INTERVIEW WITH TIOKASIN GHOST HORSE

First Voices Indigenous Radio 

Connection With Earth Matters to ALL

In previous blogs, the importance of relationship between peoples — friends, relatives, neighbors, even strangers — was examined. In this interview, we look at the importance of relationship between humankind and nature. 

Tiokasin Ghost Horse, Lakota, Cheyenne River, has been a talk show host for 29 years focusing on the need for change of relationship between western culture and Earth. His radio show, First Voices Indigenous Radio, is heard worldwide and he has traveled extensively to spread the message, some of which was covered in the interview below.

This is it, folks. This is where Indigenous culture meets the western world, and saving the earth begins. 

In South Dakota, farmers turned to Natives to help deal with effects of pollution. In California, public lands fire management is now using Native methods of burn control. So what do you need to know now? 

You can check out the First Voices Indigenous Radio show where he hosts a podcast talk show featuring speakers from across the indigenous world. You can hear this week’s show and listen to archives at https://www.firstvoicesindigenousradio.org/

INTERVIEW with TIOKASIN GHOST HORSE

Tiokasin: I have been using that form of communication for a long time, and trying to articulate the Indigenous perspective. There is something else moving and society is not ready yet to understand it. There is a stagnating paradigm of thinking, and the mental reality forced upon the Indigenous, that there is no other way to think but in the Western or the Occidental (a person of European ancestry) way.

Christina:  I think the problem is that people haven’t been given the opportunity to think another way. No other way has been presented to the western world, it has been hidden. It has been part of the American way to dismiss this alternative kind of thinking.

T: yah

C: Since you are such a messenger for the earth, what changes do you see in the dominant culture, in terms of the earth, in a positive way?

T: The most positive thing is that people are becoming more aware of something else other than the paradigm we have been thinking in — and of, and with, and for. This other thinking process has been present all the time.

T: I have always said, we have been so heavenly we are no earthly good anymore.  What we need to do, right now, is become aware that this current system has not been conducive in working with Mother Earth. I think people are realizing there has got to be an end to it. We are out-resourcing Mother Earth. We are scrounging for scraps to get oil, minerals to keep the system going, and the system is becoming anemic. The system is in a place where we all have to realize, and it is going to happen to us, anyway, because of the way this Occidental system treats Earth.

When the lights went out in New York City, for three or four days in 2003 and then for two weeks in Hurricane Sandy, after a few panicky days people understood it was more about helping each other and community, 

But there are others who are coming from this very same system, who are saying there must be a new paradigm, that must be a new narrative.  But it is still coming from the same system. 

If people continue to think in this modern day western thinking, we are going to be surprised beyond its own belief system. That is not a warning, it is something I have seen during the time I have spent here. 

I am well aware of the thinking process in the upper echelon, with those who have the money to those who are very poor. One thing that ties the rich and the poor together is in the attitude, there is no gap in the attitude because the poor people want to be rich and the rich don't want to be poor, and that greed is extracting and exacting everything from Mother Earth. It's that greed.

C:  In looking at a new (and very ancient) paradigm and looking at the earth and exploitation and greed — which is based on fear of poverty — what is the new paradigm, what has to shift? What is wrong with the relationship?

T: The dominant paradigm is one in which the word domination works very well. You have the other system, in the Lakota/Nakota/Dakota nation we have no word for the concept of domination. So, in this context, you look at Mother Earth and the concept that is applied to her is domination.

And this system, which is basically not in touch with Mother Earth, destroys our ability to have any intimacy with her.  Any kind of thinking is shoved aside and put over there and called Indigenous; which means poor people over there, Indigent means poor and genus means race or people, and that is the etymology of the old latin word, but the new meaning word was glossed over to mean Oh, it’s the place that you are from. The updated version started being used in 1570.

C: Yes, and the culture of guns, germs, and steel is failing now, and this time we are going to listen. And across the country, in places like California, the state is turning to the tribes to learn how to manage the land without wildfires. In South Dakota, farmers began working with the tribes to improve land quality. It’s time for that.  

For any change to happen, westerners will need to begin to see themselves in terms of connected to each other and the land instead of individualistic and separated. That concept is so foreign to Native cultures.

I think it is hard for most Americans to imagine a world that is not individualistic and self serving. I talked to few Native people in California and in conversation, they each said “If I were so arrogant as to use the word I…”  And in the Mexican neighborhood where I was living in California, I used the word Mine, and a little boy said to me, “My dad won’t let us use the word mine. He said it is a bad word.”

T:  That self centered, only soul in the body mentality rather than the opposite, of the body is in the soul, one says I have the right to Mine because I am an individual. It has nothing to do with relationship, it rations you away from relationship. What I found, what I was relating to, was when you have a language such as English and other romance languages based in Latin, you find there are 427 words in the English language to describe self. In Lakota maybe one or two, and that is in relationship with something.  

In English, we have so many layers to peel off to get back into that continuum, that red road of relationship. When you say I, that is the first word that separates.

“I think therefore I am,” Descartes, that is a very damaging thought. It removed people from connection from Mother Earth. Everybody had that relationship from birth but it was lost through language and programming.

