A Womb With A View

02/27/2026

I am not overwhelmed because I lack skills. I am overwhelmed because the load is too heavy for one human being.

02/25/2026

02/24/2026

Jurisdictional gaps do not only burden tribal communities. They also deeply impact Native Americans living in urban areas. Whether on or off the reservation, cases involving missing and murdered relatives, domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking are too often delayed, dismissed, or deprioritized.

Let me ask an honest question: Do you think that is accidental?

Jurisdictional confusion has existed since the earliest days of federal control over our people, when movement was restricted and sovereignty was undermined. Those systems were never designed to fully protect us.

More than 70% of Native Americans now live in urban areas. Yet when our relatives go missing or experience violence in city and county jurisdictions, their cases are still often minimized, delayed, or poorly investigated. Urban residency has not brought safety. In many ways, it has created new layers of invisibility.

We have to ask why.

Is it because Native people are still viewed through harmful stereotypes? As alcoholics. As addicts. As homeless. As unstable. As “less credible.” As “less urgent.” These narratives influence how cases are handled, whether families are believed, and how quickly resources are mobilized.

Research shows that Native women experience some of the highest rates of violence in the country, yet our cases remain among the most underreported and under-investigated.

We are often told that jurisdiction is “complicated.” But complexity should never excuse neglect. Clear systems can be built. Training can be strengthened. Agreements can be improved. Sovereignty can be respected while coordination is prioritized.

If we are willing to speak honestly about discrimination, bias, and institutional neglect, we can begin to change how these cases are handled.

We invite you to share, share your thoughts, and create dialogues around solutions. If you want to learn more or get involved, reach out to us at info@notournativedaughters.org

02/23/2026

02/22/2026

In 1973, eight perfectly healthy people walked into psychiatric hospitals across the United States.
None of them were ill.
No one inside realized it. 🧠
This was not an accident.
It was an experiment designed by psychologist David Rosenhan to answer a disturbing question.
Can professionals reliably tell the difference between mental health and mental illness?
To find out, Rosenhan recruited eight ordinary people. A painter. A housewife. A pediatrician. A graduate student.
They lied about only one thing. They said they heard voices. Just three words. “Empty.” “Hollow.” “Thud.”
That was enough.
All eight were admitted.
The moment they entered the hospitals, they stopped pretending. They behaved normally. They cooperated. They asked to be discharged. 🚪
It never worked.
Every normal action was reinterpreted as a symptom.
Writing notes became obsessive behavior.
Waiting quietly became pathological attention seeking.
Politeness became controlled behavior consistent with illness.
Seven were diagnosed with schizophrenia.
One with manic depression.
Not a single staff member identified them as healthy.
But the patients did.
Real patients approached them and whispered, “You’re not like the others. You don’t belong here.”
Those considered ill saw what trained professionals could not.
The average stay was 19 days.
One person remained hospitalized for 52 days. ⏳
Each day reinforced the same truth. Once labeled, reality stopped mattering.
When Rosenhan published On Being Sane in Insane Places, the psychiatric world erupted. One hospital challenged him to send new pseudopatients, confident they would catch them.
Rosenhan agreed.
Over the next months, that hospital identified 41 supposed impostors.
Rosenhan had sent no one. Not a single person.
The conclusion was unavoidable.
Diagnosis was not always based on facts. It was shaped by context and expectation.
This experiment shattered blind trust in clinical labels and forced major changes in how mental illness is diagnosed and treated. But its deeper lesson still unsettles today.
Perception can distort reality more than madness itself.
And sometimes, the most dangerous illusion belongs to those who believe they cannot be wrong.

02/22/2026

02/18/2026

I used to be q***rphobic. It was all I knew.

I grew up on a small, Northern reservation where there are more churches than stores, where q***rness is treated as a moral and social transgression (I love my Homelands, but we have a lot of work to do, fam).

I knew I was q***r when I was five years old, but I also knew that surviving meant silence.

