As the world begins to fall apart due to an ongoing but unexplained catastrophe, a woman writes a diary addressed to her unborn child: “There have always been letters and diaries written in times of tumult and discovered later, and my thought is that I could be writing one of those” (7). She introduces herself as Cedar Hawk Songmaker, though this is the “white name” (7) given by her adoptive parents. Her birth name, given by her Ojibwe parents, is Mary Potts. At the age of 26, she is four months pregnant and has no health insurance. Ten years earlier, she aborted a pregnancy after two months.

She describes her adoptive parents as happily married vegans who love her unconditionally, but she doesn’t understand why she was adopted; as she’s a person of Native American descent, adoption by white parents shouldn’t have been legal. As caring as her adoptive parents have been, Cedar describes how they fetishized her Native identity.

In the past, when she met other Native American people, she realized that she had little in common with them beyond genetics. This realization prompted her to reflect on her relationship with her biological parents, the Pottses. She realizes that she is angry, but she has hidden this anger from everyone and struggles to explain her frustration with the mundane, dull reality of the Pottses, whom she feels have robbed her of the romantic parents she imagined for herself.