Identity Reclaimed

What happens when the story you were given about who you are turns out to be incomplete?

In Episode 6 of 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project, Paige Williams speaks with filmmaker, writer, actor, producer, and social worker Joseph Grady about sobriety, adoption, identity, cultural reclamation, and the long journey toward belonging.

Joseph was born Blackfeet and adopted as a child into a white Irish Catholic family during an era of Indigenous child removal and assimilation. He grew up loved, but disconnected from the language, family, culture, and community he came from. Decades later, through education, relationships, and the making of his documentary Return to the Blanket, he began filling in the missing pieces of his own story.

Joseph also shares the moment that ended nearly eighteen years of alcoholism, the sense of purpose that followed, and how sobriety changed his relationship to his own life.

One of the most powerful ideas in this conversation is that reclaiming a story does not require rejecting everything that came before it. Joseph describes his journey as an integration of identities rather than a replacement of one with another.

His definition of Narrative Intelligence brings another essential capacity into the inquiry: cultural humility. The willingness to say, “I don’t know,” to remain a student, and to recognize that our own interpretation is never the whole story.

This conversation asks: What happens when we discover that the story we inherited about ourselves was incomplete? And how do we move forward without erasing the complexity of how we got here?

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Music licensed through Soundstripe.

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