Occupy Seattle rally, indigenous people's
Columbus Day protest (Joe Mabel)
Another holiday has come and gone, still named for Christopher Columbus, and we head toward the next one based on a now almost mythical giving of thanks to Native Americans.
A few assemblies at Occupy locations around the nation acknowledged our First Nations people. We are not much nearer to wiping out the name of a father of ethnocide from the federal holiday schedule. Would that it would be easier than the way we have collectively failed to take responsibility for acknowledging not only the history of our occupation of native lands, the removal of those who lived on it, and the attempted destruction of many indigenous cultures, but also the ongoing depredations in Native American communities caused by the trauma of removal of children to Indian boarding schools, and the rates of rape of Native American and Native Alaskan women.
We all need to deal with a fourth "R", for responsibility.
As long as those people who are the descendants of those who first discovered what is now dubbed the Caribbean and North, South and Central America are victims of greed, crushing poverty and exploitation we will remain at fault—collectively.
Here in the United States, Native peoples are a diminished minority. In many parts of the U.S., they only remain as place names, with no people or communities attached. Solely a whisper of the past with no current corporeal reality.
I live in a town in New York called Saugerties.
The village land of "Saugerties" was obtained from Esopus Indian Kaelcop, chief of the Amorgarickakan Family. Governor Andros purchased the land on April 27, 1677, for the price of a piece of cloth, a blanket, some coarse fiber, a loaf of bread, and a shirt.
So odd these tales of the purchase of what no one owned, but held in trust for the use of both the tribe and their descendants.
Every day, I drive across the Esopus Creek named for those peoples now removed to the Stockbridge-Munsee reservation in Shawano County, Wisconsin.
I am but an hour's drive from Albany, New York, and I think often of the history of my own Mohawk ancestress who was Christianized and removed from her people. Only because of the journal of Jasper Danckaerts, a Dutch traveler, do I know of her tale.
While we were there, a certain Indian woman, or half-breed, that is, from a European and an Indian woman, came with a little boy, her child, who was dumb, or whose tongue had grown fast. It was about four years old; she had heard we were there, and came to ask whether we knew of any advice for her child, or whether we could not do a little something to cure it. We informed her we were not doctors or surgeons, but we gave her our opinion, just as we thought. Sanders told me aside that she was a Christian, that is, had left the Indians, and had been taught by the Christians and baptized; that she had made profession of the reformed religion, and was not of the unjust...She was born of a Christian father and an Indian mother of the Mohawk tribes. Her mother remained in the country, and lived among the Mohawks, and she lived with her, the same as Indians live together. Her mother would never listen to anything about the Christians, or it was against her heart, from an inward, unfounded hate. She lived then with her mother and brothers and sisters; but sometimes she went with her mother among the Christians to trade and make purchases, or the Christians came among them, and thus it was that some Christians took a fancy to the girl, discovering in her more resemblance to the Christians than the Indians, but understand, more like the Dutch, and that she was not so wild as the other children. They therefore wished to take the girl and bring her up, which the mother would not hear to, and as this request was made repeatedly, she said she would rather kill her.
I will never learn the name of her mother.
Her genes were paled over generations in my family, and I have no exposure to Mohawk culture, but I acknowledge her place in my ancestral tree, and in her name and those of the nameless, I invoke what little political power I have to address not just the past but the ugly present. Dear reader, I care less if you have any native ancestry. You do live on robbed, stolen and occupied land.
As a black American, I have a voice, a movement, congressional representation and even now a president who is cast in my skin color. Granted, that voice is often repressed, and I live daily with the affect of systemic racism on my community. We are 12.6 percent of the population as opposed to 0.9 percent for those counted as Native Americans and Native Alaskans reported in the 2010 census. And yes-there are those of us who are "black" who can speak of "red" roots as well. That same census shows 16.3 percent of the population as Latino or Hispanic, and we know that the history of rapine practiced by the Spaniards and Portuguese explorers did not extinguish indigenous DNA.
Taino (Alfredo Vivero)
We know what was wrought by Columbus and his lost but greedy band of India seekers.
We have the words of Bartoleme de Las Casas, in his Brief Account of the Devastation of the Indies in 1542:
The common ways mainly employed by the Spaniards who call themselves Christian and who have gone there to extirpate those pitiful nations and wipe them off the earth is by unjustly waging cruel and bloody wars. Then, when they have slain all those who fought for their lives or to escape the tortures they would have to endure, that is to say, when they have slain all the native rulers and young men (since the Spaniards usually spare only the women and children, who are subjected to the hardest and bitterest servitude ever suffered by man or beast), they enslave any survivors. With these infernal methods of tyranny they debase and weaken countless numbers of those pitiful Indian nations.
