14 Captivating Quotes from Indigenous Public Speaker, Lyla June Johnston
Thanksgiving is a time of celebration for many. For others, it's a painful time with memories and reminders of systemic injustices.
The US has just celebrated Thanksgiving, a joyous tradition that encourages gratitude and unity. It’s not fun and feasts for everyone, though. The genocidal events leading up to its celebration heavily persecuted the Indigenous population, and this discrimination is still happening.
The day after Thanksgiving is Native American Heritage Day, and it’s time to remember their painful history while lifting their voices.
Lyla June was a guest on my podcast Fractal Friends, where she gracefully shared her life experiences, Diné history, heartfelt journeys, and much more.
You can listen to the full, humbling episode here.
Lyla June is an Indigenous artist, scholar, community organizer, and public speaker. More than anything, she is a true warrior of love.
She descends from Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne), and European ancestors. Her story is one of deep healing from trauma: both intergenerational and her own. She has worked hard to carry forward the wisdom of the people native to the North American continent (also known as Turtle Island) and uncover the history of her European ancestors.
Her life and research have shown us that we are all on a healing journey, and we all have an opportunity to remember our deep humanity and connection with the earth. It is time to remember that we all descend from healers.
As Lyla June says, “Love is the answer, no matter what the question.”
Let’s look at some thought-provoking quotes from my conversation with her. I’ve included audiograms, which are fully accessible as they also show the words on the video.
Lyla June touches on difficult topics like sexual abuse, violence, and discrimination, so please only read on if you feel able. Thank you.
On Pocahontas:
Thanksgiving is a lot like Columbus Day because it’s the misinterpretation of history to legitimize the colony. Just like Pocahontas, they made this beautiful Disney movie about her. She was just a little girl when she got bartered into the English colony where she was forced to marry a much older white man.
I personally like the movie Pocahontas. I think it’s a cute movie: it has a lot of really good lessons and ideas in it, but it’s just not true. It’s not what happened. Even though it’s really beautiful, it misrepresents what European settlers did here.
On her European lineage:
On being a good warrior of healing:
From what my elders told me, the battle is between what is close to Creator and what is far from Creator. So it’s a real battle, it’s real blood, it’s real pain, it’s real death. It’s not like a metaphor; it’s a battle. Yet, at the same time, no matter how many of us die and no matter how much of our blood gets shed, there is a spirit that will remain untouched, invincible, and unscathed through all of this.
However, the body of the earth and the body of the people are worth fighting for. And in this time, we have an opportunity to become instruments within that battle. And the fitness of our instrument will depend on how deeply we have healed ourselves and how committed we are to beginning each day in prayer, loving ourselves, and ceasing the cycles perpetuated through us.
So, I think of each of us as these warriors, these implements within the battle. We can be vessels of healing or destruction, and no matter what we’ve been through, we have the ability to be a vessel of healing. Again, that is just dependent on how much we’re able to heal ourselves, pray in the morning to be an instrument of healing, and love ourselves and preserve ourselves.
That’s a thing that a lot of women get caught up in. We want to help the world so bad that we’re even willing to sacrifice ourselves. And we have no idea about what boundaries are and how they work, and if we’re allowed to have them.
And that’s part of being a good warrior, too, having a shield and knowing that you’re allowed it to protect your space. You’re allowed to be happy, healthy. You’re allowed to not feel uncomfortable around the people that you’re with; you’re allowed to feel good around the people you’re with.
On goddess culture:
On true reparations:
We have to acknowledge that native people are still living in the hardest to live places. Almost all of us were relocated from our original homeland. They put us in these really challenging, drought-ridden places where we don’t even know how to gather food because that’s not our traditional way of life in those biomes.
So, if we really want to do this Jubilee say, “Hey, look, we’re all here. Let’s get back together as a human family. We’re going to have to level the mountains and fill the valleys. We’re going to have to redistribute land, wealth, power.” And slowly, it’s happening.
I would like every Thanksgiving day for a hundred thousand acres of land to be repatriated to Indigenous people. That would make sense for us to not just say we’re all family, but to act like it. To take care of those less fortunate, which, at this point, is Indigenous peoples.
On traumatic experiences:
I thought it was going to be sacred, nice, tender, and gentle. And I was going to be in love and all this stuff. No, it was bad.
After I got home that night, I remember I was at a crossroads, and I said to myself, either I could admit that was rape, and I could admit that was wrong, and I could feel how horrible that truly felt and how cruel this person really is.
Or I could tell myself that I wanted to do that. It was great. I’m not part of the virgin club anymore. I’m up with the adults; I’m a big girl. I don’t want to feel like a victim, so let’s go with that one. That one’s a lot easier to stomach, so I went in that direction.
There are lots of problems with doing that, but one of them is convincing myself. I cooperated with that: I “wanted” that. And so, by doing that, I took on all that slime, everything. I put it right on my shoulders by saying I wanted to do that. And I was doing that just to avoid feeling the pain of what happened. From that day forward, I was not the same Lyla.
To let myself feel loved, light, and worthy again, I had to go back to that scary memory, which was just one of many. I had to say, okay, that wasn’t my fault. And therefore, whose fault was it? This guy was reckless with my whole body, mind, and soul. I said, wow, that’s really messed up. And if you look back on it, not only did he do that, but I was five years younger than him, so he knew what he was doing. So that’s harder to forgive. When they did it on purpose, they knew what they were doing.
