Mohawk feels like a weapon coming from Steve’s lips—not because he’s necessarily wielding it that way but because history is. Here was the language I had lost, the language my parents and aunts and half my grandparents had lost, which was so different from the English that’d been forced on us that I secretly worried my tongue would never be able to make those sounds. And here was Steve, rattling it off easily, as if it weren’t an endangered language, my endangered language; as if those words, which held my culture, were simply . . . words to him.
