We, the undocumented youth of America are living on borrowed time. We are neither from here nor there. We are wanderers in perpetual purgatory and yet we dream of the highest heavens. But as the well-known phrase goes, “they tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.” And so, we rise.
Connor Yiamkis, a language educator and member of the Pit River tribe, is working to revitalize the Pit River language which the American government and churches tried to strip from his people during the Indian boarding school era. Citing research that language revitalization is centrally important to cultural expression, suicide prevention, and relationships with people and the land, Yiamkis argues that the American government should significantly increase funding for language revitalization.
In this era of information silos and distrust of sources that seem to offer political views different from our own, the purpose of remembrance can also be to assert that events actually happened and that they were significant.
I feel like participating in this walk/run is an act of survivance . . . an expression of tribal sovereignty. When tribes come together and support each other, it builds community and capacity for a brighter future for our children.
Sociology forces us to examine poverty as a societal choice and not simply the moral failings of individuals.
The basics of healing the harrowing hatred harming our nation are not difficult to describe, although actually implementing these steps will require a fundamental resetting of our collective orientation to one another and ourselves.
On August 6, local Indigenous youth will share their original works as part of the film, Being Seen: Native Youth on Identity, Culture, and Justice. The project was funded through a California Humanities Youth Voices grant.
“Whichever side we find ourselves on, our innate group identifications arise from the same place: “our intuitive binary instinct that allows us to classify others as ‘us’ or ‘them’ in a fraction of a second.”
The real story is how we are ready to trust and follow our hot emotions rather than our cool intellect in our quest to find our core identity in our political tribe and defend it with our lives, if necessary, regardless of the cost.
