UNBROKEN VOICES

They told you the story was over.

It isn't.

Unbroken Voices introduced you to the Indigenous women history tried to erase - the warriors, diplomats, and visionaries whose names were buried under centuries of deliberate silence. It ended with a wound still open: thousands of Indigenous women and girls missing and murdered, a crisis the mainstream world refuses to look at directly.

This book is about the women looking at it anyway.

The women in these pages were not born into easier times. They were born into the same systems, the same structures, the same deliberate erasure that tried to silence Lozen and Sacagawea and Wilma Mankiller. The difference is that they have microphones. They have social media. They have each other. And they are not waiting for permission to be heard.

Meet Autumn Peltier, the Anishinaabe teenager who addressed the United Nations about clean water while her own community still couldn't drink from the tap. Meet Deb Haaland, the Laguna Pueblo woman who walked into the U.S. Department of the Interior - the agency that for two centuries administered the destruction of Indigenous life - and took it over. Meet Jordan Marie Brings Three White Horses Daniel, the Lakota runner who covers her mouth with a red handprint at every marathon finish line so the cameras that photograph her are forced to reckon with the women they are not photographing.

Meet Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, the Chadian Indigenous climate negotiator who sat in the rooms where the Paris Agreement was written and made sure Indigenous voices were in the text. Meet Sonia Guajajara, the Guajajara-Tentehar woman who became Brazil's first ever Minister of Indigenous Peoples and walked into the government that had been burning her people's forests and said: this ends now.

Meet the water protectors. The language keepers. The lawyers filing the cases that the pipeline companies said could never be won. The artists making work so powerful it cannot be ignored. The mothers who buried their daughters and then stood up and built movements from the grief.

The women of Unbroken Voices fought with what they had in the centuries they were given. These women are fighting with everything - and they are fighting right now, in your lifetime, on land you may be standing on.

Their voices have never been broken.

They are getting louder.

The essential sequel to Unbroken Voices. For readers of Braiding Sweetgrass and All That She Carried.