This year we have been given a hand to the Basques from the distant past and we have taken it with a vote, because we have seen our identity in the place we have read in Sorioneku. We were here, therefore, for two thousand years and we have thought so before. Archaeology and Linguistics have helped clarify this distant past of the Basque community, and so we have learned that in the 1st century before Christ, when the first attacks of the Roman legions extended to the Basque camps, the inhabitants of the territory they called ager vasconum had their own language, proto-Basque, and wrote it in an adapted alphabet, composed of Iberian signs.

Right away we have drawn a long bridge in the collective imaginary, in a house of the Vascones of Irulegi we have seen hanging the bronze hand, wishing happiness, and until this Christmas eve we get to the idea that we are part of it. And it is at that moment that inevitably the question arises: how has this Basque community of today been reached, in this abrupt path of thousands of years?

We know from history that our people in Irulegi were attacked by the Roman army in the so-called Sertorian war, destroying and burning their homes. Thus the Roman pax was established in the Basque territories. From then on, the invasions of foreign armies are recorded in a long list of Germanic, Arab, French, British, Normans, Castellanos, Nazis, Spanish countries… But until now the colonizing stories of our country have written to us, obscuring the identity of the rebels: who were those V-century Bagauds? Who and how did they fight the Franks? How and why did the so-called wars of older relatives favor the pre-eminence and invasion of Castile? What was really behind the witch hunt organized in Euskal Herria by the Spanish and French crowns in the 16th century?

If history is science, we must work this science from the Basque Country itself, when the Basque community is the main object and subject of it. We can't make lights in that two-thousand year old black hole.

The same occurs in the sections of Sociology and Sociolinguistics. In order to understand the preponderance of Spanish and French in the Basque Country today, in order to know and scientifically revolutionize the path from one's own language to the phase they have called bilingualism and from there to the substitution of one's own language and to loss, it is necessary to prioritize the discourse of scientific Sociolinguistics instead of the official assimilationist fabulation today.

From the sociology of culture we have to learn how to shape the Cultural Polysystem that Basque culture needs to live, how to organize it, taking as its axis the Basque Country, our education, our communication systems, the labor world, administration and politics, art, leisure, sport… Our own nation in all its diversity and complexity in this world today.

The Basques also need Political Science, not to believe the fable of a lehendakari, when he says that “independence is from the 19th century and not from today.” Scientific data tell us, for example, that from 1975 to 2022, 49 independent states have been created, five of them in this 21st century. That at the moment there are peoples of Europe who look like us.

The Basque community and the Basque community have been preserved in the last two thousand years for our fortunate Basque identity, and science will open the way to the Basque nation.