Dear Relatives,
For me, the Fourth of July has always been complicated.
I love my neighbors, my community, and the incredible diversity of California. I love gathering with family, sharing food, telling stories, and enjoying a summer day together. And yet I also carry a much longer view of this place we now call the United States.
I am Diné. I am Mexican. I am also French and German. Like so many people in this country, I am the descendant of many peoples whose histories eventually became intertwined. The violence, dispossession, and dehumanization that came with it, though, were never inevitable.
Long before there was a United States, European powers sought to carve up the Americas in pursuit of land and power. Rooted in 15th-century papal decrees, the Doctrine of Discovery held that European Christian nations could claim ownership over any land they “discovered” that was inhabited by non-Christian peoples, treating those Native peoples as lacking title to their own territories. Under this ideology, Native peoples were displaced, exploited, killed, and too often treated as obstacles rather than as human beings, despite having governments, laws, cultures, and relationships to these lands stretching back to time immemorial. When the Declaration of Independence was written 250 years ago, Native peoples appeared in it not as citizens or sovereign nations but as “merciless Indian Savages.” Those words remind us that the founding ideals of liberty and equality did not extend to Native peoples.
And yet I refuse to believe that history has to determine our future. We inherit the lineages of movements and leaders who challenged violence, exploitation, and dehumanization. Enslaved Black people and abolitionists refused to accept that any human being could be owned. Native children were stolen from their families and sent to boarding schools designed to erase who they were, and their descendants, including me, are still healing from that trauma and still refusing to assimilate.
That refusal continues to be our collective responsibility. As we watch our immigrant friends, families, and neighbors being targeted, detained, and denied their basic human rights, we are being asked what kind of ancestors we will become. This is the inheritance I want to claim. Not the racial hierarchy or the dispossession, but the generations that answered injustice with courage, solidarity, and hope.
As this nation enters its 250th year, the real question is not what we are celebrating, but what kind of country we will build for the next 250 years. I dream of a future where every person’s humanity is respected. Where every family has a safe place to call home. Where prosperity is measured not by accumulated wealth, but by the well-being of our communities, our children, and the lands that sustain us.
I believe we can build that future. Here in Los Angeles, where I live and raise my child on Tongva land, and across California, Native Peoples have thrived since time immemorial, sustained by kinship systems, traditions, and unbreakable values. Yet most people living in California today know little about the original peoples of this place or their contemporary presence. Only recently, through the leadership of Tribal Nations and decades of work by Native communities and grassroots movements, have those stories begun to reach a broader public.
One opportunity to shape a different future is right here. I have witnessed Tribal Nations reclaiming their lands and communities engaging in truth-telling, healing, and reconciliation. In 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom apologized on behalf of the State of California for the genocide and other atrocities committed against California Native peoples, launching the California Truth and Healing process. Later this year we will have a historic opportunity to hold the state accountable to the council’s recommendations. I invite you to stand with California Tribal Nations as they lead this work.
The future we want won’t happen on its own. It will be co-created by all of us. Neighbors, families, Tribal Nations, immigrants, descendants of settlers, organizers, artists, and young people who dare to imagine something better. It will require us to choose relationship over division, courage over complacency, truth over denial, and humanity over greed.
I believe our ancestors carried us through generations of hardship because they believed we deserved to inherit more than survival. They dreamed of descendants who would know joy.
So alongside our truth-telling, our refusal, and our rebuilding, let us also fiercely protect our joy. Let us gather with the people we love. Let us laugh. Let us celebrate life unapologetically.
However you are spending this weekend, I wish you and your family healing, strength, and joy.
In community,
Chrissie Castro
Diné/Chicana
Executive Director, California Native Vote Project
