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- By Levi Rickert
Opinion. This Mother’s Day, Native News Online honors Native mothers — the life-givers, the culture-keepers, the women whose strength holds our nations together.
For Native peoples, motherhood is more than a role. It is a sacred calling that connects past to present and breathes life into seven future generations.
In our tribal communities, mothers often provide the first Native language teaching, the first song lessons, and the first to tell the stories that root our children in who they are. They do this while navigating a world that too often overlooks or misunderstands Indigenous life. Yet, they do so with power, with prayer, and with grace. Their work may be unseen by the outside world, but it forms the foundation of everything.
Native mothers carry a double burden — nurturing their families and protecting their culture from erasure. We remember the grandmothers who fought to keep their children out of boarding schools and, in many cases, were there when our ancestors returned from the horrific separation.
We honor the mothers who walk today in the movement for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, many of whom carry grief too heavy for words. And we celebrate the young Native mothers raising their babies with beadwork in their hands and dreams in their hearts — dreams that speak of survival, of strength, and of sovereignty.
Being a Native mother during a time when our communities still face systemic inequality, health disparities, and historical trauma is no small task. Yet, time and again, Native women show us what resilience truly looks like. They are lawyers and language teachers, water protectors and powwow dancers, artists and aunties — often all at once. They rise early, work late, and still find time to braid hair, make dinner, smudge the house, and whisper lullabies of our ancestors.
We see you.
We see you in the early morning light, loading your children into the car for another long day of commitments. We see you at the community center, teaching moccasin-making to the next generation. We see you holding space at vigils, holding families together, holding stories safe until they are ready to be shared. Your love, your labor, and your leadership sustain us.
In July 2023, my family lost our mother three days shy of her 92nd birthday. Her memory and love live deep within my heart every day as I navigate life’s journey. I wrote then, my mother was my rock.
Last month, I interviewed Joy Harjo (Muscogee), the iconic poet and writer, on Native Bidaské. Harjo, who served as the 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate for three terms from 2019 to 2022, released on April 1, 2025, a new book titled "Washing My Mother’s Body, A Ceremony for Grief” The short book is a poem, accompanied by beautiful illustrations by Dana Tiger (Cherokee), that addresses Harjo not being able to wash her mother’s body when she died. Harjo writes in the book “returns” to take care of her memory. “That’s how I make peace when things are left undone,” she writes.
Harjo writes in the introduction: “We each know our mother in a manner that is unlike any other.”
Here is a portion of the poem:
“I tell her how beautiful she is, how strong and brave,
Her beauty and bravery, eternally to save.
Her face is relaxed, peaceful, a serene, gentle grace,
As I wash her hands, the hands that held me in place.
The rough, calloused skin, a testament to her toil,
Yet these hands, they gave comfort, on fertile, loving soil.”
On this Mother’s Day, let us do more than give flowers or cards. Let us give respect. Let us give space for Native mothers’ voices to be heard. Let us build a world where Native women can live without fear, thrive without apology, and raise families without carrying the weight of injustice on their backs.
To all Native mothers — biological, adoptive, chosen, and ancestral — we honor you. Your strength is ancient. Your love is medicine. Your presence blesses not just your families, but to all of Indian Country.
You are the heart of the people. Today, we say thank you.
Happy Mother’s Day from Native News Online.
Thayék gde nwéndëmen - We are all related.
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