Their reason for killing and destroying such an infinite number of souls is that the Christians have an ultimate aim, which is to acquire gold, and to swell themselves with riches in a very brief time and thus rise to a high estate disproportionate to their merits. It should be kept in mind that their insatiable greed and ambition, the greatest ever seen in the world, is the cause of their villainies. And also, those lands are so rich and felicitous, the native peoples so meek and patient, so easy to subject, that our Spaniards have no more consideration for them than beasts. And I say this from my own knowledge of the acts I witnessed. But I should not say "than beasts" for, thanks be to God, they have treated beasts with some respect; I should say instead like excrement on the public squares. And thus they have deprived the Indians of their lives and souls, for the millions I mentioned have died without the Faith and without the benefit of the sacraments. This is a wellknown and proven fact which even the tyrant Governors, themselves killers, know and admit. And never have the Indians in all the Indies committed any act against the Spanish Christians, until those Christians have first and many times committed countless cruel aggressions against them or against neighboring nations. For in the beginning the Indians regarded the Spaniards as angels from Heaven. Only after the Spaniards had used violence against them, killing, robbing, torturing, did the Indians ever rise up against them...On the Island Hispaniola was where the Spaniards first landed, as I have said. Here those Christians perpetrated their first ravages and oppressions against the native peoples. This was the first land in the New World to be destroyed and depopulated by the Christians, and here they began their subjection of the women and children, taking them away from the Indians to use them and ill use them, eating the food they provided with their sweat and toil. The Spaniards did not content themselves with what the Indians gave them of their own free will, according to their ability, which was always too little to satisfy enormous appetites, for a Christian eats and consumes in one day an amount of food that would suffice to feed three houses inhabited by ten Indians for one month. And they committed other acts of force and violence and oppression which made the Indians realize that these men had not come from Heaven. And some of the Indians concealed their foods while others concealed their wives and children and still others fled to the mountains to avoid the terrible transactions of the Christians.
And the Christians attacked them with buffets and beatings, until finally they laid hands on the nobles of the villages. Then they behaved with such temerity and shamelessness that the most powerful ruler of the islands had to see his own wife raped by a Christian officer. From that time onward the Indians began to seek ways to throw the Christians out of their lands. They took up arms, but their weapons were very weak and of little service in offense and still less in defense. (Because of this, the wars of the Indians against each other are little more than games played by children.) And the Christians, with their horses and swords and pikes began to carry out massacres and strange cruelties against them. They attacked the towns and spared neither the children nor the aged nor pregnant women nor women in childbed, not only stabbing them and dismembering them but cutting them to pieces as if dealing with sheep in the slaughter house. They laid bets as to who, with one stroke of the sword, could split a man in two or could cut off his head or spill out his entrails with a single stroke of the pike. They took infants from their mothers' breasts, snatching them by the legs and pitching them headfirst against the crags or snatched them by the arms and threw them into the rivers, roaring with laughter and saying as the babies fell into the water, "Boil there, you offspring of the devil!" Other infants they put to the sword along with their mothers and anyone else who happened to be nearby. They made some low wide gallows on which the hanged victim's feet almost touched the ground, stringing up their victims in lots of thirteen, in memory of Our Redeemer and His twelve Apostles, then set burning wood at their feet and thus burned them alive. To others they attached straw or wrapped their whole bodies in straw and set them afire. With still others, all those they wanted to capture alive, they cut off their hands and hung them round the victim's neck, saying, "Go now, carry the message," meaning, Take the news to the Indians who have fled to the mountains. They usually dealt with the chieftains and nobles in the following way: they made a grid of rods which they placed on forked sticks, then lashed the victims to the grid and lighted a smoldering fire underneath, so that little by little, as those captives screamed in despair and torment, their souls would leave them....
Yet we continue to celebrate this "discovery" as something other than dastardly.
Some of this history even manages to make it into schoolbooks. But rarely is it linked in the curricula to the here and now daily reality of those who descend from rampage and rape, in the islands or here on the mainland. We teach of westward expansion and manifest destiny, and Hollywood has burned into our retinas images of "native savages" scalping noble settlers and native women as "squaws." As an anthropologist, I can attest that more attention is placed in the classroom to "Indian pot-shards and burial mounds" than to the harsh political reality of life on the rez or in the urban off-rez ghettos of places like Minneapolis-St. Paul.
