In the wintery morning of Thursday, Nov. 27, 2025, it was most heartwarming for me to be part of the sacred hoop on Cole’s Hill at Plymouth, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, to participate in the struggle of the American Indians for land sovereignty and Nations to Nations’ rights.
We gathered around the statue of the Wampanoag Sachem Massasoit, commemorating the National Day of Mourning, initiated by Wamsutta Frank James of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) in 1970, which UAINE (United American Indians of New England), NAICOB (North American Center of Boston), and other indigenous groups have organized this year.
The slogans on the banner, “We are not vanishing. We are not conquered. We are strong as ever,” speak volumes to the wounded psyche of every colonized earth citizen, exhorting us to always remain strong in the spirit of resistance which we draw from the Great Spirit, the ancestors, and the land/Earth Mother.
Standing in solidarity with the American Indians in the National Day of Mourning, we drew sacred power from the Earth and the Sky in the four-direction prayer.
What is tangibly felt in my body was the groundswell surge of energy/power from the underside of the collective memory of the indigenous genocidal past on Turtle Island, with the felt presence of the ancestors.
Exuding from this sacred hoop was a manifest air of “charged radicality” (adix in Latin meaning “root”) that pulsated through a brown Asian participant like me during the 1986 People Power Revolution in Metro Manila.
This “root-power” was palpably felt in listening to the opening message of Kisha James (/), the 22-year-old granddaughter, and Mahtowin Munro, the daughter-in-law of Wamsutta James, who introduced the exonerated Leonard Peltier, who was released from 49 years of incarceration in February 2025 to remain in home confinement in North Dakota.
His voice lifted the spirit of resistance of the crowd, which gathered annually to debunk the Thanksgiving Myth that aimed at sanitizing the brutal English invasion of the Wampanoag homelands and the systemic decimation of the indigenous peoples through warfare and diseases.
These voices exposed the violence of the intentional, lethal erasure of the Indigenous peoples in the Americas. The subsequent speeches truly spoke truth to power, geared at subverting the oppressive neocolonialism which is driven and propped up by an androcentric patriarchy, undeniably not unrelated to fascist white supremacy.
The Sacred Hoop became an “inclusive space” for the Aymarra and the Mapuche from Abya Yala, the Caribbean, and the Haitians, even the Palestinians, because they are counted as indigenous peoples of Gaza, their ancestral homeland.
The constant interjection of “shame” from the women during the rally in response to the speeches mystically charged the rally with a subversive power directed to chip away at a Berlin-like wall of globalized power of neocoloniality.
Concluding the rally with the reverential incense offering to the four directions, the Earth and the Sky truly sacralized all “within” and “without” the sacred hoop, including the water of the Atlantic Ocean at Long Island, thus canalizing the spirit of audacity of speech, and of perennial resistance and resilience to overflow to all lifeforms, both humankind and otherkinds, within the cosmic sacred circle.
Fr. Jojo M. Fung, SJ is an associate professor at the Loyola School of Theology and the Cavalieri Professor for fall 2025 at Boston College’s Clough School of Theology and Ministry. He serves as the international chaplain of the International Movement of Catholic Students Pax Romana and previously coordinated JCIM for two decades. He is also the Calvareiri Chair at CSTM, an ASW coordinator, and a member of ROOTS Asia.
