“We fight like cats and dogs,” he says, grinning. “And I love her to death.”

Cemetery notwithstanding, love and death linger in the air. The two have arrived in Asheville between ceremonies and conferences and on the heels of a visit with Teyana’s dad—perhaps her last opportunity to do so. Just as with Donn, the heart haunts again: last spring, Teyana’s dad was diagnosed with arteriosclerosis. I ask how he’s doing.

“Oh, beautiful,” she tells me. She then goes into detail about his serious cardiac trouble—the 95% blockage in his carotid artery, the bypass surgery looming on the horizon. And yet there’s not a shred of sarcasm here. For Teyana, both things can be true at once: Dad can be on death’s door, Dad can be doing beautifully. These are the bifocals through which she and Norm view the world— soaked in blood and sundered hearts, sculpted in sickness, beating with hope. “Heartbreakingly beautiful,” as Norm likes to say.

Hope is what I ask about last. These days it can be a fickle thing. The two note recent progress: Justin Trudeau’s 2019 acknowledgment of Canada’s genocide against its Indigenous, the appointment of Deb Haaland as the first Native American cabinet member in U.S. history, meteoric rises in Indian representation in the media. Most notably, 2022’s reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act addresses the Oliphant loophole, empowering tribes to bring charges against non-Indian offenders. There has even been a win in the Millete case. In October of 2021, nine months after she disappeared, Maya’s husband Larry Millete was arrested and awaits an August trial for murder, all without the smoking gun of a body. All of this, Teyana and Norm believe, is the direct product of prayer. “You think you're going to solve this?” Teyana says, incredulous of human hubris. “The prayer moves the action.” If anything, this is their refrain, a catchphrase of sorts. I hear them echo it, time and again, steady as a pulse.

Regarding hope, Teyana’s response is characteristically wide-ranging. She is connecting the dots in a sweeping, centuries-long conspiracy against her people, against people in general—she talks about the flood of Trump-era mining permits that have expanded the “itinerant man camps” abutting reservation land and threatening the safety of Indigenous women and girls, about pipelines and GMOs and chemicals in the water, about the sores her dogs get on their feet after it rains, about the interconnectedness and innate being of all things—when she stops mid-sentence.

“Wow,” she says. “Wow, wow.” She springs from the bench, stretching her arms toward the night. “The moon is coming out from behind the cloud and just shined the brightest light. Did you see that?! Oh my gosh, it’s like almost full!” She is awestruck, her inhibition banished. She is earnestly, entirely taken with the moonlight.

“Hope, you say—do we have hope?” She gestures to the land: the white pines whispering in the breeze, the moon flooding down cold silver on the buried dead—all of them named, all of them accounted for. “Like right now, just the sky and the moon and... yeah, how could we not have hope?”