Let Me Walk in Beauty
Chief Yellow Lark, from the book, God Makes the Rivers to Flow
O Great Spirit,
whose voice I hear in the winds
and whose breath gives life to all the world,
hear me.
I am small and weak.
I need your strength and wisdom.
Let me walk in beauty
and let my eyes ever behold the red and purple sunset.
Make my hands respect the things you have made
and my ears grow sharp to hear your voice.
Make me wise so that I may understand the things
you have taught my people.
Let me learn the lessons you have hidden
in every leaf and rock.
I seek strength not to be greater than my brother or sister
but to fight my greatest enemy, myself.
Make me always ready
to come to you with clean hands and straight eyes
So when life fades as the fading sunset
my spirit may come to you without shame.
Less than two weeks from now, on October 12, Indigenous Peoples Day will be recognized around the country. On this day 534 years ago, Christopher Columbus and his men were discovered in the Caribbean wandering lost, trying to find present-day India. Thus began over 500 years of European colonization of the Americas.
Leading up to the 500th anniversary of that fateful encounter, in 1992, I took part in Washington, DC with a dozen others in a 42-day, water-only Fast for Justice and Peace in the Americas. It was initiated by Brian Willson, Scott Rutherford and Diane Fogliatti, and it went from September 1 to October 12.
The overall message of this action and the much broader movement out of which it emerged was that it was long past time to turn away from all that Christopher Columbus represents—racism, slavery, militarism, imperialism and ecological destruction—and commit ourselves to working for a next 500 years very different than the one experienced between 1492 and 1992. There was an Indigenous-led campaign that had been taking action over many months in 1991-92 in support of this essential new direction for the USA and other countries in the Americas. One specific demand was for Columbus Day to be replaced by Indigenous Peoples Day.
Toward the end of the fast, Diane Fogliatti came up with an idea for how to continue to help keep these issues alive: do an organized fast for 12 days, from October 1 to October 12, each year going forward. I ended up taking part in this, helping to lead a People’s Fast for Justice network which did so from 1993 to 2001. Our two demands were for Columbus Day to be renamed Indigenous Peoples Day and for political prisoner Leonard Peltier to be freed, which he finally was as one of President Joe Biden’s last official acts as President on January 20, 2025, his last day in office.
As far as the renaming of October 12th, since 1992 there have been a growing number of localities and states which have officially recognized in some way the second Monday of October as Indigenous Peoples Day, including the states of Alaska, California, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota, Michigan, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin. And responding to this upsurge, Biden signed a proclamation in support of Indigenous Peoples Day.
There’s an awful lot of reasons to be anxious right now, knowing how important it is that there be as massive a repudiation as possible on November 3 of the Trump regime and its apologists in the Republican Party, but it is a very positive thing, something for which to be thankful, that Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas and elsewhere in the world continue to survive, continue to fight for their rights as tribal nations, and continue to give leadership in the existential battle to prevent cascading ecological and societal devastation and for a very different future in the years to come. La lucha continua!
Ted Glick has devoted his life to the progressive social change movement. After a year of student activism as a sophomore at Grinnell College in Iowa, he left college in 1969 to work full time against the Vietnam War. As a Selective Service draft resister, he spent 11 months in prison. In 1973, he co-founded the National Committee to Impeach Nixon and worked as a national coordinator on grassroots street actions around the country, keeping the heat on Nixon until his August 1974 resignation. Since late 2003, Ted has played a national leadership role in the effort to stabilize our climate and for a renewable energy revolution. He was a co-founder in 2004 of the Climate Crisis Coalition and in 2005 coordinated the USA Join the World effort leading up to December actions during the United Nations Climate Change conference in Montreal. In May 2006, he began working with the Chesapeake Climate Action Network and was CCAN National Campaign Coordinator until his retirement in October 2015. He is a co-founder (2014) and one of the leaders of the group Beyond Extreme Energy. He is President of the group 350NJ/Rockland, on the steering committee of the DivestNJ Coalition and on the leadership group of the Climate Reality Check network.
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