Carrying the Stories Home: Becoming a First-Time Author By Sierra Biidaaban Nadeau, Anishinaabe storyteller 

There is a strange loneliness that comes with writing a first book. Before there are readers, before there are reviews, before anyone knows the story exists, it belongs only to the writer. It lives in the quiet hours before sunrise, in the glow of a computer screen long after midnight, and in the constant tug-of-war between confidence and doubt. 

My debut book, What the Ancestors Say: One Journalist’s Intimate Investigation into Indian Boarding Schools (Sept. 29, 2026) was born in those hours. 

People often imagine writing as moments of inspiration, a perfect sentence arriving like lightning, words speaking on their own, chapters effortlessly unfolding. There were moments like that, but they were rare. More often, the process looked like months spent in darkness, buried beneath stacks of historical records, government documents, oral histories, and archival material. Every discovery seemed to lead to ten more questions. I disappeared into libraries, digital paperwork, and footnotes, following threads of history that stretched farther than I ever expected. 

Some days, I emerged feeling like I had uncovered something extraordinary. Other days, I walked away carrying the unbearable weight of what I had learned. 

Writing Indigenous stories comes with a particular responsibility. Our histories have so often been told by people looking in from the outside, filtered through institutions that misunderstood us or intentionally distorted us. I knew I wanted this story to honor my ancestors and community rather than exploit them, but that conviction did not erase the questions that lingered every day. 

Was I the right person to tell this story? 

It is a question I carried from the first chapter to the last. 

I wasn’t asking whether I cared enough. I cared too much. That was the problem. Every page felt like a promise to the people who came before me. Every sentence carried the fear of getting something wrong. I worried about whether I had earned the right to write it, whether I possessed enough knowledge, enough wisdom, enough skill. 

Imposter syndrome became an unwelcome writing partner. 

There were mornings when I opened my manuscript only to convince myself I wasn’t an author at all. I was simply pretending to be one. 

The irony wasn’t lost on me. My entire career had unfolded almost by accident.

I didn’t grow up believing I would become a journalist. I certainly never imagined I would someday call myself an author. Journalism found me before I found it. What began as an unexpected opportunity became a profession built on curiosity, accountability, and listening. I learned how to ask difficult questions and how to sit patiently while people entrusted me with their stories. Eventually, my work evolved into becoming a reporting specialist, continuing to document Indigenous communities and histories that too often remain overlooked. 

Somewhere along that journey, another door quietly opened. Without realizing it, journalism had been teaching me how to write What the Ancestors Say all along. 

It taught me to chase evidence instead of assumptions. It taught me to verify memory with records while never forgetting that archives themselves are incomplete. It taught me that history is rarely clean and that the most meaningful stories often live in the uncomfortable spaces between certainty and silence. 

Still, writing a book demanded something journalism never had. It demanded vulnerability. 

Facts could only carry me so far. Eventually, I had to trust my imagination, my instincts, and my voice. That was far more frightening than any interview I had ever conducted. 

At the same time, I was working as a full-time reporting journalist, covering stories that demanded their own kind of emotional labor. The stories meant sitting with facts that are often painful, complicated, and deeply personal. There’s a responsibility as a reporter to not just get them right, but to handle the people’s stories with care, knowing that behind every headline was a person, a family, a community. By the end of the workday, I was exhausted from the reporting, but demanded myself to switch gears to write my book. Sometimes I became increasingly unsure where one ended, and the other began. Still, I kept returning to that desk, even when doubt sat beside me for hours 

Most days were spent hunched over in my home office, shoulders tight, eyes aching from staring at the same paragraphs for hours. Entire afternoons disappeared while I wrestled with a single scene or searched for one sentence that felt honest enough to survive another draft. Coffee cups accumulated beside my keyboard. Sticky notes covered my desk. The seasons changed outside my window while I remained in the same chair, chasing words that refused to cooperate. 

