The Endurance Trials of Rosalie Fish

ROsalie Fish will book twice again. Her visit to Bishop Blanchett High School took longer than expected. Any minute now, you’re supposed to be hopping on another Zoom with an undergraduate you’re interviewing for a research project on missing and murdered Indigenous women. Vish said yes, as she always says yes to these requests. But the now 30-minute speech spilled over into a long morning trek through a Catholic school’s belated attempts to honor indigenous cultures. As the school’s Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion leads her down the hallways, showing her where the original art is and will soon be on display, Fish lifts her phone between polite glances upwards, trying to hang up. “I don’t even know what I was thinking.”

Earlier that morning in mid-November, a University of Washington runner loomed atop a podium and delivered the narration that made her one of the hottest speakers in Seattle—and made nearly every day a game of Jenga.

It started when she was a senior trackrunner at Muckleshoot Tribal School in 2019. That spring, she raced with a red handprint painted across her face and “MMIW” on her right leg to raise awareness for missing and murdered Aboriginal women. Over the course of several days at the Washington Class 1B Racetrack meet, she captured state titles in three different events. The enduring image of her mid-step, blood-stained, was one of a double champion, on the ring and…