Day 22. Sovereignty is Sacred – Nations Within Nations.
Sovereignty is not only a matter of politics, it is an expression of the sacred. Indigenous sovereignty honors the right of peoples to live, lead, and love in alignment with their ancestral teachings. It is the embodiment of spiritual autonomy.
From the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s Great Law of Peace to the Lakota principle of Mitákuye Oyás’in (“all my relations”), Indigenous nations have governed through consensus, relational ethics, and responsibility to the Earth long before colonial borders existed. Reclaiming sovereignty today, whether through land defense, cultural revitalization, or language preservation, is both resistance and renewal.
As Unitarian Universalists, our commitment to justice calls us to honor these movements not as allies “helping,” but as kin learning to repair relationship. To affirm Indigenous sovereignty is to affirm the sacred right of every people to self-determine their spiritual and communal destiny.
“Decolonization is not a metaphor, it is the rematriation of everything stolen.” – Eve Tuck & K. Wayne Yang
Reflection: How does your community embody respect for Indigenous sovereignty in practice, beyond land acknowledgment?
Learn More
- Read Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance by Nick Estes, a Sicangu American community organizer, journalist, and historian at the University of Minnesota. He has cofounded The Red Nation and Red Media.
- Support NDN Collective – an Indigenous-led organization dedicated to building Indigenous power. Through organizing, activism, philanthropy, grantmaking, capacity-building and narrative change, we are creating sustainable solutions on Indigenous terms.
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