I was raised by my parents, Kathy and Jimmie Justice, in the small Rocky Mountain mining town of Victor, Colorado, the third generation of my mom’s family to come of age in the Cripple Creek-Victor gold camp, which is located in the traditional homelands of the Mouache Ute people on the south side of what is now Pikes Peak. My parents lived there until ill health and the high altitude forced a move to Cañon City, just a couple of hours south in the Arkansas Valley.

My maternal grandfather, Jess Fay, was a life-long miner, prospector, and get-rich-quick dreamer whose unstable and carceral childhood made him restless and contributed to a number of broken marriages and strained relationships, although he and Mom were reconciled when he died from the silicosis he’d acquired from his years in uranium mining in New Mexico. Mom’s paternal line has claimed Chickasaw ancestry from Pauls Valley, Indian Territory (pre-Oklahoma), though all records make clear that they were white settlers trying to steal Chickasaw land through false claims to Chickasaw heritage. (I write about this history in my essay, “Narrated Nationhood and Imagined Belonging: Fanciful Family Stories and Kinship Legacies of Allotment” in my co-edited collection Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations Under Settler Siege). Mom’s own maternal family lines are Smalls (primarily English) and Schryvers (a Jewish line that is likely German but possibly Dutch), but we’re still learning more about them, as there’s far less known about my mom’s kin than my dad’s.

Through dad’s line I’m an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation, two generations removed from Oklahoma. My paternal grandmother, Pearl Spears, was raised on her father Amos’s homestead allotment just outside of Vera, Oklahoma, north of Tulsa. Amos sold both his allotments by 1920 and moved the family to eastern Colorado in time to be listed on that year’s US Census, and there Pearl met my grandfather Jesse Jake Justice. (More in the HOME FIRES section.)

After Dad’s birth in Colorado Springs, he grew up on the prairie of eastern Colorado, in and around the town of Ordway, where his dad Jake was police chief for a number of years. I was born just down the road in Rocky Ford (the “Cantaloupe Capital of the World”!), and we lived in Olney Springs before moving to Mom’s hometown when I was three. That’s where I grew up and call my “heart-home.” Mom was a restaurant owner, caterer, mayor of Victor, plant lab superintendent of one of the local mining companies, tour guide operator, and local author; she passed away in November 2021. Dad, who died in April 2019, was a heavy-equipment operator for many years, ran the hoist at the Ajax Mine, worked as a hunting guide and outfitter, and for over twenty years the summer caretaker for a fishing club at Victor’s Bison Reservoir.

I attended Cripple Creek-Victor RE-1 from Kindergarten through graduation (with one year of home schooling in between), and then in 1993 went to the University of Northern Colorado for my undergraduate degree–made possible by a number of local and university scholarships, for which I remain very grateful. I started my degree as a double major in visual arts and theatre, but ended up graduating with an English major and history minor. In 1997 I moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, for my MA in English (Native lit), and stayed for four more years to complete my Ph.D., which focused on Native American literature with a sub-specialty in Native history. I moved to Toronto in 2002 to take up a position in Aboriginal literature in the English Department (and affiliation in the Aboriginal Studies Program) at the University of Toronto, where I worked with amazing and much-respected students, colleagues, and community members for a decade.

My husband Kent and I met in 2005 and were married in 2008 at our home on the shores of Georgian Bay near Penetanguishene, Ontario. In 2009 I took Canadian citizenship. In 2012 I accepted a position in the First Nations Studies Program (now First Nations and Indigenous Studies, in the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies) at the University of British Columbia, with a cross-appointment in English, and we made the cross-continental move to the West Coast and lived on unceded Musqueam territory at UBC for four years. We now live with our feral forest Frenchies in shíshálh swiya, the traditional territories of the shíshálh people, near the ocean but once again with mountains on my horizon.