When I was a child, everyone I knew referred to this day as “The Fourth of July.” It wasn’t until I was in grade school that I learned its other name, “Independence Day.” I was encouraged to use the latter term as somehow the proper name for the date.
I resisted it.
I still do.
In our household, this day is a day like any other: no cause for celebration, no use for parades and fireworks. If we refer to it by name in any way, it’s as “the fourth.” Nothing more.
It’s not a holiday meant for us. After all, what it celebrates is nothing less than commercialized and commodified colonialism (but I repeat myself), with the extermination of our ancestors as both means and end.
What are we to find in that to celebrate?
In actual fact, of course, we do celebrate, but it is the ultimate neutralizing of the original intent that this holiday so euphemistically seeks to commemorate. Independence. Freedom. Such loaded words, charged with connotations that render them perfect tools of propaganda, and so they are, and have been, used and misused daily throughout the dominant culture’s tenure occupying this land.
I have visited the memorials and markers that that culture imbues with the symbolism of freedom: The Green Dragon Tavern in Boston. Philadelphia and the Liberty Bell, now segregated behind ropes of chain. The innumerable memorials of Washington, D.C., where the only one that ever spoke to my spirit was a new one, created by a woman of color to honor those fallen in an illegal war of this country’s waging. New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty, whose inscription has too often been a joke and lie, and a constant mockery of the peoples who lived upon this land since the time before time. Mount Rushmore, a blasphemy, sacrilege graven in stone.
This is country and culture much given to shibboleths. Today, in events and services all across the land, we will be reminded that “freedom isn’t free,” facile words whose meaning is so attenuated to the average listener as to be utterly irrelevant: something that is required of “other people.”
It’s a lesson our peoples have always known, and certainly since Contact.
Once the ancestors of those who instilled and installed this day as a secular holy day (and one not so secular, too) in the national zeitgeist similarly installed our ancestors upon reservations, our forebears knew full well the price of freedom. They also knew that it was a price to be paid in blood, and even once all the blood was shed, it would not be enough to purchase their lives, their lands, their existence. Their independence. Their freedom.
And so for our peoples, notions of freedom and independence became subversive, went underground. In the 19th Century, they found purchase in a host of prophecies, including a renewed interest in the ancient ones like the Seventh Fire, and the new omens foretold by practitioners of the Ghost Dance. In the 20th Century, amidst the occasional uprising and scattered attempts at “revolution,” these notions turned their attention to more esoteric incarnations, notions of law and sovereignty and the use of the white man’s courts to buy and barter such pieces of freedom and independence as could be wrested from the invader using his own tools.
Now, for us, at least, it’s no longer a bargain, but a blessing; not a purchase, but a prayer.
Whatever peace history and circumstance have forced our peoples to make, we remain. So, too, do our spirits.
We are connected to this land in ways that the outside world can never hope to understand: to the winds and the sacred directions, the soil and sky, the waters and the sun’s fire, the spirits of the trees and the plants and the beings with whom our kind have always shared the land, those who walk upon the earth, swim in its waters, soar upon its currents. In them we find connection and reaffirmation of identity, unbroken links in a sacred hoop of history and ancestry that stretches back to the time before time, and ahead to the Seventh Generation and beyond.
It is freeing, this knowledge that a half-millennium of concerted effort has failed in this one task, to break that hoop forever. And it is a lesson, one taught to us here daily by the great raptors with whom we share this land: In the most fundamental of ways, this is not a barter, a negotiation, or a commercial transaction. We need not try to purchase freedom for our feet to find purchase on its often rough terrain.
Like Hawk, our souls have the ability to lift their wings and fly free.
Like Hawk, we are, always and at the center of all things, an independent spirit.
~ Aji
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