July 18, 2026

Call Them Relatives

What you call natural resources, we call our relatives.

Oren Lyons is Faithkeeper and Chief of the Onondaga Nation, a longtime spokesperson for the Haudenosaunee Confederacy who has addressed the United Nations on indigenous rights and environmental protection for decades. He used this line again and again to explain the gap between an economic view of the world and the Haudenosaunee view of a shared, related one. Speaking through decades of land disputes and resource extraction, he wasn't offering a slogan but describing a lived relationship - the river, the forest, the deer are family, not inventory. That way of seeing asks for acceptance: not fighting to dominate the world but accepting a place inside it as one relative among many.