnificent glass statue. 

You write of a woman warrior, a ruthless general, and a single mom. These three stories are deftly braided into the legacy of a stolen nation. What do these characters represent?   Nancy is the reverberation of cultural destruction and the reliance it takes to survive the outcome of genocide, the Little Wolf is the forgotten historical narrative, and General Custer is a peak into what was going on bureaucratically, some of the reviews didn’t like the dialogue of Custer and the men he interacted with and some of that dialogue I took verbatim from historical documents.   

What led you to becoming a historian – and what do you think of General Custer today?   I think if General Custer was alive today, he’d be Instagram famous, an influencer, I became a historian as I progressed through higher education my love of reading and my desire to understand my life situation pushed me in that direction, as a historian we also draw from archaeology, anthropology and psychology. General Custer was a man defined by his outward reality, that he himself created, he had newspaper reporters travel with him during his Indian campaigns. He was vain and cunning and more than likely a narcissist, he held openly bigoted views, yet fought for emancipation of slavery and refused to have any African American soldiers in his regiments. He respected the Indians but had no qualms in slaughtering them.

He lived in a delusional reality measured by his own grandiosity, he dressed in a elaborate fringed hide suit when pursing Indians, and a polished uniform when frequenting the city, he spent a lot of time in New York and desired to be an actor on the stage and developed a gambling problem, that was part of the lure for taking the Black Hills from the Sioux, he was promised a substantial amount of gold that is buried in that land if he could secure the territory. He cheated on his wife, yet she idolized him in the public sphere to gain more social standing, this duality and delusion is something that is overlooked if it can be framed in the right light using media, and that’s what General Custer did. Even now most people know who he is, he wanted to be famous but didn’t really have the right circumstance to be famous so he instigated intrigue around himself, and he was successful, and he was actually never even promoted to General but died a lieutenant colonel, he self-appointed himself to that title, and that is how we know him, still in the light he wanted. 

What type of research did you undergo in writing your novel so that you capture its raw authenticity?   I conducted archival research going through first-hand accounts of soldiers’ journals, newspaper articles from that time and many historical journals and books about it and lastly indigenous elders’ historical stories on it, a piece of the puzzle few are privilege to.      

You weave love, loss, and hard truths in your story. Was that a lot to balance in your head while constructing your book?   I have a complex mind, I am always thinking and I am endlessly curious, why, guides me, I was singled out for participation in the G.A.T.E program as a young child and one of our features was that we could hold serval complicated ideas at once and apply them inter-connectedly. Loss, truth if integrated will always transmute and reveal love, but you have to have be fearless to walk the entire path. 

Your book is a journey into history and violence. How do you hope it will heal Americans, both indigenous and not?   I hope through honest discussion of what has actually happened will transform and alleviate the load indigenous people have been bearing, we’ve been shamed, condemned and murdered for   who we are, so speaking up takes a lot of courage and there’s many obstacles on that path, and you can easily get lost, ultimately my ancestors we’re fighting a spiritual battle for the wholeness of their spirit and a reverence to all life and that virtue was turned and inverted against them, but I stand with that, we are all of the immaculate creator, whether your beliefs have been structured to forget that or not that is where the truth lies, that love is the one thing we all have in common. Hoka Hey. 

How do you handle the complaint that you are presenting a revisionist history?   Revisionist history, I thought that was a funny review from someone who researches through reddit threads, clearly if someone thinks I am revisionist they are triggered by the facts that I’ve presented that are and have been available to anyone before me whose conducted archival research on the subject and chose to not highlight what I found, which I would assume for the simple reason that it didn’t interest them, because as mentioned previously there are very few indigenous historians so non indigenous historians would have a different world view, and perspective, which has some very big gaps in it. That same review,  stated that Sitting Bull was too old to be fighting in the Battle of Little Big Horn, which he most certainly did and I didn’t think he was that old, forties or fifties, that reviewer is going to be very upset and triggered to discovered that it was not uncommon for indigenous warriors to fight into their eighties or nineties, the most notable being the Apache Nana, who lead and fought on horseback in a battle against the United States army at ninety-two. Unfortunately much of what we’ve taught is what the historian D.H Rawcliffe described as ‘Retrospective Falsification’, which is the process in which an objectively factual story or history is distorted and falsified through inaccuracies and embellishments, even changing dates and locations, as a historian you should hold yourself to a moral obligation to cross verify through primary physical sources and with the advent of the internet we’re getting further and further away from that, the purpose of Retrospective Falsification is that the falsified story or history is reframed to sustain a desired result, I am presenting facts objectively and it is the readers decision to how they would like to frame the truth I’ve presented.