Pilamaye Le Uni Piya

"Thank You We Live" Inscription inside Native Remembrance Monument at Little Bighorn National Monument;

"Generosity, Compassion, Sacrifice";

"IN order to HEAL our GRANDMOTHER EARTH we must UNIFY through peace."

On our way back from Casper, Wyoming this past May, my Mom and I stopped to see Little Bighorn, the battlefield where General George Custer of the United States lost horribly to unified natives, led by Tatanke Iyotake, or Sitting Bull, of the Lakota people. It was a victory to the tribes only that they were not the ones to die in vast numbers, for once. While there, I had Mom snap a picture of me next to an inscription (above) of Sitting Bull inside a beautiful monument built to honor the natives' tragic part in the story of the so-called American-Indian Wars--something by and large ignored even now when we discuss the topic of our tribes and the state of the reservations they occupy.

The family of Tatanke Iyotake signed the inscription "Pilamaye Le Uni Piya" which, according to the inscription, means "Thank You We Live." It is this journey I will be remembering this Independence Day--because there are far too many people in America who do not have freedom or independence.

July 4, Independence Day, is a national holiday in America, honoring when we became a country free from tyranny and oppression—well, the white men anyway. As we all gear up to drink too much, eat red white and blue desserts, and skimp around in American flag bikinis and lighting illegal firecrackers that scare the dogs (the only creatures we all seem TO care about), REMEMBER what actually matters about our country. REALIZE and pay attention to what Donald Trump and his regime are doing to the very fabric of who we are. A very fabric that is being pissed on and burned by a bunch of spoiled wealthy immoral jackasses who really like creating fear. They like fear as much and probably more than they like the billions of dollars in blood money they roll in every night dreaming of an America where they can rape whomever they want to—oh wait…

But also don’t forget that all Donald Trump and his regime need to secure full power this year in November is a nice little terrorist attack—nothing brings Americans together better than a whole lot of us dying so we can continue to waste tax dollars on wars that just create more international violence.

Meanwhile, we are jailing immigrant families and terrorize them by separating children from parents, all of whom are here to escape extreme violence in their own countries that is, in large part, due to our own foreign policy.

One has to wonder what principles America has at all anymore.