by Karleigh Webb Speech presented at 4-H

I was fifteen when I found out that I have Indigenous blood. It’s funny, I know. When I explain this to people, the number 1 question I’m asked is “How did you not notice?”. Fifteen years – That’s roughly 5000 days of looking in the mirror and I never once noticed that I happened to be a different ethnicity than my two sisters.

During the majority of my teen years, I dealt with mental health difficulties with no apparent fixtures until I started to reconnect with my culture and identity. My reconnection journey has been filled with ups and downs over the last three years:

For a while, I struggled with self image- my skin wasn’t dark enough and my hair was too light, too short. In the summer, I would lay out under the sun for hours smelling like high-end tanning products and I spent months obsessing over hair care products that claimed to promote growth.

I’m convinced they’re hoaxes.

However, on the other hand, two insecurities that I quickly grew out of were my defined nose and dark, nearly black eyes. In the beginning, these features were my only condolences of my ...