On Saturday, October 10, Jean-Luc Pierite, (Tunica-Biloxi) president of the North American Indian Center of Boston, standing on the state house steps, denounced the ‘do-nothing’ legislature for failing to do its job. “Not only have they failed to pass the Mass Indigenous Legislative Initiative bills, basic common sense bills, year after year, but they have failed to pass bills to support trans people, women, and immigrants. Governor Maura Healey has failed to lead them. Shame!
And the crowd gathered in protest on Indigenous Peoples Day responded: ‘Shame!’
Pierite introduced three Indigenous women, Sam, (Mashpee Wampanoag), Kaylee (Diné), and Aiyana (White Mountain Apache), college students who delivered the following speech on behalf of the United American Indians of New England:
Resistance is Why We Remain
Today, we gather on the homelands of the Massachusett People, and it is with deep respect that we acknowledge their presence, past and present, as we stand on Land marked by their resistance and commitment to remain. (Learn more at: massachusetttribe.org)
We gather here today in support of Indigenous legislation (see below) because Indigenous Peoples Day cannot be reduced to celebration of our existence when colonization remains ongoing. It is not about performative land acknowledgements or commemorations on colonized ground. It is about honoring the resistance that carried us here. We did not survive to become spectators to the colonial project. We survived to resist, for our Kin here and across every border they drew to divide us.
Today is about telling the truth in the settler state that has lied about us, whitewashed our stories and relentlessly attacked our bodies and bloodlines for generations. It’s about ending the violence that never stopped because our People are still being targeted. Our women and two-spirit Kin are still missing and murdered because our cases are denied media attention. Our youth still face an astonishing rate of death by suicide (two to four times the national average) because we are denied adequate mental health resources and suppression of our lifeways. Our communities are made poor by the structures of racial capitalism imposed upon us, because our ways of living and relation threatened a system that feeds on stolen Land and stolen labor, and because we knew better.
This is not the past. These are the conditions of settler colonialism still playing out now. These are symptoms of a system built to erase us.
This is the legacy of settler colonialism that continues to split across our Homelands. It tears into Land. It raises monuments to war criminals. It buries our stories under concrete and corporations. It poisons the soil with industrial cash crop agriculture and crowds out native plants. It destroys the ecosystems our ancestors co-created for millennia through the construction of data centers that permit the newest form of settler surveillance.
And yet, we are still here.
This is about confronting a city like Boston that has criminalized us and murdered us. Until 2005, a law in Boston barred Indigenous People from entering the city without an escort. This is a city built on bloodshed, where streets still bear the names of our colonizers, where our children are taught that genocide is synonymous with ‘discovery.’ The City of Boston is not absolved of its sin.
We speak to you from Massachusetts, our “great hill, small place,” where our words still mark your streets and towns, kept as trophies of conquest. They took our name and left our People unnamed. We are not your trophies. We are still here. Let us not forget.
This summer, settlers celebrated the 250th birthday of their nation built on our stolen Land and buried bones. They raised their flag of conquest once more. To them, it is a symbol of freedom. To us, it is the symbol of genocide that began long before it was ever sewn. It flew over the Trail of Tears. It flew over Wounded Knee. It flew over boarding schools. It flew over every treaty signed and every treaty broken. We do not rise for it.
Call it hatred. We call it memory.
The first “American” revolution was not theirs. Three hundred and fifty years ago Metacom’s War was a true fight for freedom. In 1675, Metacom united our warriors against those who had betrayed every treaty and violated every promise. For fourteen fierce months, our warriors brought Plymouth Colony to its knees, and for one defiant moment, we threatened to drive the settlers back into the sea from which they came. Our warriors knew every tree, every stream, every shadow of this Land. It was ours, and we fought like it. Even then, even in war, we held fast to who we were. They say we lost, but we refused to become what they were. We knew we could not scorch the Land to save it. We could not win by destroying what we were fighting to protect. We chose humanity and kinship. They knew of neither.
