The Magical Unicorn Teaching Us What the Government Won't

Some eras pick fights with their own memory. Ours? It's throwing haymakers like it's going toe-to-toe with boxing champ Terence Crawford. We're watching a federal government fiddle with the childhood vaccine schedule while escorting scientists out the door, all with the same callousness it brings to history. We're in a time when even the photograph of a formerly enslaved man's scourged back can be deemed too offensive for a national park. 

In times like these, truth craves new avenues. And sometimes, it can come from unlikely places — like a children's coloring book about an Indigenous unicorn named Millie, clip-clopping through clinic hallways like she owns the place and tossing joy around like parade candy. She's there to remind kids, and the adults who've doomscrolled themselves into high anxiety, that science belongs to everyone. 

Magical Millie's Courageous Journey was conceived at the Seattle Indian Health Board by Executive Vice President Abigail Echo-Hawk and youth intern G'Centae Rodriguez, and illustrated by Megan McDermott. The story presents a bright, playful argument that insists on a truth too often denied: Native children deserve to be the heroes in their own story of health. The book is a reminder that joy is not frivolous but essential, and that laughter can walk hand in hand with the most urgent, life-preserving knowledge. It's a story declaring that public health is not something handed down from faceless institutions, but a practice rooted in community, memory, and care.

The collaboration is the book's first lesson. Echo-Hawk and Rodriguez didn't just make a children's story. They staged a dialogue between generations. Over four months of sketches, rewrites, and late-night debates about tone, scientific enough to hold water and childlike enough to sparkle, they carved out a voice that belongs to the kids it serves. "There were some language pieces in here where I wanted it to be more, like, 'sciency,' and [Rodriguez] made it like a kid would talk," Echo-Hawk said. 

The youth co-author isn't just window dressing here. He's the main event. Millie feels real to the children who meet her because Rodriguez's hand is literally on the page. He knew which jokes would land (the "UWA," aka the Unicorn Wrestling Association, still cracks him up), which names would sing, which cadences could hold 25 kids in place as he and Echo-Hawk traded pages like elders spinning a winter tale. "I didn't think it was gonna be like this," Rodriguez told me of the launch this summer, where a line of children waited for his autograph as if he were the headliner at Climate Pledge Arena. "Signing the books and giving them to kids, just watching their faces light up … that was warming." That feeling is the point: authority that doesn't tower over its audience but meets them at eye level.

We are not simply in a public health crisis; we are in a crisis of trust. When national guidance lurches according to ideology and appointments to high-ranking positions in public health go to the loudest skeptic, families in historically marginalized communities do what they have always done: They turn toward one another. In the West, a coalition of states turned toward the evidence and issued their own vaccine recommendations rather than cede their communities to confusion. In Seattle, Echo-Hawk and Rodriguez turned toward their clinic, and to the children who color in its waiting rooms, and questioned how to meet them where they are. That inquiry is the opposite of paternalism. It begins with a premise both radical and obvious: Our kids aren't problems to be managed, they're people to be spoken with. Ancestral knowledge and modern science do not sit on opposite sides of some imagined divide, but rather constitute a lineage of wisdom.

The book's message is plain and necessary: Vaccines protect you and your relatives, and caring for your community is a Native value as old as breath. But Millie does something subtler, too. On every page, she refuses the scarcity of representation. She says our children should not have to strain to find themselves in the margins of a pamphlet whose stock images were swapped last-minute for "diversity." She says the medical literature that sits in pediatric exam rooms has a responsibility to be culturally true, not just cosmetically inclusive. Echo-Hawk puts it this way: "We just can't find information to give our kids that is centered around them in our culture and community. … I don't want them to think that's the best they can get."

The book delivers a message that feels radical only because of the time and place in which it appears. We are living through an era when the battle is not merely over what counts as knowledge, but over who is permitted the dignity of self-knowledge. National leaders bleach the record until history reads like myth, leaving the children's aisle as one of the last spaces where truth can be smuggled in. In Millie's world, the existence of a queer pony, without labels, without apology, is not some culture-war provocation. It is a child-sized declaration of belonging: that our kids inhabit many truths at once, and they deserve stories spacious enough to contain them all.

It matters, too, that the book has had a national impact. It's not gathering dust in some conference binder, or locked away in a grant report written for people who will never read it. Instead, it's living in more than 70 Native-serving clinics, urban and rural, where the stakes are not abstract. Declines in routine immunizations since the pandemic, fueled by misinformation and access barriers, have already brought back diseases we thought we'd buried. To answer that with a lecture would be to miss the point. To answer it with Millie, with joy, with humor, and with a cast of characters who are relatable, reminds us that public health isn't about scolding people for getting sick. It's about giving them a story big enough to heal in.

At the launch, there were stuffed unicorns in "I got vaccinated" shirts. There were clinic hallways full of giggles and frosting. And as of this month, there was a billboard on Yesler Way, insisting in 20 feet of color what textbooks sometimes whisper: Native children are not relics; they are readers and scientists and comedians and wrestlers of unicorns and of history. "I'm tired of people only talking about how we die," Echo-Hawk said. "We should talk about how we thrive."

Thriving requires infrastructure. Not only the vaccination schedules and insurance codes that shape who gets what, but the cultural architecture that tells a child: You belong to a people who make, who learn, who take care. When those structures are attacked, when an advisory committee is gutted or a museum wall is stripped, art and story must build scaffolds elsewhere. That is what makes collaboration sacred here. Echo-Hawk brought decades of public health leadership and the insistence that decolonizing data is not a metaphor. Rodriguez brought taste, timing, and a teenager's unsentimental eye. "Find someone that knows," he told peers who want to create but don't know where to start. "Put your ideas on a paper and don't give up on it."

A final truth about Millie: She's contagious in the best sense. If you spend time with the book, you start to imagine sequels and spin-offs, clinic posters and Croc charms, TikToks and short films, each a small republic of belonging. You start to imagine young adults writing their own medical comics, or elders recording vaccine stories in their first languages, and you realize that public health is not a cold apparatus but a warm chorus.

In the long argument between erasure and remembrance, this little coloring book takes its side. It says to Native kids: You are the protagonist of your own care. It says to a shaken public that science can wear a smile. And it says to the rest of us, in a voice equal parts auntie and philosopher: Build what you need, with the people who need it, until the country catches up. Or, as Echo-Hawk told me, "We are not afraid of the current environment. We're going to do what's right for our people,and we're going to do it with culture and community at the center."

If power seeks to narrow who is allowed to know themselves, Millie widens the frame. She reminds us that culture is not an accessory to health but its condition, that truth will find a way to circulate even when institutions falter, and that every child deserves a future built not on scarcity but on care. And it leaves us with a demand that is also a promise: to build worlds where our youth are not footnotes, but authors.

Marcus Harrison Green is the South Seattle Emerald's editor-at-large.