Life Changed Forever

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From Native News Online, Leonard Peltier shares his Indian Boarding School story.

Editor’s Note: This first-person account from Leonard Peltier about his experiences at the Wahpeton Indian School from 1952 to 1955 was sent to Native News Online by one of his longtime advisers. Its authenticity was confirmed by Peltier’s attorney, Kevin Sharp.  

My name is Leonard Peltier and I am 77 years old. I am a member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribe. I am Anishanaabe and Dakota. I was taken to Wahpeton Indian School, an Indian boarding school, in Wahpeton, North Dakota when I was nine years old and did not leave until I was 12. This is my story.

When I lost my grandfather in 1952, life changed forever. He was a good and kind man and he was my mentor and knew how to live off the land. But then he got pneumonia and did not survive. I will never forget watching him die from the foot of his bed. Even now, that sad memory comes back to me as I lay in my bunk at night in a federal penitentiary.

About a year after my grandpa died, my grandma had to go to the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) to beg for help for her and me, my sister Betty Ann and cousin Pauline. As it turned out, that made things much worse for us. Now, we had to worry about the BIA agents coming to take us away. I grew up with the stories. I was old enough to know what happened when the government took you away. I knew some children never came home. Click here to keep reading.

The Courage to Quit

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Uncategorized2 Comments
Image credit: “Broccoli florets find their seed after a long winter,” May 2021, Detroit, Michigan, photo by Lucia Wylie-Eggert.

By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann. This piece first appeared in Geez 64: The Holy Fool.
My mom once wrote, “We need to recall, to intuit, to dream the life we’re called to and then make a plan that allows us to strip down enough to have it” (The Witness, 1998).

We stand at a moment of mass resignation. Folks are leaving work in every sector. After years of a pandemic and the impending threat of climate change, folks are seizing control of this one precious life. Yet to walk away is terrifying. By most standards . . . foolish. Well, we are here to bless those fools in our midst. May these words offer courage and company.

Oh holy one
who dabbles as a trickster
yet calls us to be unafraid.
Wrap your spirit around
this holy one before you.

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Co-Creating Visions and Dreams

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire2 Comments

Big News from Radical Discipleship co-founder Lydia Wylie-Kellermann. We celebrate with Lydia and her partner Erinn and their two children Isaac and Cedar!!!!

I write with big news from the Wylie-Faheys. This August, I will become the Executive Director at Kirkridge Retreat & Study Center. The retreat space is nestled in the mountains in eastern Pennsylvania with the Appalachian Trail running through.

We do not take this move lightly. The streets of Detroit have formed my political and theological awareness. My neighbors have taught me what it means to love and be loved. This block has instilled in me the power of community and joy in the midst of crisis. Detroit has been and will always be my greatest teacher when it comes to struggle, imagination, and beloved community. I love this place. Tenderly pulling up these roots will be one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

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Foolish Ancestors: Tricksters from Around the World

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Image credit: “Francis and the Birds”, Giclee, 17.5” x 14.75”, Copyright 2015 by John August Swanson.

By M. Ashe Van Steenwyk. This article first appeared in Geez 64: The Holy Fool.
Within Christianity there is a strange subset of the prophet called the “holy fool.”

Holy fools defy social convention in both word and action – sometimes in bizarre ways – out of their religious devotion.

In the West, Saint Francis is our typical holy fool. Born in the late 12th century, Francis was known for famously renouncing his inheritance by stripping naked, kissing lepers, preaching to forest creatures, and living a life of such stark simplicity and deep generosity that it sparked a movement that continues to today.

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Intercessions are Being Launched

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Art as Resistance, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

By Ken Sehested

Written in response to a friend’s agonizing note reporting on the
harrowing violence unfolding in Ukraine

We, from this distance and in our negligent comfort and
delinquent affluence, lack the ability to stretch our hands to
yours to feel your shivers; to enlarge our hearts so that they
beat in rhythm with your sobs; to train our eyes so that they
rise above the frivolous, paltry distractions, immune to grief,
comforted in our colonized minds, asking only
what more is there to drink?
what more, to eat?
what more, to abduct our attention from the brutal fate
of distant, disposable victims of imperial lust and
bloated arrogance?

Kyrie eleison, Lord have mercy.

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Which Side Will We Be On?

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Race, Subverting Empire1 Comment

By Lindsay Airey

White folks, how will we drain the poison from our communities?

Repent?

Take the assault on Black Life personally, be mobilized to grief and rage that takes action?

Get at least as passionate & dedicated to rooting out the cancer of white supremacy as many of us get devoted to fighting the biological cancers that take our loved ones?

Protect & fight for the rights & dignity of our siblings being unaccountably targeted, imprisoned, displaced & massacred like we fight for our own families, our own children?

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This Genocidal Process

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An excerpt from Friday’s Democracy Now interview with Nick Estes,  author of the book Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. The interview was conducted in the wake of the new Interior Dept report documenting the deaths of 500 Indigenous children at Indian boarding schools run or supported by the federal government in the United States.

…this is a very emotional experience for a lot of Indigenous people in this country. And it should be an emotional experience for non-Indigenous people in this country. This is quite a historic moment in time. Although it’s not new news to Indigenous people, it might be new news to those who are hearing this horrific genocidal process that has taken place.

I think, you know, there’s a reason why the forcibly transferring of children from one group to another group is an international legal definition of genocide. That’s what we’re talking about, because taking children, or the process of Indian child removal, has been one strategy for terrorizing Native families for centuries, from the mass removal of Native children from their communities into boarding schools, as this new report lays out, from their communities into their widespread adoption and fostering out to mostly white families, which happened primarily in the 20th century.

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