I was born and raised in Indianapolis to a Kentucky-English mother with blue eyes, and a father of Irish heritage on his dad’s side and Lakota/Wea on his mother’s. My grandmother’s maiden name, ‘Weas,’ means “family of Wea,” a band of the Miami tribe indigenous to Indiana and Illinois.

The story passed down through my father was that my grandmother was born Lakota on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1883, then taken from the tribe and adopted as a baby through the Presbyterian Church to a Wea family in Southern Illinois, where she remained until her death in 1939 when my Dad was only 14.