"If this nation has a long way to go before all our people are truly created equally without regard to race, religion, or national origin, it has even farther to go before achieving anything that remotely resembles equal treatment for other creatures who called this land home before humans ever set foot upon it...while the species themselves... fish, fowl, game, and the habitat they live in-have given us unparalleled wealth, they live crippled in their ability to persist and live in conditions of captive squalor...this enslavement and impoverishment of nature is no more tolerable or sensible than enslavement and impoverishment of other human beings...perhaps it is because we are the messengers that not only our sovereignty as Native governments but our right to identify with a deity and a history, or right to hold too a set of natural lass as practiced for thousands of years is under assault. Now more than ever, tribal people must hold onto their timeless and priceless customs and practices. Ted Strong in the introduction to All Our Relations by Winona LaDuke.
Mr. Strong is an activist for the Columbia River Tribes speaking for the rights of our non human neighbors, especially the salmon people.
No comments:
Post a Comment