Over the past twenty years, Indigenous issues have gone mainstream. Land acknowledgments, protest movements, scholarly conversations, the UN themed decade, and the Indigenous Literature category on Lit Hub all speak to that. As someone who comes from the Mari community from the Volga region, I welcome these developments. But I sometimes find myself wondering whether they have made one of the central questions of my own life—what does it actually mean to live as an Indigenous person?—harder to answer. Contemporary conversations on the subject are overrun with opinions about what “authentic” Indigeneity looks like, and what Indigenous people should and shouldn’t do, but the discourse often shies away from the fundamental paradoxes Indigenous people (and young Indigenous people in particular) face. What happens when the desire for cultural preservation, individual freedom, economic sustainability, physical survival, and even love are in tension?…