Coming of age during an era of assimilation and cultural erasure, Tony Tekaroniake Evans was told by his third-grade teacher that Indians no longer exist. How could this be when his grandmother spoke Mohawk in the house? Thus begins a comical, informative, and heartbreaking literary journey in search of his Indigenous identity. From childhood fantasies to altered states of consciousness, studies in cultural anthropology, and travels in Indian Country, Evans takes an uncle’s invitation to learn the deeper significance of his Iroquois traditions, yielding a personal philosophy based on Indigenous values that resist the excesses of consumer culture and could renew the American Dream.

Tony Tekaroniake Evans is an enrolled member of the Kahnawake Mohawks of Quebec, and an award-winning reporter and columnist for the Idaho Mountain Express. His stories have also been published in High Country News, A&E Networks’ History.com, Atmos, Mountain Gazette, The Smithsonian’s American Indian Magazine and other publications. He earned a degree in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Colorado and won the Expatriate Scholarship to the Prague Summer Writer’s Workshop in 1996. He is the author of Teaching Native Pride: Upward Bound and the Legacy of Isabel Bond and other books. His work is supported by grants from the Idaho Humanities Council. He has lived in Idaho’s Sun Valley region for over thirty years.