To “capture the meaning of group destruction one must begin to decolonize the Eurocentric assumptions of genocide studies”, Andrew Woolford contends (2014, p. 33). Taking up his admonition, Liu's dissertation project reticulates from memorial rides which enact horse-human kinship and nationhood in Oceti Sakowiŋ territory and temporality. Through these circles and ceremonies, Liu enters and centers an explicitly spatial “existence that focuses on ‘being in good relation’” –– a Dakota alternative to what Kim Tallbear (2019) encapsulates as “progressive settler-colonial American Dreaming that is ever co-constituted with deadly hierarchies of life”. Liu attempts to engage diachronic political ecologies of the Northern Plains in the still-expanding colonial archive, with granular attention to reading how bonds of terrestrial kinship are made and maintained through horse, human, and humus interactions. In order to “become”  into revitalizing relation, Liu brings her chosen institutional location at a land-grab institution, her disciplinary formation in American Anthropology, and all her relations to bear – upon this work that commits to solidarity with their struggles for Indigenous self-determination and accountability to their inherent sovereignty, proceeding from Oceti Sakowiŋn “grounded normativity” (Coulthard & Simpson, 2016).