06/08/2025
Wise words without anger...
nîtisânak, come close now. Let us sit together as the fire breathes, as the night listens. I will share words carried by our ancestors, words that rise like smoke to the stars.
Long ago, the colonizers brought with them a hunger for control. They did not see us as relatives. They saw us as things to measure, to divide, to erase. For our African relatives, they created the one-drop rule, saying that even a trace of African blood made you Black. Why? So they could stretch their chains across as many bodies as possible, claiming lives as property. It was not about identity. It was about ownership, power, and control.
For us, the First Peoples, they chose another path of destruction. They brought blood quantum — a way of cutting our nations smaller and smaller, so that one day they could say, “There are no Indians left.” Each fraction they took from us was a knife at the root of our existence. They wanted us to vanish, or to be folded so tightly into their world that we would forget we were ever nations.
Do you feel the cruelty of it? One system to capture more, the other to erase. Both born from the same hunger for land and dominion. Yet still, we are here. We breathe. We rise.
But not all wounds are seen on the body. Some are written in ink. This is paper genocide. With the stroke of a pen, entire nations were declared gone. In Virginia, a man named Walter Plecker used his power to erase our relatives, marking them as “colored,” stripping them of their names, their identity, their future. It was an attempt to kill a people without spilling blood.
And in Rhode Island, the Narragansett were told again and again, “You do not exist.” Yet their spirits said otherwise. Through generations, they stood, they sang, they carried their truth until finally the world could no longer deny them. Their survival teaches us that no paper, no law, no colonial lie can erase a people who keep their fire alive.
The colonizers also planted another sickness: the lie that the shade of our skin makes us different kinds of human. They built a ladder where they placed themselves at the top, declaring their skin to mean power and purity, while pushing the rest of us down as if spirit could be measured by color. This was never the way of Creation. It was built to justify conquest, slavery, and greed.
But we know better. There is only one race: the human race. The colors of the medicine wheel were never meant to divide us. They are not about race at all. They are the sacred directions, the elements, the cycles of life. Yellow for the East, where the sun rises and new beginnings are born. Red for the South, where warmth and growth dwell. Black for the West, where the sun sets and we are given rest and reflection. White for the North, where the cold winds bring wisdom and clarity. These are not races, but teachings — reminders that all life is connected, and balance is our law.
The colonizers twisted even this, making us see difference where the Creator placed only connection. And too often now, our own people repeat these colonial constructs, forgetting the truth of who we are.
Our worth has never been in the shade of our skin. It lives in our songs, our prayers, our languages, our way of walking gently upon the earth. We must cast down the ladder they built and see each other again as relatives — each one a flame carried from the beginning of time, each one a strand in the great web of life.
And so, when we speak of these things — classification, paper genocide, the false divisions of color — we speak of weapons meant to break us. Yet we also speak of survival. We are not gone. We remain. We rise. And we refuse to let our names, our blood, our nations, or our unity as one human family be erased.
Look into the fire, nîtisânak. You will see the faces of our ancestors there. They whisper: Stand. Remember. Live.
êkosi.
—Kanipawit Maskwa
John Gonzalez
Standing Bear Network
