For the first several years of her life, Hayes lived with her grandmother in the Juneau Indian Village while her mother was in and out of hospitals for tuberculosis.

As State Writer Laureate, from 2016 to 2018, Hayes visited many small communities of Alaska, like Seward and Seldovia, where she held two-day creative writing workshops.

[8] Blonde Indian, a memoir of Hayes's childhood in Southeast Alaska, is written with traditional Tlingit stories, fictional characters, and historical moments.

The fictional tale of "Tom" coincides with an experience similar to Hayes, an Alaska Native child who is separated from their traditional lifestyle and heritage.

Thematically, the book centers around redefining the meaning of "treasure," a word that Hayes explained as the time we’ve spent on the earth, rather than any material commodity.