The President of the United States has issued a racist proclamation this morning celebrating manifest destiny. I won't share - you can find it yourself.

Indigenous Peoples Day is not about taking something away. It is about rewriting history, though, by telling the truth.

What we choose to celebrate reveals what we value.

Whether it is the Confederacy or Colonization, celebrating and revering those figures shows that we (you) value them. It also says something else:

We don't value the human beings on the other side of that equation.

In telling the tales of colonizers, we (you) have been the ones to rewrite history, and ignore or even villify the human beings who lost their bodies, lives, way of life, and lands in the process.

Celebrating those invented stories does harm today. It continues to take something from Indigenous people who live today: our dignity, and our truth.

Celebrating violent colonizers tells us, "Your story does not matter. What happened to you was good."

This country cannot get right with us (Indigenous people) and with itself until it tells the truth.

That doesn't mean casting America as "bad." But, it does mean telling the truth instead of lies.

And it means honoring the people who paid with their bodies, their lives, their way of life, and their lands to build the things that we (you) value.

There was a steep cost to building this country. It wasn't only paid by explorers and soldiers, and "founding fathers."

The steepest price was paid by millions of people who had everything taken from them. Literally everything.

Despite that, Indigenous People still serve this country and even love this country.

The least that we (you) can do - the absolute least - is to take one single damn day to NOT celebrate the colonizers who imposed that price. To take one damn day to NOT celebrate a lie.

Take one day to acknowledge the truth: Indigenous People were here, are here, & paid for this