ABSTRACT
Indigenous nations faced with the many threats to the continuing vitality of the earth. Used to open and close meetings, The Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address is a ritual which expresses human beings’ recognition of their place on the Earth and all the beings that sustain life. The Haudenosaunee are Native Nations whose original homeland is in New York State. This chapter argues that a currently available text, one of many versions, is relevant to futures and learnings because it functions to create open-mindedness by focussing peoples’ attention on the interconnected relationships between the Earth, sky and all that lives in-between. The chapter interprets four themes: how the Address generates a communal vision of gratitude for these relationships, clearing away grief and hostility; how speakers of the Oneida language interpret its meaning as offering concepts of kinship, opening people’s minds so they can let go of grief and hostility and take responsibility to use their energies for sustaining life; how reframing colonization provides a deeper appreciation of this ritual; and how the global pandemic offers human communities ways to change from war, fossil fuel industries, capitalism and habitat destruction to a consciousness of our interconnectedness to one another and to all life. The Thanksgiving Address incorporates the future by increasing the collective memory of the balance within an ecosystem or “our place”, and by offering a model to change conscious and unconscious behaviours. To create Indigenous futures means learning and teaching about those ways that inspires global change.
