Clipsheet

For most of his childhood, Shaawan Francis Keahna considered himself to be a fundamentally unattractive kid — “too giggly and too gangly and too smart,” as he put it to me recently, “with a face that was really, really adult, despite my youth. My biggest problem, of course, was that I was just plain weird.” Growing up in Hayward, a former logging town on the Namekagon River in northwestern Wisconsin, he was often teased by white classmates for his Native ancestry and for his love of poetry and art. “It became a self-fulfilling thing,” he said. “I internalized it and basically came to see myself exactly the way they saw me.”