The International Liberation Reference Person for Native Americans
(Read by Dan Nickerson, as Marcie Rendon was unable to attend the gathering.)
I’m Marcie Rendon, the International Liberation Reference Person for Native Americans.
The story of Native people is not in the past. Each one of you can find a Native person within an hour of you, no matter where you are on this continent, who would be happy to learn RC from you.
In our work as Native people, we recognize the distinction between racism, which means the exploitation and sometimes enslavement of people for their labor, and the genocide of Indigenous people, which means the killing of Native people or the erasing of Native identity and sovereignty for the purpose of exploiting the resources of the land we live on.
The genocide is active and ongoing today, and our goal is to stop it. Native people, in and out of RC, are successfully organizing with allies to stop the state-enforced adoption of Native children into white families and to establish our sovereign right to protect the lakes, rivers, and oceans upon which all life depends.
Recently our work in RC has been clarified to include workshops for Native people who were raised white; white people with Native ancestry; people raised in other identities but with Native heritage, such as Chicano/a people or people in Latin America; and Indigenous people of other continents who have immigrated to North America. The goal of all of this is to reach Native people who are currently living within their culture. In other words, all of us are discharging on genocide and the Native identity so that we can reach out to this exceptionally important group of people in the world. Thank you.
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA