Autonomy is not some individual dream—it's survival. When you depend on someone else's system, someone else's rules, someone else's permission to exist on your own land, you learn real quick what autonomy actually means. The reservation was designed so we couldn't be autonomous, so we'd need the BIA for everything, and a hundred and fifty years later that dependency is still the shape of the problem. Real autonomy means your kids stay with your family, your language stays alive because you speak it, your water stays clean because you protect it—not because you asked nicely. I've watched communities that fought for actual control over their own programs, their own courts, their own schools—they heal different. That's not ideology. That's what I see.
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