I do not care if you consider yourself white, black, brown or yellow. Learn and accept the history, but take action on the current reality of the plight of our first nation's peoples.
Without our hands out to help and join in political solidarity with this beleaguered minority, nothing will be done.
Removal: "Indian" Boarding Schools.
Carlisle Indian Industrial School graduates
Each semester, I refuse to simply teach about native pots and totems. Instead, my students learn of a living history of abuse and abuse survivors. The materials are now readily available on the internet.
Where the Spirit Lives (1989) is a drama film about Aboriginal children getting taken from their tribes to attend residential schools. The film starred Michelle St. John as Amelia, a young First Nations girl captured and forcibly confined to the residential school system of the 1930s. The system was an attempt to force aboriginal youth to assimilate into white culture; in the film, Amelia resists this kind of assimilation and attempts to plan her escape. The film's cast also includes Ann-Marie MacDonald and David Hemblen as teachers at the school.
When I first included this as part of the curricula, I used the docudrama Where the Spirit Lives, now available on YouTube, and lyrics from Buffy St. Marie's My Country Tis of thy people you're dying, which references the removal:
You force us to send our toddlers away
To your schools where they're taught to despise their traditions.
Forbid them their languages, then further say
That American history really began
When Columbus set sail out of Europe, then stress
That the nation of leeches that conquered this land
Are the biggest and bravest and boldest and best.
And yet where in your history books is the tale
Of the genocide basic to this country's birth,
Of the preachers who lied, how the Bill of Rights failed
Each year more teaching materials become available.
Kill the Indian, Save the Man.
Quote from Richard H. Pratt, founder of the first Indian boarding school, Carlisle Indian Industrial School. This digital story is about an Indian Boarding school experience.'
I now show the official Canadian government response/apology for the Indian Boarding schools.
June 11, 2008 - Prime Minister Harper offered Canada's aboriginal peoples an official apology for the government's involvement in the Indian residential school system and its ongoing policy of forced assimilation. Opposition leaders also offered their apologies during a special sitting of the House of Commons. Aboriginal leaders were welcomed onto the House floor to respond to the apology.
Questions are then raised in class about what we have done about this here in the U.S., and what programs need to be implemented to do more than simply apologize.
I show clips from Our Spirits Don't Speak English: Indian Boarding School like this one:
And from Something's Moving:
Survivors of a U.S. boarding school for the Lakota are breaking the chain of trauma in order to heal their spirits, their community and the country.
For over a hundred years and well into the 1970s, Native American children were removed from their families and enrolled in US government and church-run boarding schools, which were usually cold brick buildings where they were brutally punished for engaging in any aspect of their cultural heritage. Those that didn’t die of disease or suicide entered adulthood with untreated complex post-traumatic stress that was unconsciously inflicted upon the next generation through alcoholism, drug addiction and child abuse.
Through the vivid stories of our main characters — 65 year old Walter Littlemoon, Lakota of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, and Kateri Walker, Saginaw Shippewa from Midland, Michigan — and the supporting voices of other boarding school survivors, Something’s Moving tells the stories of Native youth who were separated from their families, their culture, their spirituality and their identity. Along with other survivors representing tribes from various regions of the US, our characters retell the devastating impact the schools have had on their lives. But more importantly, they demonstrate the vulnerability, fortitude and bold actions required to pass that healing on to the next generation.
Fillmmaker Richard Vasquez has continued this documentation in The Thick Dark Fog:
Walter Littlemoon is a 69-year-old Lakota man born and raised in Wounded Knee, South Dakota. At the age of five, he was removed from his family to attend a Federal government boarding school where his culture, language and spirituality were suppressed.
The Thick Dark Fog profiles Walter's journey to heal himself and his community while reclaiming his heritage. The film's title comes from Walter's own self-diagnosis of the state-of-mind that he lived in for so many years until he began to tell his story and heal from his childhood trauma.
To give some answers on what is being done, we explore The Wellbriety Movement: Journey to Forgiveness:
Hoop Journey I began on March 6, 1999 in the Longhouse of the Onondaga nation near Syracuse, NY with prayers and blessings from the traditional people. From March through May of 1999, the Hoop was carried on an east-to-west route of over 11,000 miles, visiting 27 of the Native American Tribal colleges in both the US and Canada. Seven presentations were also given outside of the Tribal College network. At each Tribal college visit White Bison staff and volunteers gave a Wellbriety Awareness Day presentation at which students, faculty, local community members, and Elders all took part.
