Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work; a future. To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences. David Whyte (Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words)
As I finally settle in to write this week’s post, I’m present to feeling uncertain, wondering if I have the courage to post a powerful and resonant message that I encountered several days ago. I walk the land and ask the mountain if I’m to do so. It gently nudges its knowing ‘yes’. As I honor that guidance, I’m confronted with yet another wondering. Do I have the courage to see the message through, to respond to its call? Will I post and turn my attention elsewhere, or will I summon the courage to more deeply engage in the reckoning that is its invitation. Will I make future choices in alignment with its message? Will I dare ask ‘what is mine to do in this domain?’.
The domain that’s stirring in me is that of colonization and its horrific impacts on people and planet. I’ve been aware for a long while that the sanitized history I learned in school is not an accurate picture of reality. In recent months, several things kindled my interest to learn more, two films in particular: Doctrine of Discovery: Unmasking the Domination Code and The Eternal Song which I watched just a few days before this weekend’s No Kings marches.
With this curiosity already present, it was no surprise that a social media post from my friend Rivera Sun about a speech at the Denver, Colorado No Kings protest caught my attention. And it’s that message, which I have yet to find a video of, that I am sharing today. It’s neither short nor sweet, but my heart feels, and the Mountain agrees that it is important to share this timely, poignant message. I hope you’ll feel inspired or just a bit curious and give her words your attention.
Raven Payment’s speech at the Denver No Kings protest on October 18
I was initially asked to give a land acknowledgment today. This infers that I use polite words about the theft and loss of life of my ancestors. To name the tribes. To give a moment of silence before the show goes on.
But I’m tired of these hollow gestures.
Land acknowledgments have become a ritual of comfort, a way for you all to feel righteous without surrendering power, without giving land back, without changing a damn thing. Words without action are not respect. They are permission for the injustice to continue.
So let me speak the truth.
Denver sits on unceded land. Colorado is home to at least 51 tribes with historic and legal standing. Denver was one of seven cities chosen for the Indian Relocation Program of the 1950s and 60s, a federal experiment to erase us, to push Native people off our homelands and scatter us into cities like this one. Colorado had eleven Indian boarding schools, including two right here in Denver, built with one goal: Kill the Indian, save the man. Strip the language, the ceremony, the spirit, until nothing was left but obedience.
And yet when we are invited to the table, we are asked to only “acknowledge” the land?
Well. I already do. Every day. Because my people’s bones are in this soil. Our songs are in the wind. Our memories are in the rivers. I don’t need a scripted moment to remember that. I live it. It’s in my DNA.
The land doesn’t need acknowledgment. It needs restoration. It needs protection. It needs the people who belong to it to be visible again.
Because here’s the truth, Native people are invisible to you.
You assume we live somewhere else, on some distant reservation, out of sight and out of mind, or worse, that we’re extinct. But we are not gone.
Eighty percent of us live outside of reservations. We live right here, in your neighborhoods, at your schools, in your hospitals, in your offices, in your movements. We’re still here. We’ve always been here.
You come out to protests wearing your Handmaid’s Tale costumes, shouting about dystopia, about the fear of what could happen to you, about losing control of your body, your freedom, your voice.
But the terrible things you’re afraid might happen to you?
They already happened to us.
The dystopia you imagine: we lived it.
The genocide you fear: we are surviving it.
The apocalypse you dread: it already happened to my ancestors.
You want to fight tyranny? Learn from the people who have endured it for centuries.
Violence against the land is violence against the people. When you poison the rivers, you poison us. When you strip the mountains, you desecrate our ancestors. When you destroy the forests, you silence our medicine. This is not metaphor. The land is our relative, and it’s dying under the same systems that made us invisible.
We never had kings. We had councils and clan mothers. We had accountability. We had wisdom. We governed through consensus, not domination. The Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace gave this country its model for democracy, but when they borrowed from us, they left out the most important parts: women in leadership, the duty to care for the earth, and the obligation to consider how our choices today would affect the next seven generations.
I am worried at the perception that America was founded on greatness and that there is a period to which we should return. Let me be clear: we need a vision of newness because at no point has America ever been great for everyone. The founding documents declared that “all men are created equal” but they called my people “merciless Indian savages” in the same breath. Those words are still written there. That stain has never been erased.
We are here at No Kings because we are done pretending that this system works. We are done watching the same kind of people hoard power while others struggle to survive. We are done being invisible.
We know what we don’t want. We don’t want kings. We don’t want rulers. We don’t want systems that destroy the planet and then ask us to say thank you. But we can’t stop there. We need vision. We need creation.
Here is what I demand and what I expect from every person who says they mean change. First, return land where possible and co-manage what cannot be returned. Sacred sites are not decoration in a brochure. They are living obligations. Second, stop granting permits to projects that destroy water, soil and air especially when Indigenous people object. Third, take away the police budgets that criminalize survival and put that money into housing, community health and substance treatment. Fourth, fund reparations and buyback programs that actually put resources back where they were stolen. Fifth, force honest history into classrooms and expunge the lies that make genocide digestible.
This is not a wishlist for later. This is immediate. If your city council refuses to act then you shut down city hall. If corporations keep profiting off destruction then you divest and you boycott. If universities keep hiding research and names then you demand transparency and you withhold your labor. If boards will not listen then you take direct action and you hold the line. We will be tactical and relentless and we will not confuse civility with meekness.
Do not mistake this for hatred. This is love for our relations, human and more-than-human. This is love for the children who will inherit what we leave. That love looks fierce. It has to. Otherwise our history repeats.
If you really want to honor the land, act like it. If you really want to honor Indigenous people, follow our lead. If your city, your employer, or your government refuses to change, make them uncomfortable. Shut down complacency. Disrupt hypocrisy. Force the reckoning.
We never had kings, and we don’t need them now.
What we need is courage. We need truth. We need people who are ready to do more than clap for justice, we need people willing to fight for it.
So stop asking us to acknowledge.
Start asking yourself what you’re willing to give back.Because acknowledgment without action is not allyship. It’s complicity.
The apocalypse already happened.
And still, we’re here.
No more kings. No more lies.
Land back. Power back. Future back.
