My name is Angela. I’m honestly not really sure where my journey started.

I grew up as an American. I grew up on a reservation, probably not something that a lot of you are familiar with, but we were very spiritual.

So my grandparents were always talking to me about the creator and telling me stories. That’s what I grew up hearing.

When I was 10 years old, all of us native American children, got shipped out to a Catholic boarding school because they thought that that would make us more American, I guess.

So I spent two years in a Catholic boarding school and none of it made any sense, and the only thing that I really learned after the two years was that I’m definitely not Catholic!

As I got older, people started asking me:

“What is your religion?”

And I was like:

“I don’t really know”.

We’re spiritual but we don’t have name for it. It’s just a way of life. You spend your whole day in prayer, and the elders are always telling us that we’re supposed to walk in prayer. Every step is supposed to be a prayer. And as long as you’re doing that, then you’re living life the way that you should. But we didn’t have name for it!

It made it really confusing when people would ask: “What is your religion?”

Studying Everything

So I started looking into other religions. I started studying everything. Any religion that I could get information about, I was like ‘what is this?’

And eventually, I would come to a point with all of them that I was like: ‘This just doesn’t make sense.’

No matter how many times a day I pray, I’m never going to be a god, it’s not happening!

So time kept going on, and after a while, I actually met a Muslim and we started talking. And I was like: “Wow! You do that really? So do I.”

It just started getting to a point where I maybe I need to read more about this. So I went online and I started reading whatever I could and it all just made sense… most of it with stuff I had already heard from my grandparents.

Reading the Quran

So, I kept reading and I went to the grocery store one day where I found a little bin. It was like books that people would drop off and they’d buy the books, and the money would be donated to charity.

So right on the top of the stack, there were all these books about Islam. I was like “cool! This is awesome!”

I bought the whole stack of books and I went home and started reading them. This really makes sense.

So then I decided that I was going to try to read the Quran. I went ahead and started reading it. At first, I felt a little bit weird because of the lot of the stuff that I was reading, and the stuff that I had heard from my grandfather. I found that different.

I kept reading the Quran and I was like: “Wow! I’ve been doing this my whole life and I just never knew it!

So it just got to a point that it just made sense. And here I am.