We visit the Boarding School Healing Project. We follow news stories which cover prosecution of abuse:
Native American Sex-Abuse Lawsuits Head for a Higher Court
The South Dakota Supreme Court will hear childhood-sexual-abuse lawsuits brought by 18 former students of St. Paul's Indian Mission, on the Yankton Sioux Reservation, in Marty, South Dakota. St. Paul's (in photos on this page) was one of a half-dozen Catholic boarding schools statewide for Native children, and the alleged crimes, including rape, sodomy, and molestation, occurred there before 1975, when the institution was transferred to the tribe and renamed Marty Indian School.
Arikara girl
Rape and Sterilization.
Members of W.A.R.N. (Women of All Red Nations) on the Pine Ridge Reservation taught me about the sterilization of Native American women years ago when I went there to teach a class at the "We Will Remember" Survival School. But it wasn't until the last 10 years that I became aware of the statistics on the rape of Native American and Alaskan native women.
Outside of very occasional, anecdotal reports in a few major newspapers, the mainstream media generally ignored the wave of sterilizations as it was happening. The first large-audience, detailed description of the sterilizations was published not in the United States, but in Germany. Torpy tapped sources of information in small, specialized (often leftist or health-related) journals of opinion that, taken together, sketch a history of the sterilization campaign. She credits Brightman and the International Indian Treaty Council and others, including Constance Redbird Pinkerton-Uri, for keeping the issue alive enough to spark the interest of Senator James Abourezk of South Dakota, which led to a General Accounting Office report and congressional oversight hearings that eventually curbed the practice.
By 1974, some IHS doctors who were critical of the sterilizations began investigating on their own. Pinkerton-Uri, a physician and law student who is Choctaw and Cherokee, started her own inquiry after complaints were lodged by Native patients against the Claremore, Oklahoma, IHS hospital. Taking publicity about the Serena cases and what she had found at Claremore, along with other pieces of evidence, Pinkerton-Uri began calling Senator Abourezk's office. The office also had received inquiries from Charlie McCarthy, an IHS employee in Albuquerque, regarding sterilizations of Native American women. Torpy followed the trail of Abourezk's investigation, beginning with an intern in his office, Joan Adams, who took the initiative to investigate whether Native women were being sterilized "without their consent and under duress." This preliminary investigation convinced Adams (and, later, Senator Abourezk) that further study was needed. Abourezk, using Adams' research, then called for a GAO investigation. Torpy describes the findings of the GAO report, which surveyed IHS records in four of twelve Bureau of Indian Affairs regions: Albuquerque, Phoenix, Oklahoma City, and Aberdeen, South Dakota. The study covered only 46 months, between 1973 and 1976. (As of 1977, the IHS operated 51 hospitals and 86 health centers or clinics.) Within this sample, the GAO found evidence that the IHS or its contractors had sterilized 3,406 women, 3,001 of them of child-bearing age (15 to 44 years).
Since the GAO study did not even begin to arrive at a total number of sterilizations, opponents of the practice looked at the data in another way, as a percentage of the women of child-bearing age in each examined area who were sterilized. In Oklahoma, using the GAO study's numbers, 1,761 of roughly 17,000 women of child-bearing age were sterilized. In Phoenix, the number was lower, 78 of 8,000; in Aberdeen, the figure was 740 of 9,000. They began to make a case that, with only 100,000 fertile Native women of child-bearing age in the United States, the sterilizations were putting a significant dent in the gene pools of many individual Native American nations. Regarding the threat to the Native American gene pool, Torpy quotes Ms. Pinkerton-Uri: A 200 million population could support voluntary sterilization and survive, but for Native Americans it cannot be a preferred method of birth control. While other minorities might have a gene pool in Africa or Asia, Native Americans do not; when we are gone, that's it.
Along with losing the ability to reproduce, native women are subject to rape and violent assault. Jodi Rave investigates crimes against Native American women:
1 in 3 Native women will be raped in their lifetime reports the Department of Justice
Findings from the U.S. Department of Justice also found that Native women are two and a half times more likely to be raped then a Caucasian woman. Non-native men are reported to be committing 86% of these assaults. Jodi Rave discusses questions of jurisdiction and what level of commitment exists to prosecute these crimes.
Violence against women act
Rape of Alaskan native women.