Once I forgave that, boom, I’m a lot more free, myself again. And I’m allowing Creator to speak through me because I know I’m not dirty.
I thought I had become so tainted, horrible, and gross that how could I even let Creator move through me? So I think that you’re right. I believe that self-forgiveness is the key to everything. And often, it’s not us we need to be forgiving; there are actually people we need to forgive.
On self-healing:
On Thanksgiving:
The real question we need to be asking this Thanksgiving season is: Why is it so scary to face the truth of what we’ve done here? What are we gaining by pretending it didn’t happen? And that’s a big question I don’t expect anyone to be able to answer. Because if we were able to face these things, we wouldn’t be where we’re at right now, but it’s just too hard.
People can’t look at it in the face. It delegitimizes the whole United States. Are we ready to lose this whole imaginary thing called the United States? Are any of us prepared to do that? Because I think that’s what Thanksgiving is calling us to do. Are we ready to truly understand that this whole thing is completely illegitimate, illegal, wrong, immoral, unethical?
On European horrors and saying sorry:
On learned pain and destruction:
Many of our communities are pretty dysfunctional; we have a lot of incest, rape, drug addiction. A lot of it, and it’s really hardcore, and that doesn’t come from us; that’s not who we are. That comes from the boarding school system, where about two out of three kids were sexually abused.
That comes from the massacre, the concentration camps we were put in. It comes from the soldiers who would come in and rape our villages, a lot of different things. But even though we are pretty dysfunctional, there are subsections of us that somehow healed all that crap that happened to us.
On Indigenous Peoples’ Day
One tiny step in the right direction is Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Transforming Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples’ Day, where we’re taking this really rotten thing, Columbus Day—which I hope most of us know is very offensive to celebrate on this continent—and turning it into a celebration of resilience. We now have events popping off all over the country honoring, educating, healing, gathering, networking, and supporting Indigenous peoples.
I think we could do the same for Thanksgiving. What if we renamed it? Instead of Thanksgiving Day, like Correct History Day or something? (laughter)
On acting with poise and honor:
On forgiveness and alliances:
I think that, ultimately, forgiveness is going to be our greatest tool as Indigenous peoples. If we can let go of that anger, hatred, animosity, and bitterness, we’re going to feel better.
We’re going to feel more clear to fight the battle, to protect our children, our waters, our homelands if we are no longer fighting in reaction to our anger, but we’re fighting in concert with Creator, and knowing that there are a lot of good people out there.
If we were able to extend a hand, many good European Americans would form an alliance with us, and we could get a lot done.
On the vast, unknown Indigenous history:
We have a lot of native wisdom. Diné Bizaad is being spoken to this day by thousands of speakers, and that is a beautiful miracle.
At the same time, we are in a situation where our culture has been so thoroughly altered. It’s gone through so many transformations that it’s hard for even us as native people to know who we were before, not just Columbus but also Erickson and many others. Columbus was kind of late to get here, actually. And a lot of people have been here before him.
But at any rate, about 98% of native people were obliterated. Probably about that much of the languages were obliterated. We were highly sophisticated civilizations. We had complete social systems, sanitation systems, food systems, and socialization systems. There was eldercare, childcare, caring for the women who got their first menstruation, caring for the boys whose voice was cracking and changing into a manly voice.
We had a highly developed system of maintaining social and ecological harmony. By the time historians started writing about our people, we had already been brought to our knees. We had already had 90% of our villages go extinct overnight. So the tribes we know today, such as the Seminole, the Cherokee, even the Diné to some extent, are not representations of what was here before. We’re bands of people who survived and got together.
What was here before was much more vast, complex, and established. Archeologists think that if there are no marks here, if there’s no evidence of a vast civilization being here, then there must not have been a vast civilization.
There must have been a few scattered nomads running around the forest, half-naked. No, we populated the land densely, and we managed the land extensively. But you won’t find evidence of that because we knew that if you left a mark on the earth, you had done something disrespectful. So we tried very hard not to leave marks on the earth.
So anywhere you’re sitting, listening to this, wherever you are on Turtle Island, you can bet right beneath your feet was the site of a very large complex civilization. We’ve been here for hundreds of thousands of years.
They just found Mastodon bones in San Diego with human carvings that were 130,000 years old. Okay. We’ve been here a long time. And so yes, it is a miracle that we have these things still here, but I just want to make it clear that we don’t even know what we don’t know anymore because so much was lost. Oceans of languages, genetic resources have been lost.
Having said that, like I was saying earlier, they can destroy our bodies, they could shed our blood, but the spirit will never die. In that sense, the spirit hasn’t died because love as a principle has managed to survive within our communities.
With forgiveness as my bow and my prayers as my arrows
Pull 'em back and let go: I watch 'em fly like sparrows.
With compassion as my shield and faith down to my marrow
I will walk the Pollen Path even when it gets narrow!
You can listen to the full Fractal Friends episode with Lyla June here.
The podcast is full of thought-provoking discussions, and you can see the complete directory of Fractal Friends episodes here.
You can find Lyla June on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, her website, and her podcast.
You can find more information about the work I do in conflict transformation on my website: http://www.omni-win.com
You can schedule a call with me here: https://calendly.com/duncanautrey
Don’t forget to check out the rest of my posts as I discuss how we can work together to ensure we all win.
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