November is Native American Heritage Month, a time to honor diverse stories, vibrant traditions,

and important contributions of Indigenous people, both historically and today.

In an honor of Native American Heritage Month, we are sharing a side-door story from the vault,

about the colonial roots of a phenomenon that affects many Native and Indigenous nations today.

I hope you'll listen and share.

This is Side Door, a podcast from the Smithsonian with support from PRX. I'm Lizzie Peabody.

Taylor Irvine started hunting with her dad when she was just four or five years old.

And when she shot her first deer, she took a bite of the liver. And what does it taste like?

Metallic. What a bloody nose. It kind of tastes like the back of your throat when you're just like,

oh, and it's not like a huge bite. It's just a little nipple.

And it's a symbolic thing. It's important in our culture. It's what we've done and what we always do.

The woods and prairies where Taylor grew up hunting are in Montana, on the flathead Indian

reservation, Indigenous homelands of the confederated Salish and Kutney tribes. So you say

C-S-K-T for short? Yeah, because that's a mouthful.

Taylor is a member of C-S-K-T and hunting was a big part of her family life growing up.

Me and my whole family, we'd go out hunting together and I think it's less of

like when I think of hunting, I don't think of the actual like shooting an animal part.

It's more of the car rides and hanging out and growing up, you know, we always had

freezers full of me and it wasn't like hunting is this extra curricular activity. It's just part

of our family dynamic. Taylor's father and grandfather, Sela, in the Salish language,

made their living in the woods. That's where Taylor and her brother learned the tribe's creation

stories as they gathered medicinal roots and berries. Growing up that way, with just your dad and

...