11/10/2025
When I hear words like “Columbus, the original American hero,” I feel a heaviness in my chest — not because I am angry, but because I know how stories can wound when they are told without truth. Our people have lived on this land since long before that man ever dreamed of crossing the ocean. The rivers already had names. The stars already had songs. The people already knew the Creator. To call him a hero, and to erase the names of the ones who were here, is to speak only half a story — and half-stories have always been dangerous things.
When the leaders of a nation use their power to lift up conquest and silence the survivors, it tells me they have not yet learned the meaning of kinship. A true leader does not fear truth. A true leader does not need to erase others to stand tall. Our ancestors taught that greatness is not measured by how far you travel or how many lands you claim, but by how well you remember your relatives — all your relatives — the four-legged, the winged, the swimmers, the crawlers, and the human beings.
When I was young, the old ones told us that stories are medicine, but they can also be poison if told without humility. This proclamation feels like that — words dressed in honor but carrying harm. It forgets the women and children who suffered, the languages silenced, the songs that were not allowed to be sung. It forgets that this so-called discovery began a long night for our peoples, one we are still waking from.
I do not speak these things to divide us. I speak them because truth must be spoken if there is ever to be peace. We do not need to hate Columbus to honor our own story. But we must not let his name stand above the countless ancestors who greeted him with open hands and were repaid with chains.
Today, when the government once again chooses to remember the colonizer and forget the Indigenous, it is not surprising — it is just a reminder that our work is not done. We must keep teaching the children who they are. We must keep speaking our languages, planting our medicines, walking softly on the land that still remembers us.
So I say this: we will not disappear because a proclamation forgets us. We were here before Columbus, and we will be here long after the politicians are gone. The land remembers. The water remembers. The wind carries our names. And as long as we breathe, we will keep telling the whole story — the one that begins not with discovery, but with belonging.
—Kanipawit Maskwa
ᑲᓂᐸᐏᐟ ᒪᐢᑿ
