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My name is Ron Howard.
I am Arapaho. I was born on the Wind River Reservation. My children were born here. My grandparents are buried here.
And for thousands of years before there was a Wyoming, before there was a United States, before there was a church building called Foundations For Nations, my people were here.
We had Grace. We had Wisdom. We had ceremony. We had language. We had ways of raising our children, burying our dead, and praying to the Creator that sustained us through starvation, through war, through exile, through boarding schools.
Those ways are not broken. They do not need to be fixed.
But now we are told, again, that they are not enough.
Foundations For Nations came here to do good work, they say. To help. To serve. To save. But you cannot serve a people while telling them their soul is wrong. You cannot save a culture by asking it to disappear.
That is not service. That is assimilation. And we know that word. Our grandparents knew that word. It came with scissors for our hair, soap for our mouths when we spoke Arapaho, and Bibles to replace the pipe. It came with the promise that if we just changed — if we just became like them — we would finally be acceptable.
We changed. We lost our language. We lost children. And we are still not acceptable, because the ask never ends.
So let me be clear: This is oil and water.
Evangelical belief says there is one way to the Creator. Arapaho belief says we have known the Creator on this land since time began. Those two ideas do not mix. They do not blend. You can shake the jar all you want, but when it settles, the oil is still oil and the water is still water.
We are Arapaho. That is the water. It is deep. It is life. It was here first.
You can build your church. You can run your programs. But do not ask us to pour ourselves out so you can fill the cup. Do not tell our youth that Grace and Wisdom are only found in your book, when we see them in the faces of our elders every day.
We have been asked to change for thousands of years. We are done apologizing for who we are.
If you want to be neighbors, be neighbors. But if you came to change us, you came to the wrong nation.
We are still here. We will still be here. We are Arapaho.
And that is enough.
Signed,
Ron Howard