Litefoot: Indigenous people are still regaining our self-esteem

Friday, October 14, 2011  

"Much in the same way that all parts of a journey are important and that all pieces of a puzzle are important to create the finished picture—I believe we as the indigenous people of North, Central and South America are the sum of all our parts. It is impossible to leave out some pieces and still complete the picture. I believe it is impossible to speak of “Indian Country” and think of only one group of tribes in one region or country. Thinking this way undermines the journey and makes impossible the completion of the mural that the Creator painted for us. We are one out of hundreds. We are hundreds out of thousands.

And yet we are the descendants of boarding schools and policies of genocide. We are still healing. We are also the providers of the core ingredients that Benjamin Franklin took to create the Constitution of the United States. We are not savages. We are the victims of raids that specifically targeted women and children to break the spirit of its men. We were slaughtered. We are the saviors of visiting pilgrims to this land who became sick and whom we helped nurse back to health. We are compassionate. We are a people who were told and then shown that we were “less than” and that we were not “good enough.” We were demoralized. We were business people who gathered in the thousands to do intertribal business and non-tribal business at multiple locations in North, Central and South America. We are entrepreneurs. We are also a people who might not think we are now “good enough” to give a casino or economic development contract to another Indian business because it may not be “good enough.”

We are still regaining our self-esteem. It has been said that a race of people no longer exist not when they lose their language or elements of their culture—but simply when they forget. I think it is possible when you forget your journey or large pieces of it, that someone or something will be more than happy to make it up for you."

Get the Story:
Litefoot: Becoming ‘Good Enough’ (Indian Country Today 10/13)