My dedication to those Indigenous women and girls buried without ceremony or care is bound to them, woven into them before I was born.

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I see them the way others can't see me: invisible but alive with voice, vision; entwined with ground, root, weed and ash; steeped in soil, sand, the sacred and woven into the fabric of All That Is, will be & was: hope, faith & fearlessness.

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I do this because I am Them and there is no Other. I do this because I believe in righting the wrong, and that they are part of building the fulcrum for the future of women and girls in Indian Country and beyond.

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I am strong enough to carry them and their pain; their past and future tense. I am solid enough to speak to them, quiet enough to hear them as they sing through the wind and ground.

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I work from a limited vantage point and only with something resembling trust and the truth of the ground, of all that is holy. I'm led by Others whose sightline is broader, is bespectacled by stars and song and moon and in that there is no mourning; only the sun's rise again and again.

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One day the sun will rise on those bones that are buried and we'll call it the beginning of justice. And we'll create and follow that arc as we grieve and reweave.