Every night has been a night of fear for what I will wake up to. This has been the case since Trump won the GOP nomination last year. This is not new. It mirrors fears I have had most my life as an Indigenous woman of mixed (i.e. Scottish and Puerto Rican) heritage. However, as I close the screen tonight, I am fully aware that today everything I am has been vocally threatened by the [il]legitimate head of a settler state. I am not from Standing Rock. I am not from the Dakotas. But I am from a land base that relies upon our water to carry on our existence as Ojibwe people. We too are being threatened by Trump's stance on oil interests. Here we have one of the few places in the entire world where manoomin, natural wild rice, grows on the water. Here, we live where our ancestors settled (or were forced to settle after settler policies of land theft). I am terrified. And I am not terrified because I cannot and will not budge another inch. This land, this water, is intimately tied to who we are as people. This land and this water is what I have always intended to let my future children experience as they realize who they are as indigenous peoples, as ojibweg, as anishinaabeg. I wrote my truth on instagram today. This is not unexpected. This is business as usual. And as usual Indigenous people will fight for water, for land, for future generations. We are the result of our ancestors' hardest struggles and their wildest dreams and it has never been more clear to me that indigenous people will not back down. We will not submit to oil interests and we will not let the corrupt settler state define our relationships to the earth. We have nowhere else to exist but here in our homelands. And history has shown we are survivors, even against the most horrendous atrocities. I am going to close out tonight with that belief, with that love for Anishinaabeg everywhere (anishinaabeg being a human, an Indian, and/or an Ojibwe person). Gimiigwechiwendaminimin. Nimiigwechiwendaan o'ow aki.
(Ps. I have not written or spoken ojibwemowin in months, excuse any mistakes)
9:50 CST, U.S., January 24th 2017.
Signed,
An Anishinaabekwe