NPR produced the series Sexual Abuse of Native American Women, winner of the duPont-Columbia Award in 2009:
This series about the rampant sexual abuse of Native American women and the faulty policing and prosecution of these crimes explore a shocking statistic from the Justice Department: One out of three Native American women will be raped in her lifetime. Sullivan’s three-month investigation involved dozens of interviews with law enforcement officials, victims and tribal leaders on reservations in South Dakota and Oklahoma. A devastating case of sexual assault that led to a woman’s death was reopened in North Dakota in response to the series’ findings. The series also resulted in Congressional hearings, and the Justice Department deputized Indian police officers to arrest non-Indians for the first time.
My students learn about the healing work of groups like Mending the Sacred Hoop:
MENDING THE SACRED HOOP is committed to strengthening the voice and vision of Native peoples. We work to end violence against Native women and children while restoring the safety, sovereignty, and sacredness of Native women. We work from a social change perspective that relies upon grassroots efforts to restore the leadership of Native women.
Our local work includes the Nanda Gikendan (To Seek Knowledge) Project, a series of community gatherings to discuss cultural and traditional teachings focusing on the Seven Grandfather Teachings (Ojibwe) in an effort to address and redress violence against Native women in our Duluth, MN community. The Giwiidookaadimin (We, All of Us, Help Each Other) Project was formed to enhance culturally specific services for Native women who have been sexually assaulted in Duluth, MN.
Through the Sacred Hoop Tribal Domestic Violence Coalition, we work to organize and raise the voices of Native women throughout Minnesota to build the capacity of survivors, advocates, Native women’s organizations and victim service providers to end violence against Native women.
We study urban community groups like the Minnesota Indian Women's Resource Center:
The Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center (MIWRC) is a non-profit social and educational services organization committed to the holistic growth and development of American Indian women and their families. Founded in 1984, MIWRC provides a broad range of programs designed to educate and empower American Indian women and their families, and to inform and assist those who work providing services to the community.
We read the report submitted to the Justice Department Violence Against American Indian and Alaska Native Women and the Criminal Justice Response: What is Known by Ronet Bachman, Heather Zaykowski, Rachel Kallmyer, Margarita Poteyeva, andChristina Lanier.
We look for online resources and forums like Native American Netroots.
It is important to keep Native issues in the news on the front pages of our consciousness.
Justice Dept. announces $118.4 million to tribes
September 14, 2011
The $118.4 million in grant money is meant to help tribes with community policing, methamphetamine enforcement, justice systems, alcohol and substance abuse, and corrections and correctional alternatives, the U.S. Department of Justice said.
The grants are also planned to help fund programs to prevent violence against women, elder abuse, and provide youth programs.
Attorney General Eric Holder Speaks at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. He spoke directly to the issue of rape:
But we have more to do. And, for me, no challenge is more urgent than protecting women and girls on tribal lands. That’s why the Justice Department recently proposed legislation that would close significant legal gaps and give Indian Country law enforcement, investigators, and prosecutors the tools they need to crack down on violence against women.
We discuss current and future legislation:
President Obama, flanked by Native American representatives, signs the Tribal Law and Order Act (Courtesy: Flickr Creative Commons)
Signed into law July 21, 2010, the Tribal Law and Order Act in part aims to fight the atrocious rate of sexual violence in native communities living on reservations by strengthening the tribal criminal justice system and tightening communication between tribal, local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. In a long overdue step towards amending the federal government’s ignorance of Native American rights issues, the act highlights another painful burden born by American women of color due to government socio-economic strategy.
In a mess of jurisdiction regulations and legislative loopholes, the federal, state, and tribal law enforcement facilities have struggled for decades with the prosecution of sexual violence offenders in native communities. The Amnesty International 2007 report Maze of Injustice: the Failure to Protect Indigenous Women from Sexual Violence in the USA publicized statistics on unprosecuted rape and sexual assault cases on reservations. US Department of Justice data shows that Native American and Alaska Native women are over 2.5 times more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted than the average American woman. Over 1 out of 3 American Indian and Alaska Native women will be raped during her lifetime, while the national figure for women is less than 1 of 5.
More disturbing is the statistic indicative of the grave abuses that our federal government treaties allow non-native Americans to impose upon Native American and Alaska Native women. According to the US Department of Justice, in 86% of reported rape or sexual assault cases against Native American and Alaska Native women, the perpetrators are non-native men. Federal legislation in these treaties prohibiting tribal courts from trying non-native persons gives complete impunity to the majority of sexual violence perpetrators on Indian reservations.
