To be read at the start of each assembly.
Today’s gathering is part of a yearlong series of assemblies hosted across the nation. Spanning the Dakotas to the Carolinas, Wisconsin to Louisiana, California to Puerto Rico, Why We Gather explores the braided memories, histories, and stories shaping the 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, recognizing that people’s cultural traditions, migratory journeys, freedom-seeking, and world-building began long before 1776.
A North Star guiding this series is honoring and uplifting the Elders and Ancestors, both known and unknown, who drafted and crafted declarations of their own—asserting the rights, freedoms and futures of their communities, even while some are being systematically omitted from the archives of the nation. There are at least half a dozen drafts of the Declaration. The “truths we hold to be self-evident” have never been static, and continue to be shaped by the stories we choose to tell and remember. How might we widen the river of these narratives?
We gather not because our histories are the same, but because our futures are bound together. If a politics of independence has shaped the last 250 years, what becomes possible when we turn toward a politics of interdependence for the generations ahead? Across time, people have gathered around campfires, in praise houses and roundhouses, at kitchen tables, and inside community centers to struggle, strive, resist, and thrive—to make ways of living beyond the limits of the worlds they inherited.
As we gather, may we listen to the land, the waters, and the histories of this place. May we recognize that community is something that we shape together through acts of attention, generosity, and care. May this gathering invite us into a deeper sense of responsibility to one another and a recommitment to the seven generations after us. May the fellowship we make together offer sweetness and sustenance in perpetuity.
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