This project would begin before I was even cognizant of the power of place and its relationship to colonialism, race, and gender. Yet, even as young children, many of us learn the constraints and limitations of the socially constructed spaces we find ourselves in. While I may not have known the history of how reservations came to be or how colonial governments enacted power in that space, I was deeply aware of the difference when
I passed the lines of trees that mark the territories between off-reservation and on-reservation. I knew, on a deeply emotional level, that this was sovereign land without knowing the precise legal history. In my childhood migrations, I learned at a young age what it meant to be and how to act as a young Native girl in small-town rural Maine, or white suburban Connecticut, or a predominately black part of the city of Apex, North Carolina—and I knew it required adaptability and awareness of my own embodiment as I moved through tumultuous geographies constructed around differing and constantly shifting power structures. Yet I would not consciously reflect on these geographies and what they meant for years to come, even as I navigated them throughout the various stages of my life.