They Tried to Erase a Whole People. Now They're the Happiest Nation on Earth.

A story about Lithuania — and about what survival actually looks like.

I'm Diné and Lithuanian. Two peoples who were supposed to disappear. Neither one did.

I write a lot about my Navajo side — the language, the sheep, the ceremonies that survived everything the United States threw at them. But today I'm standing in a Lithuanian solstice festival in California, weaving crowns and singing the old songs, and I want to tell you about my other bloodline. Because their story of survival is one of the most stunning in the world, and almost nobody in America knows it.

This isn't a contest of who suffered most. I don't believe in that. Suffering isn't a competition — it's a brotherhood. What I believe is this: when you see how many peoples were nearly erased and came back anyway, you stop feeling alone in your own history. You realize survival is the human inheritance. So let me show you theirs.

The Book Smugglers

For 40 years, it was illegal to print a book in the Lithuanian language. The Russian Tsar banned the Latin alphabet itself — trying to dissolve a people by dissolving their words. Get caught teaching a child to read their mother tongue, and you went to prison. Get caught smuggling books, and you could be exiled to Siberia.

So they smuggled the books anyway. They were called knygnešiai — "book carriers." They walked through forests at night with Lithuanian books hidden under their coats and under the hay in their wagons. Some were caught. Some were killed. They kept walking. Because a book in your own language isn't paper and ink — it's a declaration that your people still exist.

My own great-grandfather was one of these men. He carried books out of Lithuania, crossed an ocean with twenty dollars, and built a life in Michigan with nothing but the work in his hands.

The Song Keepers

You cannot ban a melody that lives in a throat. You cannot confiscate a rhythm that passes from mother to daughter while they grind grain together.

So when the books were banned and later when the Soviets came, the grandmothers kept the dainos — the old songs — alive in kitchens and fields, under the noses of the soldiers. Lithuania has one of the largest collections of folk songs on earth: hundreds of thousands of them. They survived because women refused to stop singing.

The Forest Brothers

Then came the worst of it. After 1944, the Soviet Union swallowed Lithuania whole. And thousands of ordinary Lithuanians — farmers, teachers, students — picked up rifles and walked into the forests to fight one of the largest empires in history.

They were called the Forest Brothers. They waged guerrilla war against the Soviet Union from 1944 to 1953 — one of the longest partisan wars in Europe. An estimated 30,000 partisans and their supporters were killed. Another 60,000 Lithuanians died in Siberia in the early post-war years. It's said the Lithuanian fighters always saved the last bullet for themselves, knowing what capture meant.

They fought, knowing they would almost certainly lose, for one reason. As the survivors put it: they believed in the ultimate victory of the truth. And decades later, free Lithuanians thanked them simply: for the chance to speak the Lithuanian language without fear, to travel where they want, and to choose whom to vote for.

And Then — They Came Back Singing

Here is where the story turns, and why I love these people.

Lithuania declared independence in 1990. And almost immediately, they wanted to send a basketball team to the 1992 Olympics — to play under their own flag for the first time in 50 years. But the new nation was broke. They announced they'd have to withdraw — there was no money, no sponsor.

Then the strangest, most beautiful thing happened. The Grateful Dead — the American rock band — heard about this freshly independent country that couldn't afford to send its team, and they fell in love with the underdog story and sponsored them. The band's artist designed tie-dye shirts in Lithuania's national colors — yellow, green, and red — with a skeleton dunking a basketball.

And then Lithuania beat the former Soviet Union to win the bronze medal. They climbed onto the podium — playing for their own flag for the first time in half a century — wearing tie-dye. "We cried," one player said. "It was from joy. Words cannot express it." The great Arvydas Sabonis, comparing his old Soviet gold medal to this new bronze, said it best: "The medal in Seoul was gold, but this bronze is our soul." That tie-dye skeleton jersey is now iconic around the world. A symbol of freedom, born from a people who refused to disappear.

What Survival Looks Like

Lithuania is tiny — fewer than three million people, with a huge diaspora here in the United States (which is exactly why we gather at festivals like the one I'm at today). And yet:

This nation that was banned, occupied, deported, and nearly erased is today, by the most recent global happiness research, home to the happiest young people on earth — its under-30s top the world. It produces basketball players who fill the NBA, and now the WNBA. Musicians, dancers, performers far beyond what a country its size should generate. And every summer solstice, on the hills, they light the fires their grandmothers lit, and they sing.

They didn't survive by becoming bitter. They survived by staying themselves — and then they multiplied.

This is the thing I most want you to take from it, whoever you are, whatever blood you carry: many, many peoples have walked through the fire of erasure. Navajo. Lithuanian. And so many more. Naming that isn't a competition. It's a brotherhood. And the ones who make it through teach the same lesson, in every language: You don't survive by forgetting who you are. You survive by refusing to. The book smugglers carried paper across borders. The song keepers carried melodies across generations. The Forest Brothers carried the truth into the trees. My grandfather carried himself across a continent to sit with a Navajo boy in a sheep camp.

Same thing. Different words.

Linksmų Rasų. Happy solstice. 🔥🌿