Going to War with All My Relations: New and Selected Poems

Author: Wendy Rose

Publisher: Northland Publishing (1993)

Going to War with All My Relations involves a special kind of "war"—one in which struggle is honorable and just, but also one in which there are no mutilated soldiers or plundered villages. The "war" to which the title refers is a memoir of sorts that documents or recalls my thirty years of observation and activity within the Fourth World (Indigenous Peoples) Movement. The "war" is everyone's war. All of us depend upon the Mother we have in common; all of us are indigenous to Her. Our "Relations" are each other, all that is alive, with the awareness that life is everywhere. In one way or another, the prayers and ceremonies of Native people throughout the world end with "All My Relations"—not always in exactly those words, of course, but in the universal language of the heart and spirit. In that way, I have tried to be a "warrior" in the company of "All My Relations."

–Wendy Rose