I was watching The Madison the other night.
There’s a scene where someone brings food to a family. A kind gesture. The kind of thing communities do for each other.
They called it Indian tacos.
The younger girls in the scene got offended. Made a thing of it. Corrected it.
And I’m sitting there on my couch thinking — that’s literally what we’ve always called it.
Indian tacos. Indian fry bread. That’s the name. That’s always been the name. Nobody where I come from ever wrinkled their nose at it. It wasn’t a slur. It was dinner.
I wasn’t offended by the scene. I was just… surprised. By the reaction.
And then I wasn’t surprised at all.
There’s a particular kind of awkwardness that happens when people outside a culture decide what should be offensive to the people inside it.
I’ve seen it more times than I can count.
Someone who has never set foot on a Reservation, never sat at a drum, never riced a lake or eaten frybread off a paper plate at a Pow Wow — deeply concerned about the feelings of Native people. Correcting terminology. On behalf of us.
Meanwhile, the actual Native people are just trying to eat their tacos.
I don’t say that to be dismissive. I understand where the impulse comes from. People want to do right. That matters. But there’s a difference between listening to a community and speaking for it. And sometimes the loudest voices in these conversations are the ones with the least lived experience.
That’s not a political statement. It’s just an observation.
I’ve been deep in research for my next book — Boarding School Indians — and I will tell you, spending time in those real stories has a way of recalibrating your sense of what’s actually painful.
The boarding schools were painful. Children taken from their families. Language beaten out of them. Identity stripped down to nothing.
Indian tacos? That came after the survival. That came from the frybread that families made with commodity flour when there wasn’t much else. It came from resilience and adaptation and a people making something good out of what little they had.
It became a tradition. A food. A memory.
My people named it. We own that name. It’s ours.
I think about my dad a lot when moments like this come up. He grew up at Sugar Bush, seventeen miles from the Rez, in a one-room house on the water. He learned the language, the traditions, the ceremonies — the real ones, the ones that were actually dangerous to practice for a long time in this country.
He knows the difference between something that wounds and something that feeds.
So do I.
The Madison scene wasn’t wrong to raise the question. I’ll give it that.
But the answer they landed on — that the term itself is the problem — missed something.
The problem was never the name.
The problem is when people stop asking the people it belongs to.
Warrior Spirit Rising is available now. Boarding School Indians is in progress — and the real stories deserve to be told right.