When Rose was a girl, she wanted to dance, but her feet wouldn’t cooperate, and her pride made her stand still. She’d wrap her mother’s old Fancy Dance shawl around her shoulders in the comfort of her bedroom and pull the yoke on top, some strings loose so that when she moved, beads fell to the floor. She didn’t watch herself in the mirror, because then she would remember she couldn’t do this. She couldn’t dance. What she could do was fight, so she did that instead. Punching second cousins when they teased her for her curly hair. Putting townies in headlocks when they called her names she didn’t understand but knew were poison by the way they festered under her dark skin. They couldn’t decide if they hated her more for being from the rez or being Black, so they made weapons out of words, all the words they could find, and threw them at her. And now, even now, even after all that, she still couldn’t dance. So she kept fighting.

Rose was a fighter, and sometimes that’s nothing more than the choreography of survival.

Rose wanted to be a Jingle Dress dancer, but she never asked for regalia. By the time she was five, those dresses existed only in stories. Making noise drew attention, and attention brought in outsiders. So to be safe—to stay alive—the people had gone quiet. Except for the stories.

Eagle plumes fastened to the backs of their heads, small purses with tobacco offered in return for prayers, hundreds of silver cones hanging from bias tape tabs around bright material, Jingle Dress dancers were the healers. They made the noise that brought the healing; the first one came from a dream and allowed the girl who wore it to overcome her own sickness with a sound like nothing else in the whole world. Rose wanted to make that noise, but instead she made the sound of a knuckle against a tooth, a fist connecting with a kidney, the suck of breath being knocked out of a chest.

Rose was a fighter, and sometimes that’s nothing more than the choreography of want.

She had never been to a powwow, had never seen a real Jingle Dress, but she knew the pattern by heart. Her grandmother had taught it to her, sitting at the kitchen table, drawing out the lines with a finger through spilled sugar. People had different versions of where the dress first came from, but her grandma asserted it was from Treaty 3, her own territory.

“The skirt goes below the knees, and it’s heavy ’cause of all the jingles. Most people do three hundred and sixty five, one for each day in a year. Hang ’em close together so they hit each other when you move. Boy, you could hear some of those dancers walking into the field from the fry truck. Like shattered glass being put back together.”

Now the loudest sound was the Earth uncurling and flexing into every space. Tree bark popped its seams from the sudden changes in weather. Weeds strangled the geometry of cultivated spaces overnight. Bees swarmed broken streets, made hives out of green-clotted houses, the wallpaper shot through with moss. Foxes traveled in covens, noses to the ground, throats safe from the wolves that slunk across barricaded highways like silent motorcycles. The moon was blocked by the flight of dark birds moving into new territory. Not every fight was violence. Some fights were resistance.