She learned hockey the way kids in the Upper Peninsula learn everything, informally, outdoors, through repetition that doesn't feel like work. Her father built a backyard rink every winter, and she was out there daily playing shinny, the game that predates organized hockey, woven into Ojibwe life in northern Michigan and Ontario. When girls' teams didn't exist locally she made the Sault Area High School boys' varsity team as a freshman, the only girl, the only freshman on the squad, and stayed all four years. A signed Team USA jersey from players she admired as a girl reoriented everything, turning her attention from the NHL to what women's hockey could actually offer her. She went to Wisconsin, won a national championship, and was named USA Hockey's Women's Player of the Year in 2020.

At the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics she became the first Indigenous woman ever named to the United States women's hockey team, coming home with a silver medal. The following year she won gold at the IIHF Women's World Championship. In 2026 she helped deliver the Montreal Victoire their first Walter Cup, tying for the playoff lead with four goals and eight points and scoring twice in the championship-clinching game. She built a game on shinny and stubbornness. Then she carried a community into a building where it had never been before.