Our resistance is older than their nation. When their empire falls, we will remain. So we remember. We mourn. And we resist, because we are still here. We refuse to abandon our indigenous Kin in Palestine, in Sudan, in Congo, in Kashmir, in West Papua, in all nations resisting occupation. From Turtle Island to Palestine we acknowledge the settler machine that sought to erase our legacies. We are here because our ancestors resisted. Every one of us descends from someone who refused to be the last.
Resistance is why we remain. That is why we cannot condemn resistance to occupation, wherever it occurs. You cannot mourn a people’s death while condemning the means by which they tried to live. You cannot honor their suffering while demanding they suffer quietly. Whoever stands in solidarity with our corpses but not our rockets is a hypocrite.
Today and every day we demand: Indigenous Peoples Day, recognized and honored. Legislation rooted in Indigenous voices, not imposed, but born of our ideas. The freedom of our comrades, and of all political prisoners who dare to resist the viciousness of the settler state and its ties to genocide. The return of our sisters and brothers stolen by ICE, who sought sanctuary on our homelands, only to be called ‘illegal’ on stolen land by those who themselves occupy these places as settlers. We are not free until we are all free.
We demand the abolition of settler systems, police that occupy our communities, borders that divide our homelands, pipelines that poison our life sources, and settler curricula that erases our history. We demand reinvestment in community and culture. We fight for the liberation of all Indigenous peoples because Indigenous liberation does not stop at colonial borders. Indigenous Peoples Day means global indigenous solidarity. It means recognizing that our struggles are connected, and that our liberation will be nothing if it is not collective.
We demand divestment from genocide. We demand divestment from oil industries profiting off the degradation of our homelands, from war eliminating populations across oceans, from colonial education that refuses to see us, from every machine that feeds on Indigenous life. We demand that Land and Life be treated as sacred, not just here, but everywhere. We refuse settler comfort on stolen Land. And we must remember that to protect the Land is to protect the People, and to protect the People is to protect the future. We Indigenous People are not myths of the past, but living nations who have never stopped evolving and resisting.
Showing up for Indigenous voices cannot be a one day performance. It must be an everyday promise because this Land is still stolen, and comfort is complicity if it ignores the pain of dispossession. Indigenous Peoples Day requires us to resist a non-action oriented Indigenous Peoples Day. It means we do not celebrate survival without also demanding justice. Our struggle has not been forfeited. Our fire has not gone out. And if you are here, standing with us, then you carry the responsibility to amplify, to protect, and to honor our truth. To our Indigenous relatives in the crowd, happy Indigenous Peoples Day. May this day be yours. May it be ours. May it be for our ancestors. For our children. For the Land beneath our feet. May it be more than a celebration. May it be a reckoning and may it be a promise.
May it be a promise that our descendants will inherit more than just wounds. That they will inherit Land, language, culture, and liberation. A promise that we will not be erased. That we will reclaim what was stolen. That we will protect our Kin and our future.
It is the promise that Indigenous sovereignty is non-negotiable, and that every step forward is made with the fire of those who came before us and the hope of those yet to come. The promise is: we are still here. And we are not done.
Editor’s note: these are the five bills backed by the Mass Indigenous Legislative Agenda. Committee chairs have told us some of these bills receive more supportive testimony than any other bills under their purview, year after year. But after they emerge from committee with positive recommendations, the white majority leadership in the legislature refuses to let them pass.
Call Speaker of the House Ron Mariano: 617-722-2500 (Ronald.Mariano@mahouse.gov and Senate President Karen Spilka: 617-722-1500 (Karen.Spilka@masenate.gov) and demand passage of these five Indigenous-backed, reparative bills: Ban Native Mascots in our Public Schools (S.312 – H.575) Celebrate and Teach Native History and Living Cultures in our Public Schools (S.444 – H.628) Indigenous Peoples Day for Massachusetts Now! (S.2113 – H.3292) Protect Native Heritage (S.2335 – H.3597) Improve Educational Outcomes for Native Students (S.412 – H.649)