I Can Make This Promise

Edie Green remembers feeling alienated from her peers on her first day of kindergarten. Her teacher, Mrs. Vespucci, asked her, “What are you?” (2). Edie did not know how to respond, so she simply said that she was Edie, and she was from Seattle. Hearing her teacher’s repeated questions, she got the feeling that she was failing some kind of important test. Edie has heard similar questions in the years since kindergarten, and she is never sure how to answer them. Her father is white, and her mother, Lisa Green, is Indigenous. Because her mother was adopted, Edie does not really know where she comes from.

On July 4, 12-year-old Edie travels to nearby tribal lands with her parents. She has little context for understanding the cultures she sees around her. She sees an Indigenous woman wearing a “Find Our Missing Girls” (9) T-shirt. Edie meets a dog without a collar and hopes to help it get home, but her parents stop her, saying, “Someone will come along for him” (9). They head to a booth to buy fireworks from an Indigenous teenage boy, and he gives her a free extra firework.