10/23/2025
Repost from .made
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Non-Natives love to criticize what they helped destroy.
They point fingers at broken homes, cracked windows,
overgrown yards, and addictions,
but never at the hand that swung the axe
that cut us from our roots.
They see symptoms, never the sickness.
They don’t see genocide,
they see “bad decisions.”
They don’t see boarding schools,
they see “lack of parenting.”
They don’t see intergenerational trauma,
they see “welfare abuse.”
They don’t see centuries of policy meant to erase us,
they see “laziness.”
You call it history.
We call it survival.
“Kill the Indian, save the man”
that was policy, not metaphor.
And now, you’re shocked at the aftermath?
You marvel at the fire still burning in our blood
while standing on the ashes your ancestors left.
And now that oppression knocks at your door,
you rise up crying “No kings!”
Welcome.
You’ve just arrived at the starting line of a race
we’ve been running for five hundred years.
You shout about freedom
while ours was outlawed,
our songs criminalized, our children stolen,
our ceremonies buried and burned.
And still, you don’t see.
You only notice the storm
when it floods your house.
We’ve lived in the downpour for generations.
And yet,
we still plant seeds.
We still sing.
We still rise.
Your “sprinkles of freedom”
were always watered with our blood.
So before you critique our homes,
our streets, our pain,
ask yourself who built your empire,
and who paid the price for your comfort.
Because we are still here.
And we remember everything.
And still,
I stand with you.
Hoping to be seen and heard,
healing while holding the line
between what was taken
and what still grows.
Standing with my ancestors’ strength,
carrying and holding the hands
of the next generation,
planting them firmly in the soil of remembrance,
so they too may rise
with the light of a freedom
that belongs to all of us.
Watering the seeds with my tears.
lakotamade.com
