When Erica Tremblay was a small child she would watch her aunts and uncles making everyone laugh with their storytelling. “I noticed this physical shift in the audience, where people would lean in. And I thought, I want that power. I want to be a person that has other people leaning in.”
Among the Seneca Cayuga Nation, on the borders of Oklahoma and Missouri, near the small town where she was raised by her mother, communal storytelling was part of everyday life. But so were financial hardship and violence, the unsolved murders of women and the forced removal of their children. “It’s a massive bleeding wound that still exists,” she says. “From the first moment of contact, violence against Indigenous women has been an epidemic, and it remains one to this day. You can’t go online or on social media as an Indigenous person without seeing a poster being shared about someone who has gone missing.”
