Demetrius Johnson (Diné) is a #LandBack Organizer at Rapid City, South Dakota-based nonprofit NDN Collective. Originally from Tółaní, Ganado, Arizona, Johnson began community organizing shortly after being elected President of Kiva Club around the disastrous Gold King Mine spill that affected his people in 2015. He is also a long-standing lead organizer for The Red Nation, a coalition of Native and non-Native activists, educators, students, and community organizers based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, advocating Native liberation.
The Wampanoag Peoples have lived in the region of what is now southeastern Massachusetts for more than 12,000 years. The year 2020 represents 400 years since colonizers voyaged on the Mayflower and founded Plymouth Colony as settlers on Native land. This anniversary is a time of reckoning with that history of violence, dispossession, removal. The story of Plymouth Colony cannot be told without the perspectives of Indigenous Peoples who were here as that ship arrived and who still remain.