Following my meetings in London in late October, which include delivering the Keynote Address at the Gala Banquet and Awards Ceremony for the 9th Edition of the CC Forum, a Global Summit convening investors and leaders around sustainable development, impact investment, and humanity’s shared future, I will travel to the Netherlands. There, I will reunite with the network of more than 100 stakeholders I collaborated with between 2003 and 2008, a collaboration that has continued to this day through Four Worlds Europe.
My relationship with the people of the Netherlands is profoundly personal and began long before this professional collaboration. In 1953, when I was eight years old, a great flood struck the Netherlands. My beloved father, carrying teachings from his relatives in Wakpala, helped me understand the tragedy and taught me that we must “give our very best”. I gathered my best toys and sent them across the ocean to a boy my age who needed kindness.
Months later, a box arrived from Rotterdam from a boy named Hans Grootmeier, filled with toys, wooden shoes, tulip bulbs for my mother, and Dutch beer for my father. A decade later, after traveling through Europe in 1962 and 1963, I traveled to Rotterdam and sat down for a wonderful dinner with Hans and his family high above the harbor.
That childhood act of generosity opened a doorway that stayed open through the years. What began with concern for someone experiencing tragedy blossomed into a lifelong relationship with the Netherlands. This foundation of love ultimately led to my decades of work alongside beloved Dutch relatives, including Fred Matser, Sister Karin Lindeman-Boere, Sister and Brother Anka and Jelle De Jong, Brother Bernhard Holtrop, and Sister Annelous de Vin, establishing Four Worlds Europe and bringing the healing practice of Talking Circles and Principles of Consultation into communities across the Netherlands.
As I return to reunite with these stakeholders, I recognize a profound historical alignment. The Netherlands is preparing to face the forthcoming independent research into its colonial history. This reckoning directly parallels the responsibilities I have called upon King Charles III to face in the United Kingdom.
Seeing these two moments converge presents an incredible vision: What if the Royal House of the Netherlands and the British Royal Family joined together? What if these two historic institutions united, not just to offer apologies, but to jointly lead the world in the material and spiritual repair of our human family?
This vision of unity is deeply grounded in history. The British and Dutch Royal Houses are intimately related by blood, sharing lineage through ancestors such as King George II and Johan Willem Friso. But more importantly, they are bound by a modern history of profound alliance, sanctuary, and shared sacrifice.
When the tyranny of Nazi occupation swept across the Netherlands in 1940, Queen Wilhelmina and the Dutch Royal Family were forced into exile, finding immediate refuge in London alongside the British Crown. To protect the next generation, Princess Juliana and her children crossed the Atlantic and found sanctuary in Canada, the very lands from which I now speak. The bond between these nations was so deep that Canada temporarily relinquished its sovereignty over a maternity ward in Ottawa so that Princess Margriet could be born strictly as a Dutch citizen.
The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Canada are forever linked by this history of protecting one another from destruction.
If these Royal Houses could unite in the 1940s to defend their people, offer sanctuary, and defeat a global threat, they possess the shared strength to unite today. The moral courage required to fight the tyranny of the past century is the same courage required today to face the legacy of over four centuries of global colonization.
A boy in Walla Walla, with Sacred Teachings from Wakpala, and a boy in Rotterdam once proved that reaching across the ocean can build a lifelong circle of love and healing. I now call upon King Charles III and King Willem-Alexander to draw upon their shared history to build a bridge of similar profound impact.
You have modeled what it means to offer sanctuary; now, together, you can model what it means to offer restitution. By joining forces, your two Houses can provide the world with an unprecedented example of how to face history with generosity, return authority to Indigenous peoples, and lead the Global Healing of Mother Earth and all our relations.