OUR NATURE:
CLAPP-CLAPP-clapp-clapp-clapp HEY...

To be Deaf is something that begins within us. It begins in our hearts, in that place that is never separate from the living heart of ours. To be Deaf is something that begins within ourselves that finds itself mirrored back to us by the Deaf community. This community, our people, walking between Deaf and hearing, between American Sign Language and English, between right and wrong, between night and day, and between matter and spirit.

There are many Deaf communities around the world. For so long we have defined ourselves in opposition to how the general society has viewed us. We have defined ourselves, and been defined, by that which seemed to be in us most different. But our Deaf community must define itself from within, not without. And it is not our cultural nature alone, not its difference from the Deaf-and-Hard-of-Hearing-and-Cochlear-Implan-Users-and-Hearing nature, but American Sign Language that makes us different.

In this time of crisis, it is Deaf leaders and writers who hold out, by our very nature, the deepest vision of healing and peace that is possible for Gallaudet University. For the alumni are gathering themselves up from everywhere to find common ground to connect. This GUFSSA protest has offered us its capacity for all alumni to come together to enter into the collective unconscious. This is going to happen during the 2006 Gallaudet University Homecoming weekend that was cancelled by the oppressive IKJ administration.

So it is not by our nature alone that we make a difference in the world, but by our actions, our thoughts, in our coming together as the GUFSSA community. We will speak a universal language of signs, and we will be global ambassadors and information carriers. We will be able to listen to our inner purposes and meanings, and we will become the truth tellers for our own people—Deaf people.

We will have shamanic rituals with drum-beating, CLAP-CLAPP-clapp-clapp-clapp poems, and storytelling arts. Never before, all over the planet, so strongly and so freely, have alumni been able to meet in such great numbers this week. In this time, in our time, when we are more firmly rooted into matter, we can get together with faculty, staff and students at Gallaudet University. We are empowered in this protest by our very nature.

CLAPP-CLAPP-clapp-clapp-clapp HEY...