So I learned how to perform.

I convinced myself that seeking male attention was normal, that partnership with men was the goal, and discomfort was simply the cost of being a woman. I genuinely thought most women were pretending too, because it seemed obvious to me that many men did not cherish the women they were with. I saw conquest where others saw romance. I saw transaction where others saw love.

So I buried what felt true and leaned harder into what felt required.

I was fully immersed in evangelical Christianity.

Sunday school teacher, worship team, youth group leader, attended services every week (2+ times a week). I even carried my Bible in high school, except mine was printed like a magazine so I could appear modern while still being faithful. I believed I was doing good in the world by warning people about hell and trying to save as many souls as possible.

Hell wasn’t an abstract idea to me. It lived in my nervous system.

I remember sermons describing the smell of it, the heat of it, the screams of it. I watched films about it in youth group and shared YouTube testimonies with urgency. My body learned vigilance before it learned consent. Don’t sin. Don’t slip. Be ready to die at any moment.

I never questioned what I believed because my family believed it, and family was my compass.

To consider that they might be wrong, especially my late grandmother, felt like betrayal at the deepest level.

But when I began to wrestle with doctrines like eternal punishment and rapture, I discovered how much of that theology was constructed to maintain obedience. I didn’t start questioning because I wanted to rebel or to “live in sin”; I started questioning because I wanted to LOVE better.

I realized I was moving through the world seeing people as lost, broken, hell-bound. When you see someone primarily as a soul to rescue, you cannot fully see them as a person. I thought it was compassion, but it was merely control and self-righteousness deemed as goodness.

The deeper I traced my beliefs, the clearer it became that q***rphobia does not emerge from nowhere. In many Indigenous communities, it flows through the bloodstream of colonization. Through residential schools, missionary doctrine, and assimilation policies that fractured kinship systems and targeted women and q***r relatives first. Colonization runs on fear, control, and shame. It embeds itself in our spiritual language and calls itself tradition.

Queerness is not new. Colonization is. Queerness is not dismantling our communities. Colonial shame is. If we position q***r people as the source of harm, we are upholding the very systems that tried to erase us all.

It has taken years to deconstruct, to sit honestly with why I believed what I believed, to ask who told me and who told them, and who benefited from that chain of certainty. That process is not tidy. It disrupts families. It shakes identity. It rewires your nervous system.

And had I not done that work, I would have missed the most remarkable love of my life.

I would not be sitting across from my sweetheart on our Valentine's date, wearing the beautiful rose earrings they made for me that you see in this photo–it is one of the many ways they love me with tenderness, beauty, and care.
My heart opened in a way I once believed was sinful.

This post is not a call to shame anyone raised the way I was. Many of us were immersed into belief systems before we had words, choice, and before we understood consent.

So this post is a call to courage.

The courage to examine inherited beliefs. The courage to ask whether a belief expands life or tightens it. The courage to choose love over the comfort of certainty.

Many of our communities have, willingly or unwillingly, absorbed q***rphobia and normalized it. It has been preached from pulpits, enforced in families, leaked in our traditional ceremony spaces, justified as culture. Yet much of that hostility traces back to assimilation policies, residential schools, and missionary doctrine that targeted our kinship systems. When we uphold those beliefs without question, we do the work of colonizers for them.

Healing as a People requires more than reclaiming Land or language. It requires reclaiming and expanding how we love each other.

It requires protecting those who are most vulnerable in a colonial society–women, children, and our q***r relatives–with fierce love. They cannot be the scapegoats for wounds inflicted by colonial systems. They cannot be blamed for fractures created by fear and shame.

Queerphobia is not ours to carry.

If liberation is our goal, then our love must be wide enough to hold the ones colonization tried their hardest to erase. Sometimes the most radical act is releasing rigid certainty and allowing love to move freely through our communities again.

Land back.
Language back.
LOVE back.

02/16/2026