09/30/2025
On this day of Truth and Reconciliation, we pause.
We listen.
We remember.
Across this land, the dawn rises over rivers that once carried children away from their homes. Mist lifts from the lakes where grandmothers once sang lullabies now lost to silence. Cedars still hold the breath of prayers whispered in secret. Stones still hold the weight of small bodies never returned. The earth remembers. The wind remembers.
We stand in the presence of that memory, on land older than any boundary. We stand where moccasins wore paths to ceremony, where drums beat like heartbeats against the night. The loons still call across the water. The wolves still watch from the tree line. The sky still arcs wide enough to hold our grief.
Creator, Ancestors, Grandmothers and Grandfathers — we ask for courage. Courage to open our eyes to the truth that has always been here. Courage to let that truth soften our hearts instead of harden them. Courage to walk a different path than the one that brought us here.
On this day we remember the children who never came home. We remember the parents who wept without answers. We remember the families who have carried silence as their inheritance. We remember the Elders who kept the language alive in whispers, the ones who refused to forget.
We hold this silence not as an end but as a beginning. We commit ourselves to be the generation that chooses relationship over denial, that plants love in the places where pain has taken root. We commit to listening until our listening turns into action. We commit to making the land safe again for every child, every voice, every dream.
May the rivers teach us how to move forward.
May the trees teach us how to stand.
May the stones teach us how to endure.
May the fire teach us how to transform.
Today is a day of mourning, but also a day of promise. The promise that we will not turn away. That we will carry these truths in our bodies like medicine. That we will walk slowly, together, on the path that leads home.
For the children. For the Ancestors. For all of us.
