Earlier this week I joined almost one-hundred-and-fifty of my brother priests for our annual convocation in Groton, Connecticut. Because our day starts early, I was up before dawn on the Feast of Saint Francis of Assisi, running along the Mystic River, around the historic Mystic seaport and on out to Saint Edmund’s Retreat on Enders Island. Although I was running alone in those pre-dawn hours, I was thinking of all the saints and angels whose feasts we yearly celebrate leading up to and throughout this first week of October: Francis, Therese of Lisieux, Faustina, Bruno, Our Blessed Mother, the Archangels and Guardian angels. And then the words from one of my favorite Scriptures verses in the Letter to the Hebrews hit powerfully home: “…we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses…”

Also, thanks to the NativeLand App and the Rising Hearts Running on Native Lands Initiative (https://www.risinghearts.org/nativelands), I was keenly aware that I was running in the presence of the Mashantucket Pequots and the Mohegans, the indigenous First Peoples and caretakers of that land, and whose present day descendants’ trace their ancestral roots back 10,000 years. But, as is articulated in the Mohegan Tribe History and Vision Statement adopted by the Council of Elders in 1997, “like humanity everywhere, Native American people trace their past in more than years…”

We are the Wolf People, children of Mundo, a part of the Tree of Life. Our ancestors form our roots, our living Tribe is the trunk, our grandchildren are the buds of our future.

We remember and teach the stories of our ancestors.

We watch. We listen. We learn.

We respect Mother Earth, our Elders, and all that comes with Mundo.

We are willing to break arrows of peace to heal old and new wounds. We acknowledge and learn from our mistakes.

We walk as a single spirit on the Trail of Life. We are guided by thirteen generations past and responsible to thirteen generations to come.

We survive as a nation guided by the wisdom of our past. Our circular trails return us to wholeness as a people.

Ni Ya Yo.