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The Fourth of July arrives each year with a familiar rhythm: fireworks bursting across night skies, parades winding through town squares, and grills fired up in backyards. For many, it’s a day to celebrate independence, to wave Old Glory and reflect on what it means to be an American.
For Indigenous peoples, like me, and members of many other communities whose histories are entangled with displacement and injustice, the Fourth of July can feel complicated or bittersweet, and I have experienced all of those mixed emotions. Since becoming a mother, I am always mindful of how to practice rematriation on a daily basis. For me, that means focusing less on our painful history of colonization– which was already in place long before 1776– and focusing more on what July 4 represents: revolutionary action.
Even if the promises of justice, freedom and liberty for all were not extended to my people for hundreds of years after the Declaration of Independence was created–Native Americans didn’t gain American citizenship until 1924– the idea of fighting for freedom is as much a part of my Indigeneity as my devotion to honoring and protecting this land into which many, many generations of my grandmothers have gone.
Regardless of citizenship, my ancestors were always citizens of the great Navajo Nation, just as all Native American people are citizens of their respective sovereign nations first and American citizens second. In this way our communities were the first on this continent to practice patriotism, fight for freedom, and speak of revolution. The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 is a great example of this, as is the Wounded Knee Occupation of 1973, and the #NoDAPL Movement in 2016 .
As a storyteller, I envision the Fourth of July as a day to reclaim memory and tell fuller stories. To gather with family not just for fireworks and burgers, but to remember our own histories of resilience and revolution, including those that happened on other lands, like Ireland, for example. In the words of the great American poet Tom Petty, “Everybody’s had to fight to be free.”
The Fourth of July can be a day to honor the warriors—those who served this country in uniform, and those who defended their languages, cultures, and lands through other means. It can be a day to stand in our truth while looking toward a future where freedom isn’t just a promise, but a reality for all who seek, or whose ancestors sought refuge here on Turtle Island.
And when I think about patriotism, I think about what we say in Navajo: “hózhǫ́ǫ́ naashá.” It means to walk in beauty and in harmony with the world around us, including other people. Hózhǫ́ǫ́ naashá reminds me that the greatest kind of love for a place is the kind that seeks to make it better, not disrupt its harmony. This Fourth of July I wish you all hózhǫ́ǫ́ naashá with one another and our beautiful, sacred Mother Earth.
