Footprints in the Windsm # 1108
Generations ago, in a land foreign to us, lived a man with his wife and three children, 2 boys and a girl. Their lives were not easy. It was difficult work planting on and gathering from their land barely enough to eat. But the man had managed, with the help of his wife and sons and daughter, to build a small house. Sparse it was and rude, but they were thankful for the shelter from the weather.
One day came a man from another land. He did not speak the first man’s language. The new man had friends like him, and they were just a little stronger of will and more in number than the man and his wife and three children. The new man pushed the family out of the house, and put them to work for him, growing his crops and tending his cows and pigs and chickens.
One by one, the three children left the land as they became old enough to see what was happening. The wife died, and the man’s heart broke open. He too died a few years later. No one knows what happened to their bones.
Seven or eight or eleven generations passed. A son of a descendant of one of the three children chanced upon a record of what happened. He went to the lands of his grandfather, but was not allowed on the land. He brought suit against the descendants of the new man, for they were still living on the land, and had built factories and shopping centers there, as well.
Who should be entitled to this land? Whose land is it? Who should be allowed to visit this land? How would you decide the lawsuit?
You, you children of Europe, you whose parents came from Spain and England and France and Germany and Ireland! Who is entitled to walk among you, to own land here and be your neighbor, to have a right to cross the borders you have established? Who was here first? Those from South of your border? Those in the reservations you have placed them on? Whose fathers and mothers have been nourished by this land, been children of it? Who are the original people?
