#native families had a lot of kids because of high infant mortality rates on reservations and federal land

[tired-fandom-ndn]

Thinking about (my version of) Alastor's mother, one of the more than a dozen children of a freed slave and a Choctaw woman, growing up in the miserable conditions of the Indian Territory where her people were forced to, eventually growing up and escaping south in a way that felt like returning home despite the dangers. Trying to pass on the traditions that her own parents taught her to her son while also being intimately aware that the only way he could survive was by hiding everything that made their family what it was.