Many of us are familiar with our expression Ohnkwe Ohnwe. It is what we use to describe ourselves as the original people of Turtle Island. The approximate translation is “real human being, forever.”

There was never any question that we had a future. We were never tied to a spot on a timeline. We were never frozen in history. We were neither primitive nor at the end of our evolutionary scale. We continued to develop.

The entire concept of Seven Generations was based on knowing that our growth and development would require a priority placed on the impacts on the unborn faces — those ones who would come long after us.

But for all the certainty of those that have come long before us, our future would not be a sure thing, certainly not over the last two centuries and certainly not going forward from here. That path, so meticulously crafted by the tens of millions of feet of those that came before us, has been so neglected and deviated from that it is only Creation and our language that guide our feet back to it. But that course correction back to that great path, the Kaianerehkowa, is not a trip backwards or back in time. It is a trip forward, into the future...