★★★★★ (5/5) — Emotionally resonant, politically sharp, and structurally ambitious.

The Band Office Door

On a northern river where fog braids the water, a grandmother and her two grown grandchildren stop waiting on the band office and build what every memo says can't exist: a youth home on their own land. When the court orders a "placement," they have forty-eight hours to turn an empty bunkhouse into River House—stringing a shoreline rope, ringing kids in for supper, and filing a notice under UNDRIP while the photocopier still smells warm.

Opposition gathers: audits that read like threats, a notice to vacate, winter without a furnace. With an elder's Feast Law in one hand and a caseworker's affidavit in the other, the community forces policy to meet kin—FOI emails pull the curtain on "optics," and a night-water rescue makes the law human or not at all.

From pop-up cots in a parking lot to a land-transfer ceremony at the slough, The Band Office Door is a modern Battle Hill story told in living documents—minute-book pages, night-watch logs, and the pencil letters of an elder who knows which promises last. It's about sovereignty made of breakfasts and budgets, the youth who choose to stay, and a door that opens because someone inside is watching.

We do not leave our kids alone.