...but the words get stuck in my throat. I think we're all walking on land stolen from massacred people, raped daily with little to no reverence, and we've just come to accept it. We don't care. Even now, the first line or two of this post, most of you turned away and figured you don't want to hear about it. I've heard white people even dismiss the topic by saying, We stole this land fair and square. I can't. Yes, today we are understanding more truth about Columbus, pilgrims, etc., than those many decades where we were taught how Columbus and pilgrims and Indians all celebrated together in peace and harmony with grins and smiles and good happy fuzzy feelings. We know better now. Yet our culture's not changed a single iota in its paradigm or its parameter. I have this book on my altar... A Cherokee Feast of Days, by Joyce Sequichie Hifler. It's 365 daily meditations, and each day I try to remind myself to take a moment of reverence and read the day's meditation, burn a little sage, smell the rich scent of it, soak in some wisdom, and remember to let myself feel the connection of Wakan Tanka, the creator and the creation, and all my relations, Mitakuye Oyasin. Tonight I read the 22nd meditation early. I feel nothing but pain and heart-wrenching truth in this reading:

We fight feverishly for equality and freedom to do something that in the long run serves little purpose. In other times, we bargain with everything precious without the slightest knowledge about what it is costing. We feel like birds in a cage with only inches of space to fly. It is exciting to look out at the wild birds on wing and think how much we would love to spread our wings. And yet, a bird on the wing has no protection, no loving care, no regular feeding. And then we stand on the edge and look in a window and wish someone cared for us. If only there were someone like that for us to lean on. We are out in the cold--but free. The very things that pin our wings also help us to grow, a dv hi, and with wisdom we learn how to fly, ga no hi li.

It is for this reason I felt the connection even deeper right now. I can't usually take a step outside without imagining what it'd look like without all the pavement and buildings, and if the people who no doubt lived in that area were to still be there, instead of massacred and cleansed from the area, so that civilized people could move in and use what the savages were wasting. Where you are now, chances are some tribe was destroyed entirely. You probably have no knowledge. It's probably never crossed your mind. In The Culture of Make Believe, Derrick Jensen suggests what I think is a stroke of pure genius. The awareness and the paradigm of our people would change drastically if we did truly know. If we searched the truth and learned of the peoples who used to live here, learn when they were killed, hold vigils for them on that date each year in the places that they happened. If we stopped thanking God for a dead turkey that probably never ran free a day in its life, and for the privilege to live in a mass-produced lifestyle in a spoiled-rotten culture... if we instead learned to give sorrow for what had to die, what had to be destroyed, so that we may sit here being as miserable a people as we are. Paradigms might radically change. Find out in your area. I have lots to give thanks for. But today, I choose to give my sorrow and condolences, because there's so much more that's been lost, and so little gained from it, that it drastically outweighs the thanks I have to strain myself to remember.