04/10/2025
❤️🥰😢💕
Today we remember a woman who walked gently upon this askîy (earth), yet whose footsteps echoed across the whole world. Dr. Jane Goodall has begun her journey back to the spirit world at the age of ninety-one. Like so many of our kêhtê-aya (old ones), she showed us that wisdom is not only carried in books or titles, but in listening closely to the voices of the land and the beings who share it with us.
When she first sat among the chimpanzees in Gombe, she saw what others could not — that these relatives are not just shadows of humanity, but beings with their own laughter, sorrow, tenderness, and tools of survival. In this way, she shattered the wall we humans built between “us” and “them.” Her teachings remind us of something our own nôhkomak (grandmothers) and nimosômwak (grandfathers) have always said: that all life is wâhkôhtowin (kinship), that the breath of a chimpanzee, a tree, or nîpiy (water) carries the same sacred mystery as our own.
Her work did not stay in the forest. She founded the Jane Goodall Institute, raised the Roots & Shoots oskâpêwisak (helpers, youth), and carried her message across nations — that we must respect the web of pimâtisiwin (life), that our future depends on how we treat the smallest beings. She stood for climate justice, for the healing of askîy, and for the dignity of animals, never tiring, even in her final years.
Dr. Goodall has returned to the ancestors, but her spirit will keep walking with us. The seeds she planted — in the hearts of children, in the forests she protected, in the global call for justice — continue to grow.
In our way, we say: her iskotêw (fire) is not gone, it is now part of the great flame that lights our path. Rest well, Jane. Your journey carries on in the rivers, in the trees, and in the children who rise to protect them.
—Kanipawit Maskwa
ᑲᓂᐸᐏᐟ ᒪᐢᑿ
