Name: Coyote Tuqiri
Ethnicity: Native American (Crow)
Gender: female
Age: 20

Coyote grew up on the reservation, one of a big family amid the other Crow there in southern Montana. They're by the book traditionalists and raised the girl the same way. She ran with the usual crowd of kids, tons of siblings and cousins, all poor as dirt but not really knowing it unless they watched television which showed them what they were missing. Life was okay.

Until she ran into a BIA cop in the wrong place at the wrong time. They'd been having a powwow, drinking around a bonfire, drumming, being young and she'd been feeling flirty, toying with maybe going off along the beach with one of the musicians if she was reading the looks he gave her right. But she had to pee and headed out into the scrub.

She hitched down her buckskins (that traditionalist family of hers had taught her how to hunt and skin and sew, among other things) and squatted, pleasantly buzzed on homebrew, the world a little blurry, when two black boots appeared in her vision.

Then sneering lips, hard hands, foul breath, her fingers clawing at skin and the white-red-hot pain of a fist hitting her jaw. Then detachment, like she was watching it all, the huge white man in the BIA uniform rutting at the girl with the silent scream on her face, her virgin's blood sticky on her thighs like warpaint.

He left her there after he came, tossing a five onto her chest. Her hand curled around it then everything was blurry, her friends' faces appearing, the distant, repulsed expression on the boy who'd been flirting. They got her home and nothing happened. That's the way it always was. Nothing happened.

She had a hard time with it, and no amount of tradition was letting it settle. Things grew worse when she came up pregnant and her family wanted her to keep it. She took that traditional knowledge and put it to use, mixing up the right herbs to make herself bleed.

And bleed she did, too much, and even after her family got it under control, lips pressed together with disapproval, it kept up, a bloody trickle with a side of cramps, for weeks and weeks. She'd be in bath and stand to dry herself and watch it trickle out onto her thighs and that image of herself would float across her vision. Warpaint.

She just up and started walking one day, money from the touristy crap they sold on the freeway stuffed in her pocket, and she hasn't looked back. Hasn't look much of anywhere really, except at the sky, or the stars, but mostly into a whiskey bottle.

Now she's in Hathian.