What they didn't think about When they came and stole the land And laid down on top of our ancestors Is that it's a strange thing To lay down on top of the people Who make your food and provide the dust Your ancestors will use for you How could you not realize We would still completely envelop you From the ground up That your body would melt back into our expanses While we grew all over you? And so you will be overcome As we clap when our children dance And run On top of you And we receive their tears As the quenching water we need To keep holding them up We will consume Every bit of you And that is the beauty The sun will illuminate.

To honor the Indigenous of the US and Canada, we must honor the resilience that gave way to our survival. We remember purposeful tactics created to divide us from our families, our communities, our languages, our homelands, and to intrinsically devastate our connection to our identities. We recognize the tactics of parent-child separation, White-claims to Indigenous children and being able to provide better welfare, and the separation of different Indigenous ethnic groups that kept us from knowing about the plights of one another (for example, displaced Indigenous Africans and their descendants and US/Latin American Indigenous). To honor the Indigenous of the lands we are standing on today, we recognize that many of us survived. And that is a testament to our will to endure through the violence that intended to subdue us in order to allow invasion of our resources and ways of life to benefit another, European settlers and their descendants. As we reflect on ways to honor our dead tod...

                   (My proposal to a local school board near my town) I am a woman who is a descendant of the Saginaw, Swan Creek, and Black River tribes of Ojibwe. I am a mother of five children, I have a college education, including a graduate degree. I work professionally in the community in a role that adds diversity to the institutions I occupy. I am a self-professed lover of urban culture, coffee, popular music, dancing, and an information and book-collecting nerd. One thing I am not, however, is a mascot. I am also not a redskin. I belong to a racial and ethnic group who was admittedly, by the US government, an experiment for forced assimilation, which enabled Hitler to gain inspiration from America for the disgusting self-declared supremacy that resulted in the annihilation of innumerable Jewish people. I am a member of a group of racial and ethnic people who were forcibly remov...