Script by Millie Richard: 
 

Resilience, for a native woman in 2020, living in a urban concrete jungle, what does that look like? Well, in a pandemic, you're made to stay at home, isolated. More so when you have a compromising illness. What does resilience look like in a situation like that? 

 

Resilience is going to the sacred tobacco, believing in your prayers, and offering your tobacco and setting it down on our mother earth, asking Creator of all good things, to help and guide our day. Because for some, we've been in isolation since the whole 2020 and we have not been able to go out as much as others as who don't have a compromising illness. 

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Tribal women living in an urban setting in 2020, feeling very disconnected... thinking about resilience, a comeback onto the situation, where there is so much changes happening in the world. One - the security and safety of our own lives, and the lives of our loved ones. Where do we go from here? Feeling that disconnection .. thinking about our resilience, back to a better order of living. 

 

To help us with the disconnection, it will help us to go to mother earth. In an urban setting, mother earth is not seen as much, because she has only become small patches in the checker board of concrete jungle, laid out all over in and around us. Water, water is easy to find in some places. Hard to find in others. Yet when we pray to that water, that water will help us with our disconnection, our healing, and to see clarity on a good comeback from whatever situation this 2020 pandemic has put us urban tribal people in. 

 

This connection can happen when you acknowledge full moon, once a month, when you give her tobacco and offerings, to our grandmother moon. She watches over us during the night. During the day, grandfather sun watches over us. This connection and resilience is a way to wake up and watch grandpa sun rise up over the horizon, and we give out our tobacco to both grandpa and grandma moon, who now has journeyed to the other side of the world. 

 

This connection, resilience, finding a way back, can only be of a good way, if we re-go back and start praying, start doing our tobacco offering, start praying for our water, and start praying for ourselves. Water is the life blood of mother earth, and as tribal native women, this is our connection. When we are lost, disconnected, and don't have a comeback like resilience in these times where a lot of us have no income, we're out there trying to find a different way to feed clothe, and shelter, going back to mother earth, the creator, father sky, grandmother moon, grandfather sun, all these will help us reconnection. 

 

Not feeling lost, but feeling a clear path ahead of us, a spiritual tribal women ... we are the heads of our family units. We are the backbone of our nations. We are the heart of our people, our children, our elders. Let's reconnect today. Pick up your tobacco tomorrow morning, light your smudge, and invite mother earth, creator, father sky, grandmother moon, grandfather sun, into our lives. That is a way to deal with your loss. That is a way to deal with your inner peace, serenity. That is a way of reconnecting and having a strong resilience for a comeback on a better way of life.