Indigenous woman heals from intergenerational trauma, recovers from personal trauma, conquers addiction, and reconnects with her identity and cultural practices. Indigenous woman lives happily ever after. The end. You want the story to end there because it sounds pretty and gives you warm feelings about the possibility of change. Perhaps that story lifts and eases colonial guilt with the knowledge that individuals can make it through on their own accord. All they have to do is “pull themselves up by their bootstraps”. Survival of the fittest. Darwinism. Rise above your circumstances and you get a happy ending. Enough of all this privilege, power, oppression, and colonial legacy nonsense. Be a go getter.

For Indigenous peoples living in a colonial settler state (a state where the colonizers never have and never will leave), the story does not end there but continues on. After personal redemption and individual freedom then the fight…