What band are you from? My dad, aunt & grandmother wered all enrolled members of LCO, but LCO's never responded to me when I reach out about it for myself. It hurts, my grandma was abandoned as a baby and adopted by Slovakian immigrants, though she briefly reconnected with her mother and siblings later in life. My dad left my family when I was a kid.

I just feel robbed as a mutt who's always been an outsider, even in my own home. I did a deep dive in to what it meant to be Anishiaabe, all of my passions & instincts suddenly felt like they made perfect sense. The shores of Lake Superior are the closest thing I have to an ancestral homeland, I wasn't raised to be German or Slovak.

My great grandma was from Old Post, a village that was flooded & destroyed by the Northern States Power Company to provide electricity that the villagers of Post wouldn't even have access to for decades. There's a continual pattern of being kicked out & abandoned that stretches back to that flood. We've been trying to survive on the outside, it was never a choice leave it behind.

I just feel like my Ojibwe heritage has been stolen. I may look like a white guy, but that's what genocide is intended to do, destroy not just the blood but the heritage behind it. It made me proud to learn my great aunt Sandra fought against blood quantums, but the genocide isn't finished yet so that fight isn't over.