Nika Bartoo-Smith
Underscore Native News + ICT
Building off of a world created in his debut novel, “X-Indian Chronicles: The Book of Mausape,” Thomas Yeahpau drew from the experience of his own healing journey with the release of “Native Love: An X-Indian Chronicle” this January.
It tells a love story that blurs the lines between reality and myth.
The main character, Brando, is a narcissist caught in a love triangle between Two-Rivers and Morning-Dew. In a parallel reality, Grandpa Snake and Grandma Spider teach about love through their own attempts to rekindle their relationship.
“I’m about spreading good medicine, good stories, especially love and the understanding of love,” Yeahpau said. He explained that the main character doesn’t know what a healthy relationship looks like, something Yeahpau himself also had to work through.
Yeahpau says he wrote the book to be a uniquely real Native American love story.
Yeahpau is from the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma on his dad’s side and the Apache Tribe of Oklahoma on his mom’s side. Yeahpau is an author, filmmaker and music producer. He was part of the ABC/Disney Writing Fellowship in 2006. In November 2025, Yeahpau premiered his latest short film, “Totem,” at the 19th annual LA Skins Fest.
With the release of “Native Love: An X-Indian Chronicle,” Yeahpau also produced a soundtrack, featuring a song for every chapter in the novel. The soundtrack blends together vocals, powwow drums, hip-hop and R&B, incorporating samples from Native State of Mind, created by PJ Vegas and Tippie.
Yeahpau released an animated trailer for “Native Love: An X-Indian Chronicle” as well, featuring music from the soundtrack. In the future, Yeahpau hopes the book will be picked up and adapted into a TV series.
Yeahpau joined Underscore Native News + ICT via Zoom from his home in Oregon.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Underscore Native News + ICT: How would you describe “Native Love” to someone who walked into a bookstore and picked it up off the shelf?
Thomas Yeahpau: “Native Love,” the best way to describe it is good medicine. It’s really good medicine, especially, I think, for women. I think you can read it and hopefully learn from it, because there’s lots of stuff we don’t talk about in Native culture.
The romance Harlequin novels, they don’t get it right with Native love. I know [this story] is not everyone’s experience. But I lived deep in Indian territory with a bunch of tribes, and those stories in my book are normal in my area. I also wanted to include mythology characters in there.
UNN + ICT: What was the inspiration behind this story?
TY: It’s me just watching my mom and dad. When they were together growing up they would always read all those Harlequin romance novels. And I would look at them, and I remember reading some of them, thinking, “Man, this is lame. I could do better.” Those stories, they’re always the same thing.
“Native Love” was part of the first book I wrote, [X-Indian Chronicles: The Book of Mausape], but they chopped it in half. With “Native Love,” I actually took some stories out and added some in, and I made it more about love. It’s really supposed to be about the character Brando, because in the first book, all three of his friends die, but he’s the only one that lives. The second book was always meant to show how he dies, basically. The first book is about them reaching manhood, about being a man and everything. So I was like, you know, part of being a man is your love life. And I want to show how complicated it was.
At the same time, my daughter was entering teenage years, and I wanted to kind of explain to her that love could go bad. You have to watch out for certain kinds of guys, like the main character. It’s like a warning to people out there for these kinds of guys: they will never let go of the past, and they’ll always go back to the past, and that’s their fault.
UNN + ICT: You use the term “X-Indian” a lot in the book, it’s even in the title. I had never heard that before. What does it mean?
TY: So part of the title was, I almost considered rated x, because there’s some sexual scenarios, and they’re pretty explicit. And also I wanted to be like X, like ex. We’re really not Indians. These are a race in between two races. And then also Generation X. So the X has three different meanings: x as in rated x, and ex-Indian, and Generation X.
UNN+ ICT: The book weaves together two stories, one set in recent times and the other centering relatives from Native stories. Can you talk about why you did this and what you hope people will take away from it?
TY: I like our Native American stories. And I thought it’d be the perfect tool for me to teach love lessons. I think I get the first marriage in there, the first divorce, just explaining things about love that a teenage girl wouldn’t know, a teenage boy wouldn’t know.
And they can see rainbows and everything at the beginning, and happiness and then just somehow disappear. No one talks about that when you’re in your younger years, dating and all that, that you’re dealing with people with trauma and that you’re gonna have to deal with that if you fall in love with them and continue the relationship with them.