So Columbus Day, founded as a state holiday in Colorado in 1906, and made federal in 1937 has passed, and the oppression of Native Americans continues, tucked away, and rendered invisible from many of us.
Hawaii, Alaska and South Dakota are the three states that do not recognize Columbus Day at all, though Hawaii and South Dakota mark the day with an alternative holiday or observance. Hawaii celebrates Discoverers' Day, which commemorates the Polynesian discoverers of Hawaii on the same date, the second Monday of October. though the name change has not ended protest related to the observance of Columbus' discovery. The state government does not treat either Columbus Day or Discoverers' Day as a legal holiday; state, city and county government offices and schools are open for business. South Dakota celebrates the day as officially a state holiday known as "Native American Day" rather than Columbus Day.
There is a Congressional Native American Caucus. In that caucus, is the sole registered Native American holding national elected office, Republican Tom Cole, though a majority of the caucus members are Democrats.
Please check the list to see if your representative is a member. Raise these issues in your state.
This is not simply a matter of changing the name of Columbus Day, to Native American Day, or Indigenous People's Day. The POTUS has declared the month of November as National Native American Heritage Month.
America's journey has been marked both by bright times of progress and dark moments of injustice for American Indians and Alaska Natives. Since the birth of America, they have contributed immeasurably to our country and our heritage, distinguishing themselves as scholars, artists, entrepreneurs, and leaders in all aspects of our society. Native Americans have also served in the United States Armed Forces with honor and distinction, defending the security of our Nation with their lives. Yet, our tribal communities face stark realities, including disproportionately high rates of poverty, unemployment, crime, and disease. These disparities are unacceptable, and we must acknowledge both our history and our current challenges if we are to ensure that all of our children have an equal opportunity to pursue the American dream. From upholding the tribal sovereignty recognized and reaffirmed in our Constitution and laws to strengthening our unique nation-to- nation relationship, my Administration stands firm in fulfilling our Nation's commitments.
Words are nice. So are apologies, like the one signed by President Obama Dec. 19, 2009, as are promises, but we know the history of broken promises to native people's.
After President Obama signed the Law and Order Act In July 2010, diarist Aji wrote:
One in every three Native American women will be raped at least once during her lifetime.
One in three.
At least once.
That's more than twice the rate for any other ethnic group in the U.S.
I've sat with some of these women, heard their stories, shared their pain and grief and fear. And I've shared their frustration with the knowledge that, some 86% of the time, their rapists were virtually untouchable.
Why?
Because with very few exceptions, tribal authorities have had no jurisdiction over non-Indian criminal offenders-and 86% of rapes of Native women are committed by non-Indian rapists (70% are white). These numbers, of course, included only those rapes that are actually reported ... According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 70% of all rapes in the U.S. go unreported; other sources place the number as high as 84%. It's understandable that rape survivors often fear reporting the rape. They may be afraid the attacker will retaliate. They may fear that no one will believe them, or that they will be blamed for the assault. They may feel ashamed, humiliated, degraded, dishonored –- and fear that reporting it will only allow others to humiliate them further. And Native women's fears are exacerbated by historical tragedy and the knowledge that the system is not set up to help them.
Unless ALL of us take on the responsibility to become political actors for Native Americans, little will be done about any of this. The fourth R for responsibility can change the other three.
So while you may be occupying Wall Street, or some other city, remember whose land we all occupy.
Join us in a simple prayer:
Great Spirit,
give us hearts to understand;
Never to take from creation's beauty more than we give;
Never to destroy wantonly for the furtherance of greed;
Never to deny to give our hands for the building of earth's beauty;
Never to take from her what we cannot use.
Give us hearts to understand
That to destroy earth's music is to create confusion;
That to wreck her appearance is to blind us to beauty;
That to callously pollute her fragrance is to make a house of stench;
That as we care for her she will care for us.
We have forgotten who we are.
We have sought only our own security.
We have exploited simply for our own ends.
We have distorted our knowledge.
We have abused our power.
Great Spirit, whose dry lands thirst,
help us to find the way to refresh your lands.
Great Spirit, whose waters are choked with debris and pollution,
help us to find the way to cleanse your waters.
Great Spirit, whose beautiful earth grows ugly with mis-use,
help us to find the way to restore beauty to your handiwork.
Great Spirit, whose creatures are being destroyed,
help us to find a way to replenish them.
Great Spirit, whose gifts to us are being lost
in selfishness and corruption,
help us to find the way to restore our humanity.
Prayer + Action = Resolution.