Writing asks your body to remain still while your mind travels everywhere. By the end of many days, both were completely spent. Yet there was another side to the process that made every difficult day worth returning to. There is an indescribable thrill that comes when a story suddenly begins to breathe. 

Ideas that once existed only as rough notes start speaking in voices that surprise you. Scenes that felt impossible suddenly unfold with startling clarity. Pieces that had lived separately in your

mind begin fitting together until the entire manuscript possesses a rhythm of its own. It is as though the story decides it is finally ready to be told. 

Those moments kept me going. 

Every completed chapter felt less like finishing a task and more like uncovering something that had been waiting patiently beneath the surface. The words no longer belonged only to me. They belonged to the generations that inspired them, to the histories that demanded remembering, and to the readers I hoped might recognize pieces of themselves within them. 

Looking back now, I realize the writing process changed me as much as it changed the manuscript. 

It forced me to confront my own insecurities, wrestle with perfectionism, and accept that no book is written without uncertainty. I stopped waiting to feel qualified enough to call myself a writer because qualification didn’t arrive before the work. It emerged through the work itself. 

Perhaps that is the lesson I will carry long after this debut book finds its place in the world. 

Being an author was never about feeling fearless. It was about continuing despite the fear. It was about showing up every day, opening the document, and trusting that another sentence would come. Then another. Then another. 

Eventually, those sentences became chapters. Those chapters became What the Ancestors Say. 

And somewhere between the archives, the self-doubt, the exhaustion, and the quiet victories of finding exactly the right words, I realized something I hadn’t expected. 

I hadn’t simply written a book. The book had written a new version of me. 

—

Sierra Biidaaban Nadeau is an award-winning Odawa Anishinaabe storyteller from Traverse City, Michigan. In 2020, she started a fellowship with the Mishigamiing Journalism Project, a partnership between the Traverse City Record-Eagle and Indigenizing the News. In 2021, she received a fellowship with Report for America and became the Record-Eagle‘s first full-time Native American reporter and the state’s only full-time Indigenous affairs reporter. She currently works as the reporting specialist for Miigwech, Inc., and also works as a freelance writer and keynote speaker. What the Ancestors Say (Broadleaf, 2026) is her debut book.

WHAT THE ANCESTORS SAY

An Indigenous journalist’s reporting on her state’s Indian boarding schools becomes a sweeping journey through her family’s history, the memories of survivors, and Native strategies of survival and resilience.

Reporting for her local newspaper, Odawa Anishinaabe journalist Sierra BiidaabanNadeau stumbles onto a family’s–and a nation’s–buried stories. In enrollment records of Michigan boarding schools, she finds the names of ten of her ancestors thrown into the maw of American settler colonialism: Her great-grandfather and his siblings, along with generations before them, were forced to attend Indian boarding schools.

More than five hundred Indian residential schools operated in the US and at times enrolled more than 80 percent of Native children. The facilities, often run by churches, aimed to erase Indigenous life, one child at a time. Physical and sexual abuse was rampant. Young children were stripped of their homes, cultures, languages, hair, and dress.

Sifting through archives and the records of five Michigan schools whose names belie what happened there–Mt. Pleasant, Holy Childhood–Nadeau begins publishing articles. And the flood of emails and phone calls from Anishinaabek begins. Elders want to tell her their stories, so she drives around the state–to school gymnasiums and community centers and homes–and listens. Her uncle Tom, son of a survivor, becomes a gentle guide into the past they are discovering together. Nadeau writes it all down, not to collect traumas but to uncover deeper seams of resistance.

In this personal and communal odyssey through ancestral legacies, intergenerational trauma, and Native resistance and resilience, she calls us to attend to the truths of the past. “I am the sentence my ancestors whispered through wind, through prayers, through dreams,” Nadeau writes. Now, in a powerful act of reclamation, she brings forward stories of people the government tried–and failed–to break.

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Category: On Writing