Long before their ships,
long before their flags,
long before their broken promises,
we were here.
We were here —
walking the rivers,
naming the hills,
whispering songs into the roots of the trees.
We are nêhiyawak —
the ones made from the breath of aski.
The ones whose hearts still beat with the old drums.
They came with papers,
with guns,
with a hunger too big for their own hearts.
They called our love for the land “savage.”
They called our ways “primitive.”
They called our nations “obstacles.”
But they did not understand:
you cannot uproot the river.
You cannot silence the stones.
You cannot kill what was made by the breath of creation itself.
They marched our ancestors down the Trail of Tears.
They tried to crush the songs from our throats.
They tried to teach our children to forget their own names.
But the grandmothers kept singing.
The grandfathers kept praying.
The land kept breathing.
And we — we kept living.
We carried miyo-pimâtisiwin —
the good life —
hidden in our bones,
like embers in the ashes.
And when the black snake came,
we rose.
We gathered at the sacred fire.
We stood at Standing Rock,
bare feet on frozen ground,
prayers rising like mist to the stars.
And the world saw us.
And the land remembered us.
We are not relics.
We are not ghosts.
We are not a sad chapter in someone else’s history book.
We are the breath of aski.
We are the drum of life.
We are nêhiyawak,
keepers of miyo-pimâtisiwin.
We are not vanishing.
We are not broken.
We are not silent.
We are rising —
like rivers after the thaw,
like trees after the fire,
like nations reborn in the first light of morning.
We are the voice of the land.
We are the memory of the stones.
We are the living breath of aski.
We are nêhiyawak.
We rise.
We rise.
We rise.
John Gonzalez
Standing Bear Network