Same with the mythical creatures. I like the idea of playing with them and their love story as well. I really liked playing with the dear lady’s love story. That’s one I’ve always wanted to write.
UNN + ICT: Your main character, Brando, is a narcissist and a player. Basically, he’s got lots of issues when it comes to his romantic relationships. What should a reader know about his character and his journey throughout the novel, without any spoilers?
TY: That’s a problem a lot of men face, you look more backwards than forward. The other thing I didn’t want to do was make excuses for narcissists. He wasn’t born that way, something happened to him to make him that way. And I hinted throughout the book, but I don’t ever tell what it was. It’s just something really bad happened to him that really messed him up.
And it happens to a lot of Native brothers that I know. And we all have something dark that’s pushing us, especially those of us that treat women bad. It took me a while to get the healing that I needed and find out what it was that was pushing me to do those bad things and bad behavior.
So I want people to understand that this guy, he’s got an ego, he’s flawed, and just doing the best in the world that he was given. And it’s bad that he can’t appreciate everything, like a lot of other men can’t. Women are a great blessing in our lives. Like my wife right now, I adore her and put her on a pedestal. Back in my 20s though, I didn’t know I needed healing.
Hopefully people can get that from Brando’s character, that he’s just someone who needs to heal. I was trying to recommend every Native woman with a Native man, take them to therapy. Get that stuff out and open early. Don’t wait ‘til later on, when you got kids and it’s too late because he’s already stuck in his ways with you. Same with women with trauma too, they need to get some healing.
UNN + ICT: If you’re comfortable, will you expand a little bit about how this book and your writing has been part of that healing journey for yourself?
TY: I originally wrote “Native Love” too for my daughter, because she was in her teenage years and I wanted to explain to her and say, “Hey, I used to be a bad guy. This is how I used to treat women, but I found healing.”
I chose to call it “Native Love” because that’s a bold title and it’s really my journey and understanding of love enough to where I want to try to help other people understand what I’ve learned. Things that I didn’t know in my 20s, behaviors that I was showing that I didn’t know were part of something else. Back in those days, I thought I was a cool guy, and I wasn’t. It really feels uplifting to even get it out there and get it off my chest, because it’s been something I’ve been holding on to for years. I hope this heals people like it healed me. Or at least, it’s good medicine.
UNN + ICT: This novel and its release is pretty unique. What was the process and inspiration behind some of the multimedia aspects, namely the animated trailer and soundtrack that accompany the book?
TY: Every story I write, most of them, I will sit down and write a song to go with it. And I can make music really fast, so I will make a song. And I had all these songs that I was writing to, and I was like, “Man, these are some really good songs. I wish I could get them out in the world some way.”
Originally, there were no lyrics on them, just instrumentals. But I had some lyric ideas for some of them, and then I came across a sound pack that PJ Vegas and Tippie came out with, a bunch of Native sounds and it was just so perfect. So I started incorporating all their sounds into the songs, and then I was like, “You know what? Well, I guess I will have to jump on a mic and feel this.”
Once that was done, I’m a really visual person, I really want to do something cool with it. And I got this crazy idea where I do animation, but in beads.
UNN + ICT: What do you hope readers will take away from this book?
TY: Hope. There’s a brighter light at the end of the tunnel. Go through the bright light and let go of the past. Both of [the main characters] should have done it. The woman does, and she moves on to a better life. The man doesn’t and he doesn’t move on to a better life.
It was really about hope, especially to women. I wanted to put in there that you don’t have to stick around this guy just because of a kid. Stop wasting your time trying to heal this person or trust this person.
I want people to know that sometimes we’re in bad relationships because we’re holding on to someone we shouldn’t be holding on to. We need to let go of things. Creator does have other people out there better for us. I know that it’s hard to get out of some relationships and hard to lose feelings for somebody. But ultimately, some relationships are better not being in. Some people, like a lot of times I’ve seen in my life, are holding each other back by being together. That’s kind of what I learned to portray at the end of this. They were kind of holding each other back from better lives.
This story is co-published by Underscore Native News and ICT, a news partnership that covers Indigenous communities in the Pacific Northwest.