Indian
nations are denied legitimacy solely because they committed the crime of owning
land somebody else wanted and surviving after the land was waken. Having failed to physically disappear, the
Indian nation is now urged to disappear legally, culturally, and
psychologically.
Indian
leadership needs to understand that when they stand as Indians for Indian
rights, they are often in direct conflict with US aspirations, and that an
Indian allegiance to the United States can be secondary to their allegiance to
their own nations because the former, by nature, seeks to eliminate the latter.
The culture of Native nations was built around the knowledge of how
to survive in an environment. To
continue the culture meaningfully requires that the people be free to continue
to nurture the environment in which we live and grow.
Colonization
interrupts the pattern of learning to survive and substitutes learning to serve.
Awareness
of something is not that thing’s reality.
Individual
human spirits combine to create the spirits of nations and families.
The
process of colonization involves the imaginary transformation of the unfamiliar
to the familiar.
