HOW DID OUR HOMELAND BECOME SOMEONE ELSE’S COUNTRY??? WITH APOLOGIES TO THE ANCESTORS
The Saint John River Valley that our people have always known as the Wulustuk River Valley is our homeland and has been so for thousands and thousands of generations. At the time of contact our Ancestors referred to it as Ski-gin-ee-weekog or “our Indian Homeland”.
Our people were placed here by Great Creator along with sacred instructions to love, honour, respect and protect our homeland along with our Sacred Earth Mother. We lived by those sacred instructions right up to the arrival of those European invaders.
We are taught that we corrupt and degrade, and dishonour and disrespect our sacred teachings and all of the efforts of the Ancestors to live, preserve and pass-on our sacred teachings when the present generation allows the destruction of our homeland and our Sacred Earth mother.
Our present generation has not, and is not, doing a very good job in living our original instruction of respecting and protecting our Sacred Earth Mother. Hence the need to apologise to the Ancestors.
In the many, many millennia that we have lived in our homeland we left NO ecological footprint. Our homeland was a paradise on Earth, as clean, pure, pristine and perfect as when Great Creator placed our Ancestors here.
But it took the European invaders only a very short period of time to desecrate, destroy and to lay waste to our once pristine homeland.
Our beautiful homeland was stolen from us by those Europeans who we greeted as brothers, and who we helped and fed and sheltered so that they would survive their first years here.
In time we were repaid with lies, treachery, deceit and the theft of our homeland through extreme white violence including rape, hangings, fire, torture, mass killings and genocide. This attempt at the genocide of our people continues into the present as white-mans way of eliminating all of those Indian witnesses to their genocide of some one hundred million human beings in order to steal their lands and in order to hold on to their ill-gotten gains – that being our homeland.
But we are still here living in our terrorized, traumatized and colonized state locked away on those Euro-Canadian-made Indian reservations where we await the white-mans Final Solution to Canada’s Indian Problem.
What do we as Indians do in our present state of terror and trauma?
In the words of one of humankind’s great Elders… “when all the familiar goals in life are snatched away, what alone remains is the last of human freedoms – the ability to choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances.”
There is only one thing worse than remembering that we were once free and that is forgetting that we were once free.
We as Indian people should know that we always have our Original Instructions, our traditional Teachings, our Ancestors, and our Sacred Ceremonies, our choice as Indian people should be our return to the sacred ways of The Ancestors.
If we are to survive as a people and begin to be part of the solution in defending and protecting our homeland and our Sacred Earth Mother we must begin thinking, acting and speaking as The Ancestors thought, acted and spoke. What that means in the present context is that we think and act and speak as Indians and not as colonized victims.
And we must continuously remind our white oppressor that we are still here, and that we know and remember what they did to our people in their religious zeal to steal our homeland and to continue to illegally hold on to our homeland.
From this day forth our chant, our mantra, our war cry must be… How did our homeland become someone else’s country?
For as long as need be or until we receive a satisfactory answer from the thieves.
These are the words of a child of the Canadian holocaust.
All My Relations,
Dan Ennis, O.I.M.
