Ronnie James is an Indigenous organizer and activist in the Mutual Aid tradition in central Iowa.
To walk a path of Doing The Truth is a battle with a very young culture. Telling the truth is comparably easy, we have our oral histories, art and traditions created and carried on, histories printed by thoses that found a way to the presses. We can recount the stories and lessons that survived colonialism.
But to do the truth, to live a life that enforces what we once had, a life and culture that made a millennia of humanity possible to thrive, is to be at war with what has defined and destroyed this world for too long.
We, those that conspire to live the truth, have chosen to honor our histories of cooperation. We know, with all that we have, that a world of competition and conquest is the opposite of how we gained the knowledges that propelled our abilities to create the sciences and the art and architecture of beautiful societies that our ancestors built, and we draw our strength from that to continue, to create, a world our future generations can thrive in.
It has only been a very short time that the world has been this way, which is the proof that it doesn't have to stay this way.