An Open Letter to:
President Bill Clinton
The White House
Washington DC October 10, 1993
Dear President and Mrs. Clinton,
Last night, on the grass between the Washington Monument and the
Whitehouse, a unique prayer vigil and an unprecedented historic
meeting took place to the sound of drums you may have heard in your
sleep.
Representatives of many smaller nations within our great nation
gathered there to pray for peace and for the future generations of
all peoples. There were people of the Dine'h (Navajo), Hopi,
Cherokee, Shoshone, Cheyenne, Lakota, Dakota, Nakota, Piscataway,
Micmac, Mohawk, Aztec, Mapuche and many other native nations of
North and South America. The 19th Generation Keeper of the Sacred
Pipe of the Lakota, Dakota, Nakota met for the first time with the
Keeper of the Sacred Hat of the Northern Cheyenne, who had never
before left his nation, but had come with difficulty in his advanced
age to negotiate, after long struggle, the return of ancestral
bones with the Smithsonian.
The Indigenous Americans, including venerated elders, well into
their eighties, stood for hours on end in the sun, wind and rain,
in the cold night and before dawn to greet the sun on two
consecutive days with their prayers for you, Mr. President, and
for all people. Hopi and Dine'h embraced as brothers and sisters,
the way they always have, despite the ongoing efforts of the
government of the United States to separate them with barbed wire
fences and to forcibly relocate them from their traditional homes
to other sides of an artificially created border. A Mohawk told
his fellow Indigenous Americans and the non-Indian supporters
gathered with them of suicides among their youth who despair of
a future. The people together prayed for a presidential pardon
for Leonard Peltier, who remains in prison these many years despite
lack of evidence against him. Many other painful events of the past
and present were told and forgiven in prayer.
While in Washington, these indigenous people were taken on a tour
of the Holocaust Museum, and saw the great, if painful, tribute
paid to the millions of holocaust victims in this monumental,
impressive building. As I pushed the wheelchair of one indigenous
elder through the museum, feeling her pain and thet of the others,
I wondered when our own nation would acknowledge the even greater
holocaust here at home against the indigenous peoples of the
Americas.
We were able to introduce three Dine'h and Hopi elders to Molly
Olson, newly appointed Executive Director of your Council on
Sustainability, who gave generously of her time. We impressed on
her the importance of consulting these elders, who belong not only
to their own nations but to all of us as American Elders, as our
nation discusses sustainability, for they are the ones who are
living testimony to sustainability in all its deepest meaning.
Thank you for your attention.
Your respectfully,
Elizabet Sahtouris, Ph.D.
Geobiologist, author, speaker, environmental/sustainability
Consultant
cc: Washington Post, representatives of indigenous nations,
President's Council on Sustainability
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Michele Lord + If you have come here to help me,
+ you are wasting your time.....
+ But if you have come because
+ your liberation is bound up with mine,
milo@scicom.alphacdc.com + then let us work together.
Aboriginal Woman
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