By Charlene Willing McManis, Traci Sorell
It's 1957, and the government has declared that Regina's Umpqua tribe no longer exists, so her family leaves their Oregon reservation for Los Angeles, where a ten-year-old is left asking what that makes her now.
Regina Petit is ten, she is Umpqua, and she lives on the Grand Ronde reservation in Oregon where her family has always been. Her little sister Peewee is there, and so is her grandmother Chich, who tells the old stories. Then a law goes through Congress and terminates the tribe. The government simply declares that the Umpqua are no longer a tribe, which means the land is no longer theirs and Regina is no longer, on paper, an Indian. There's nothing left to stay for, so her father signs the family up for the Indian Relocation Program, and they drive to a street in Los Angeles where nobody has ever met a Native person. The question Regina carries through the rest of the book is the one the law handed her. If the government says you aren't Indian anymore, what are you?
It teaches a piece of history most adults have never heard of, and it does it through a paperwork problem rather than a battle. There's no villain who rides in. There's a law, a form her father signs, a new street, and a girl trying to work out what her own name means now. That's how the Termination era actually reached families, and a child of nine or ten grasps that kind of official cruelty perfectly well once it's pointed at somebody they've come to like. The book also does something a lot of Native-history titles don't: it drops Regina onto a block of Mexican American, Black, and white neighbors, and lets her watch racism land on other people alongside herself. She reads as a person living in a country, not a chapter in a social-studies unit.