We invite ALL OUR RELATIVES to participate. 
We are re-indigenizing!

In our Indigenous communities, we have become separated from the wisdom of our elders and are assimilating into the oppressor's system, following a shiny facade of a better life that doesn't offer real support. Our grandmothers and grandfathers are taking care of 3, 5, 9 or more grandchildren without help or support; our relatives are self-medicating because the system does not have the resources to dedicate to healing trauma; our elders are dying alone and homeless; and our young ones are taking their lives because they feel hopeless.

Despite our best intentions, we are practicing colonizer politics: their religions, their educational systems, their legal systems and have been assimilated to the detriment of our cultural ways. Few of us remember or are practicing fully the ways of the Očhéthi Šakówin. We are practicing colonization, by practicing individualism.

But instead of reshaping our Očhéthi Šakwóin culture under the colonizing system, we have a new intention to preserve our cultures and re-create our own educational system. It is time that we come together as the fullness of the Očhéthi Šakówin and re-indigenize. Our community has been divided but can rejoin in a decision-making process to strengthen ourselves. The reservations, blood-quantum, and membership do not define who are the keepers of knowledge. We all have knowledge and can help make the Očhéthi Šakówin Oyate strong again - One hundred percent Inclusion of all who are the Očhéthi Šakówin Oyate, or the Seven Council Fires People.

Let us all practice the values we know - kindness, humility, respect, and honor - to re-indigenize the Očhéthi Šakówin Oyate, so that we can learn the fullness of who we are and teach one another. Our non-human relatives and Unci Maka (Grandmother Earth) need us all to be caretakers and fulfill our responsibilities as citizens of land-based cultures. Our settler relatives who have been colonized so long that their land-based roots are almost lost can turn from assimilation towards shared values and mutual support as we all re-indigenize.

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