The Native American Zionist

Jennifer Muskrat Velarde, Native American educator and leader will be celebrating Thanksgiving this year like many Americans — surrounded by family and friends, enjoying a beautiful meal, sharing gratitude, and watching football. This Thanksgiving, Jews around the world should express their deep appreciation for her unwavering support of Israel and her steadfast allyship during a time when publicly standing with Jews and the Jewish state is neither trendy nor easy.

Velarde’s roots stretch from the Cherokee Nation on her father’s side to the Apache people on her mother’s, weaving together a legacy of resilience and pride. She grew up on the Jicarilla Apache Nation reservation, a place that shaped her identity and her sense of purpose. Today, she remains deeply connected to her community — teaching its youth, working and living on the land, and carrying forward the traditions and values she was raised with.

Velarde is an avid student of history and Native American culture. She attended the Native American Preparatory School (NAPS), in New Mexico, and later pursued her undergraduate studies at Carleton College in Minnesota where she served as an international school leader.

Rejecting Victimhood

While in university she began to notice that professors were pushing a colonizer framework, casting one people as invaders and others as victims. Academic scholars implied that Native Americans were considered victims of American colonization. But she didn’t identify as a Native American victim at all. Neither did her community. They were thriving proud Americans who felt lucky and grateful and proud of not only their heritage but to be living peacefully in America.

She asserted her opinion in class, pushing back against the settler-colonial narratives often promoted in academia. “I described this narrative as a ‘marketing of misery’ — a framework that reduces Native communities to victims.” Velarde rejects that lens and instead takes pride in the self-determination, resilience, and self-sustaining, corporate-like structure of reservation life. Their reservation operates like an organized corporation and she is proud of their self-sustaining systems and market-driven features.

Through her work with Apache youth on the Jicarilla reservation, she recognized an opportunity to use social media as a bridge to the younger generation. She began creating cultural and historical content to educate, inspire, and advocate, becoming a genuine representative of Native American life, history, and tradition online.

“Since this entire generation is always on the phone, I figured I thought we become savvy and try to talk to them where they are.”

She creates videos in a melodious, self-assured tone, calling for unity and respect, overflowing with gratitude, and challenging many of the popular myths and mainstream narratives that dominate online discourse.

After October 7^th

When October 7th hit, she was horrified by the images emerging from the Middle East — videos openly displaying violence, rape, and slaughter. What she saw struck her at a visceral level. She immediately reached out to college friends living in Israel and was shaken to learn that Omri Miran, a relative of one of her friends, had been taken hostage by Hamas during the attack on Kibbutz Nahal Oz.

She was perplexed by the sudden shift in the narrative that flooded her algorithm on October 8. Had the world not witnessed what she had seen with her own eyes just a day before?

As she scrolled, she recognized the same settler-colonial narrative she had long rejected reappearing, this time directed at the Jewish people. She felt an immediate connection with Israel's plight as their history was being distorted and their rights to their ancestral homeland were dismissed flippantly in online discussions.

When asked her how she was so proficient in history of this region she laughed and said, "Isn't the bible the most printed, read, and distributed book on the planet? Even this Indian woman knows that Jesus was born a Jew, lived as a Jew, and died as a Jew in Judea, modern-day Israel. You can't burn down Israel and thousands of years of recorded history.”

Her definition of a homeland is a place that shapes your identity — a land to which you hold a spiritual, cultural, and historical right to remain connected, to preserve, and to protect. The Jicarilla Apache traditional homeland lies between four sacred rivers and four sacred mountains in New Mexico. She describes the beautiful fall harvest festival gojiyá where a usually barren stretch of the land comes to life with tippis, food, and celebration.¹ Even those who are unable to attend in person take part by orienting themselves eastward, offering prayers and thanking God for the land’s abundance.

To her, these traditions echo the Jewish connection to Israel, particularly mimicking the three pilgrimage festivals where Jews traveled eastward to the Jerusalem temple. Just as the Apache maintains a living spiritual bond with their homeland, she sees how Jews around the world — even those who have never walked the soil of Israel — still carry within them a profound sense of origin, a thread that ties them back to the land they come from.

Advocating for Israel

Because she felt so disgusted by what she was seeing online about Israel, she began using her online platform to advocate and defend the State of Israel,² proudly calling herself a Native American Zionist.

She could never have imagined the backlash she would get for proudly standing with Israel.

 

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For her, the decision felt natural, yet it did not come without consequences, and the consequences weren’t just online hatred being spewed in her direction. She lost several professional opportunities and keynote speaking engagements, and some colleagues and acquaintances distanced themselves from her socially simply because they disagreed with her stance.

The backlash only fueled her determination to speak out. She was furious that anyone could deny Israel’s right to self-defense, and she pushed back forcefully. “If a bear was going to attack my family, there is no question I would kill the bear — even though someone might argue we’re encroaching on its habitat. Self-defense and self-preservation come first,” she explains. She also knows that a little humor helps when dealing with online hostility. Over time, she’s learned to laugh off the hate, block out the noise, and keep telling the truth as she sees it.

Hope for Peace

The only pathway to peace in her eyes will be when Israel's right to exist is recognized. She defines peace as beauty and balance and understands that diversity is necessary for true peace. In her view, there is harmony in accepting that God created both heaven and earth, and there is profound beauty in the balance that exists within all of creation.

Her hope is that one day the Palestinian people will experience the true freedom that comes with choosing their own future — the freedom to cast off oppressive leadership that “markets their misery” and to decide for themselves who represents them. Their leadership uses their people as pawns to profit off of. She stated, “Real self-determination means a people choosing peace rather than clinging to a political line in the sand that denies Israel’s existence.” As she puts it, “Through war, peace is had” — meaning that peace only becomes possible when the will for peace overcomes the hateful forces that keep conflict alive.

She recalls the images of Israeli soldiers forcibly removing Jewish families from their homes in Gaza in 2005 and it pains her to see that when Palestinians were handed a thriving infrastructure and a beautiful stretch of land, it was instead destroyed, abandoned, and ultimately used for terror and violence. She compares this to her own people’s struggle to protect their land within the negotiated borders of 1887 and reflects with pride on how her community had chosen to build rather than destroy — living with gratitude, resilience, organizational discipline, and self-determination.

She wishes the same for innocent civilians in Gaza and pleads with the world to listen to their cries rather than to the warmongering leaders who profit from their suffering. In her view, violence begins in the mind, then becomes the spoken word, and only afterward erupts into physical action. She is dismayed and alarmed by the violent rhetoric of protesters around the world and horrified by the violence they sometimes call for — and even enact. To her, spreading hatred and aggression not only fails to help the Palestinian people; it actively harms their cause.

There are three things Velarde wants you to know about her Apache tribe and modern-day Native Americans. They are not conquered, they are not colonized and they are thriving. Her prayer is for peace, beauty and balance with all of the world.

1. https://www.instagram.com/reel/CxTTNAeqieb/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ%3D%3D
2. https://www.instagram.com/p/CyT27k6PJc5/?img_index=3&igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ%3D%3D