If we are to survive long term, we need to give the land back, first, to Yethi’nihstenha Mother Earth herself, to her rules and practical laws, and, second, to Indigenous governance and ways of proceeding, which were fashioned within the framework of her rules. To do this, we need to align our laws, as Indigenous people have been telling us all along, with earth’s laws, with what Onondaga naturopathic doctor Johanne McCarthy calls Mother Earth’s house rules, her “ground rules.” Western legal systems cannot give the land back to its own ground rules because they are grounded in a foreign and inappropriate set of basic philosophical assumptions about what land is and what its laws are.

A question I’ve asked myself since my son Kaz suffered the neurological catastrophe that rendered him intellectually disabled: Who will look out for him after I am gone? 

I touch my left popliteal fossa. Left wrist. Left index. I ask the question again. Who will look out for him after I am gone? My right hand repeats the cycle. 

My Northern Lake
Thomas Leduc

Come with me, I’ll show you beauty, show you life,
show you where the loon swallows the sun
and the moon sits in the eye of a snowy owl.
Painted trees shimmer across the landscape,
setting the lakes on fire. Here every 
stroke of our paddle slices the water’s skin,
pushes away our wounds.