The Thanksgiving Address was carried in words through forced removal

Evidence

Despite Carlisle, despite exile, despite a siege four hundred years long, there is something, some heart of living stone, that will not surrender. I don’t know just what sustained the people, but I believe it was carried in words. Pockets of the language survived among those who stayed rooted to place. Among those remaining, the Thanksgiving Address was spoken to greet the day: “Let us put our minds together as one and send greetings and thanks to our Mother Earth, who sustains our lives with her many gifts.” Grateful reciprocity with the world, as solid as a stone, sustained them when all else was stripped away. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 937

Categorization

• XREF: Pays off the running Thanksgiving Address thread (ch24-27) — that practice of giving thanks is what history could not take away. — connects to: The Thanksgiving Address is at once ceremony, scientific inventory, and Native science lesson — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 375