Our Debt

 Our Debt 

We stole their land. We took their world, their world which they nurtured for thousands of years. Native Americans lived with the land, not just on it. Theirs was a spiritual partnership with nature. For ages, they connected with and honored Earth, water, animals, and plants. When they took the life of plants, they did so with gratitude. For example, to fashion a sweetgrass basket, they would take only what was needed and ensured that it was sustained by planting more. If they took the life of  a deer, they thanked it first, for giving up its life to sustain their own. And, again, they took only what was needed. They knew how to live with nature.

Europeans came here in just the last few hundred years. They took the land by warfare, broken treaties, the spreading of smallpox, forced relocation. The Native Americans have been decimated. And the land has been covered in asphalt and brick, animals - like buffalo - slaughtered to near extinction, air and water polluted, Earth defiled with mining, fracking, herbicides… the list goes on.  We, the descendants of those Europeans, owe the Native Americans reparations. And we owe the Earth and its animals and plants the same - a chance to regain a footing. For, if we don’t, the planet’s survival, and ours, is in grave jeopardy.