◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Chief Seattle Barbaric Yawp I hear you shouting ownership at the sky. I hear you counting rivers as if they were coins, naming forests as if they were empty, calling the land resource so you do not have to call it relative. You say the earth belongs to you, but how can you own your own breath? How can you sell the silence where the deer listens or fence the rain before it falls? You build walls and think they will hold, but the wind does not ask for papers. The salmon does not recognize your borders. The smoke from your fires crosses your lines without apology. You speak of greatness as if it were conquest. You confuse power with noise. You confuse strength with taking and freedom with forgetting. I tell you this, what you do to the land, you do to your children. Not someday, but already. The soil remembers. The water remembers. The dead remember. You mock care and call it weakness. You laugh at restraint and call it loss. But a people who cannot listen will soon hear only echoes of themselves. There is no away to throw things. There is no future without relation. There is no wealth that survives poisoned ground. The earth does not belong to you, you belong to the earth. And when you forget this, the reckoning is not punishment, it is consequence. I do not curse you, I warn you. Listen while there is still time. Speak softly again. Walk as if the ground were holy, because it is.