Bald Eagle.
Our Grandfather.
It’s the symbol that unites our peoples, by which we all are known to others.
It’s the symbol that was taken by the colonizers as their own. Again.
It’s the messenger to the Mystery: Strong, powerful, able to communicate and commune alike with the spirits as it wings from the greatest heights to earth and back again.
On this day, when the world celebrates the colonizer but we celebrate the survivor, it’s a symbol of so much more.
There is no one word that captures it, and that is fitting, since at his best Eagle soars unbounded, free. And so it is with us: No reservation of land or spirit can contain our pride, our joy, our strength, our very lives and souls.
We remain, yes, but as much more than remnants. We are fully alive; we sing and dance and love and mourn; we celebrate our victories, whether stopping a new scar upon sacred land or hailing the birth of another child. Our cultures thrive, our voices sing, our feet dance, our spirits — and Spirits — rise and renew and rejoice in our ways.
We endure, yes, but it’s not all hardship and privation, as the word implies, not merely getting past what’s difficult simply to exist. No, we live. We thrive; we speak; we pass on the stories and the words; we paint and sculpt and carve and fashion what is tangible into something that is so much more, that leaves our mark on the world for time immemorial, just as our ancestors did, that tells our children and their children that we were here, we lived, we handed our world to them to likewise live and thrive, even unto the seventh generation and beyond.
What Eagle symbolizes, on this day . . . it is not even hope, exactly, though that is here, too: more an immanent assurance in who we are and that we shall remain, yes, but more, we shall simply be.
From the description accompanying its entry in the Wingéd Ones section of our Photography Gallery:
BEING
Leave the relative safety of the branch, now gray and bare, of the slowly-petrifying tree.
Spring up, into the currents of the winter air, reach out, embrace the clear thin sky.
Leap, with soft, strong wings spread wide, smoky feathers touching the face of the winds.
Glide above this earth that is ours, up toward the place where Spirit dwells, to listen closely for the words to bring back to firmer ground.
Like Eagle, we put our faith in the winds to carry us where we are to go, and always, always, to bring us back home.
Like Eagle, we are, and we shall be.
On this day, it is enough to remember. To celebrate, in defiance of the dominant culture’s insistence on honoring the destructive act of a killer who sparked genocide on two continents, the very fact that we survive and thrive.
Here.
This earth, as it was given to us. Our ways, as they were given to us. Our names, as they were given to us. They are past and present merged into one continuous hoop, our ancestors and our children, our history and our future yet to be.
They are.
We are.
~ Aji
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