A fall breeze lifts colored leaves from tall maples, birch, beech and oak trees as an autumn drizzle softens the piles already on the ground, where a friend’s two-year-old dog pounces and rolls with joy. Turtle Island spans all of North America, including my original home ground here along the Kennebec River and the little farm in a high Rocky Mountain valley that has been home now for decades. So much joy in landscapes all across this continent, a place so many people from around the world now consider “home”.

In the 1920’s, according to historian Heather Cox Richardson, Columbus mattered to Americans who opposed the Ku Klux Klan because celebrating an Italian defended a multicultural rather than a solely British and Protestant society. In more recent years, seventeen states and many tribal nations have reminded the country that the large-scale exchange of plants and animals across both the Atlantic and Pacific might have positively transformed Europe and Asia but the overall effect on the Americas was devastating, with germs and ideologies that decimated up to 90% of the human population already living here. The Native Organizers Alliance salutes the ancestral people who faced militarism, intimidation and imprisonment from government agents since first contact, and supports clear movement toward a different horizon.

The vision of a “future in which all of our descendants will live in a climate healed and returned to its natural balance, and human rights as the law that drives a regenerative economy and a real multi-racial political system” activates the ancestral responsibility tribal nations recognize to protect Mother Earth and all of humanity. As the Acoustic Burro sings in a chorusing refrain, kinship isn’t about blood ties, or even nationalities or species. Kinship reunites Western concepts of separate “kingdoms” of plant, animal, mineral and beyond. As Native Organizer’s director Judith LeBlanc (Caddo) puts it, kinship is about who we welcome into the circle of everyday life.