Every year on February 23, our ancestral calendar reflects our history. Exactly 170 years ago, on February 23, 1856, one of the darkest chapters in local history began in Oregon – the Rogue River Trail of Tears. Indian Agent George H. Ambrose began the forced relocation of 325 "Indian Refugees" – as sovereign people were officially called at the time – from the temporary Table Rock Reservation northward to the site that would later become the Grand Ronde Reservation. The march took 33 days and covered 263 miles along a wintery, mountainous, and arduous route. The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde is a confederation of more than 27 tribes of western Oregon and neighboring regions, whose sovereign people were herded into a single location to free up land for settlers and "resolve the conflict" they had not created.

In his journal, Ambrose records mundane details that suddenly become terrifying precisely because of their "ordinariness": how there were not enough sled teams; how they had to buy shoes, blankets, and tents; how the sick, the elderly, and the exhausted had to be carried because they could not walk. In his final entry, Ambrose sums it up: "So ends my journey & journal. He writes of 33 days, 263 miles, and notes: 8 deaths and 8 births – that is, the number of people "remained the same." But "the same number" does not mean the same lives! These are living, sovereign people, torn from their homeland, placed in new circumstances with losses that cannot be measured by arithmetic.

Oregon’s history of forced relocations is not limited to a single road. Research literature on the history of the Siletz tribe records that the first removals to the Siletz Reservation took place in the winter of 1856 – Kalapuya, Molalla, Umpqua, and others – followed in June-July by two arduous relocations "primarily by sea" from Port Orford to Grand Ronde, and later by a grueling overland trek from Port Orford to Siletz. The Oregon Encyclopedia also notes that in the summer of 1856, two large groups were transported by boat from Port Orford to Portland and then to the Yamhill Valley, while another group was driven on foot to the Siletz coast.

The ancestors of our Veps indigenous tribal people also walked their own trails of tears. The Finno-Ugric, Finnish-speaking communities of the Soviet Union’s Northwest in the 20th century endured forced resettlements and pressure on their traditional way of life: In the early 1930s, the Veps were caught up in the wave of collectivization, dekulakization, and the repressive system of special settlements, when people were declared "socially alien" and forcibly removed from their native lands. Some Veps families were torn apart and found themselves outside their historical territory, including in Siberia, as well as in other regions of forced resettlement and labor exploitation of special settlers, including Kazakhstan, where large waves of exiles and displaced people were sent during those years.

Today, we Veps are a small indigenous and tribal people; our Veps language is endangered. In the blood of the Laksha clan flows the blood of our ancestors – the Veps indigenous tribal people of the Laksha clan – and our ancestral sovereign memory. We know that there is a brotherhood of blood, and it can be destroyed by war.

We remember that there is a brotherhood of the land, and it can be taken away by resolutions, orders, and "resettlement." And we know that there is a brotherhood of spirit, and this sacred knowledge resonates within every member of the Veps indigenous tribal people of the Laksha clan through the story of Standing Bear, chief of the Ponca tribe, which took place on May 2, 1879, in a courtroom where the chief had to defend the honor of his sovereign people.

After a lengthy hearing in the courtroom, Chief Standing Bear suddenly raised his hand, looked at it before speaking, and then, in a translation by Suzette LaFleur of the Omaha people, delivered a speech in his Ponca language.

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