Tigray rebel groups ‘forcibly recruiting boys as young as 15’ as fighting spreads as reflected on by Elder Thomas Many Feathers
The wind carries an ancient chill across our high northern plains this morning. It stirs the dry prairie grass. This reminds us how fragile life becomes when violence takes hold. Word travels far across Unci Maka, Grandmother Earth, reaching our council fires from the dry hills of Tigray. We hear of young boys, children only fifteen winters old. Rebel groups are now forcibly recruiting boys from streets and homes. They must carry weapons into renewed fighting. This news cuts straight into our hearts. When a people begin to consume their own young to feed the machinery of war, the sacred hoop of life has suffered a grievous fracture.
Our Lakota ways teach us children are wakanyeja. This sacred word carries deep meaning. They are sacred beings. They are the light that kindles the fire of future generations. They do not belong to armies. Furthermore, they do not belong to warlords or broken political compacts. They belong to the Creator. Grandmothers and grandfathers, mothers and fathers, must protect them. They must teach them how to walk in balance. To forcibly strip a child of his innocence is a spiritual theft. To put a rifle into hands meant to learn honest trade, planting, or song, echoes across generations.
The Wisdom of the Seventh Generation and Tigray’s Children
Our elders have long taught us the wisdom of the Seventh Generation. Every decision made by leaders, every law enacted, and every dispute waged must reckon with its future effect. We must consider the children unborn seven generations from now. However, when leaders break peace agreements and round up the youth, they do not think seven generations forward. They do not even see seven days ahead. They are trapped in the blindness of fear, vengeance, and pride. They burn up the community’s seed corn to fight another battle. Consequently, they guarantee only that grief will inherit the land. This is the tragic outcome when groups are forcibly recruiting boys.
Here on our sovereign lands, our families know lasting pain. We experienced having children taken away. For generations, government policies tore our boys and girls from their families. They sent them off to boarding schools. These schools stripped away their language, songs, and spirit. Even now, decades later, the grief remains in our blood and soil. The wounds carved into a family do not close when a treaty is signed or a battle ends. That trauma settles into the bones of a people. It poisons the water of the soul for decades.
True Courage and Kinship: Mitakuye Oyasin
True courage, what our warriors of old called woohitika, has never been about dominating others. It is not about force or slaughtering the innocent. True bravery means strength. It means protecting the vulnerable. It means standing between danger and the children. It means speaking the hard truths that bring about lasting peace. A man who forces a child to fight on his behalf has discarded his honor. He has admitted his cause has lost its moral standing. No righteous struggle requires the sacrifice of its own children to survive. Therefore, the act of forcibly recruiting boys reveals a profound moral failure.
Mitakuye Oyasin, we are all related. The suffering of a mother searching the streets in northern Ethiopia is not separate from the sorrow of a mother weeping on our reservation. The soil that absorbs the blood of children in Tigray is the very same Earth that sustains us here beneath the wide plains sky. When human beings forget this kinship, they treat the land and its people as resources. They consume them by wrath. We must remember our connection.
We send our prayers with the sacred smoke of cedar and sage toward the east. We ask the Great Spirit, Wakan Tanka, to shield those young ones called into battle. We pray that wisdom finds the hearts of the men holding the weapons. May they remember who they are before all things: sons, fathers, and caretakers of life. May peace take root where bloodshed now threatens. Thus, those boys may return to their homes. They will then grow to become the elders their people so desperately need.
Leave a Reply