Then, as you know, they got rid of the earth people, and what comes out of that is people who fear. People who will do anything to survive; to try to make some kind of sense of what’s going on, of what’s put into place, as if you have to be this way.  It doesn’t work with Mother Earth. 

Wakan is mystery and energy, but we are not saying Mother and Father, we are saying Great Mystery. That is what we have forgotten. People do all these things: I must follow the model as a servant to the system. There was always another way that was prevalent here before that mindset showed up in the western hemisphere.

And that is what I feel we are all connected to, that balance that we had and may still have; and out of that balance, that to relate to other brother and sisters that some call race and divides it up, and we understand that they are included, too. 

Our original instructions are to listen to that cloud floating by and the wind blowing by and it doesn’t make sense in English, because look what we do with it. That’s poetry and prose in English, it is Wakahan in Lakota which basically means to consciously apply mystery to everything, everything is alive and has its own consciousness.

I was at the Morgan Library in NYC and there were all these people for Peace Consciousness, people who came together from all these big organizations, but it felt more like we were missing in that whole sacred earth community, a contemplative alliance, sacred earth community, people from all over the world, and what was interesting to me, we are revolving in this system that created a war/peace society, we are defining peace through war, and we don’t understood that the war is against Mother Earth and they don’t want to go there. They are so well intended and they have all this knowledge, but when we talk a heart language thats what that colonization did to those folks back in Europe, they were taken away from their heart and put in their head, 

to think feudalistic, king, idolistic, hierarchal, linear all those things, that’s way out of balance, proving that if you are coming from your heart language, which Lakota is, We are talking 150,000 electromagnetic waves come from the heart, that intuitive, prescient values that we are all born with as children, and if you are coming from there, then you have it and it grows and expands 

But folks are telling us we should only go in our heads and information is only in the head, but the head only releases 50,000 electromagnetic waves compared to the heart. We are working with the weaker part without working with the strongest source, so that whole world, of working with what I call the heart language has been dismissed as something magic and put in what, you know, illusion, romanticized.

C: This is what religions couldn’t grasp, the relationship with earth as a being. It’s looking at everything as it applies to me rather than seeing oneself as being within it.

T: Yeah, and it’s conscious, the thing we don’t give them credit for this bench, but that blade of grass is hearing everything we are talking about, we say a blade of grass is only going to last a season, but we don’t know that we, too, last a season.

We put science into the supernatural state that we hold it in now, that science is going to have the answer for everything eventually and that shows a real disconnection,

Me: Don’t know if you saw it, there was thing going around on Facebook and there were these little kids in Africa standing on a hill talking about the poor kids in America, they have to sit in a classroom all day. It’s that whole — there is so much fear of domination and because of the fear, it’s like watching a scared person running and they could have stopped running a really long time ago but they just keep running.

T: The Forest Gump mentality. When you think about the domination, symbology is very important to me, and it’s very telling. I was talking to Birgil Kills Straight and Steven Newcomb, I asked if there is there a word in Lakota for domination and he thought and thought and a few minutes later he said, ‘No. We cannot even think that way.’

Steve Newcomb and I cornered this Catholic priest, and he went away with a big old frown and he came the next morning with a smile on his face. He said, “You know, you guys almost converted me.”  We said, we are not trying to convert you, that’s your thoughts, and I am sure he is wondering to this day, how do they not have domination, other than think, they need to be dominated.

Columbus said, They can be slain with 50 men, and you don’t have a god. And I think about that concept. We didn’t have gods, we have relationship. We don’t have a god, we are in relationship with the mystery, everything, all things. 

Next week, the relationship of language to culture and the combined relationship of both of those to the scientific study of the environment.

 A Culture of Happiness

Christina Rose

“Aren’t you worried about old age? No career! No savings! No 401K! How are you going to live?”

“I didn’t know poor people could be happy.”

“How come I have all this money but I am miserable and alone?” 

“My kids are grown, and I feel like I have no purpose.”

“Christina, why are Americans so unhappy?”

I think most people would agree that a life of sustained happiness is not only elusive, but unrealistic. 

Fear of poverty drives a five day work week much of our lives. I get that. I work, too, and the man who asked me why Americans are so unhappy has two or three jobs and his wife works full time. In terms of the American Dream, their life is far from financially secure, but they are happy. Visibly and tangibly happy and it has nothing to do with finances.

America offers everyone the opportunity to have what the upper classes have had: nice things, abundant food, maybe even help in the house. But in the old days, middle classes didn’t expect to live like royalty. They were connected to their communities in which everyone’s talents played a part. 

Wealth doesn’t really improve life more than by providing physical comfort and accessories we don’t really need. What wealth does do is give people a sense of entitlement. Some people of recent comfort seem to feel they have earned special treatment if they can afford fancy restaurants and nice clothing. It isn’t respect gained by actions, but an expectation of respect for all they have earned.

I have spent time with a multitude of cultures and for most of the world, acting entitled is not acceptable behavior. Frightening road rage, impatience with clerks in shops or services, even just a competitive nature can set people against each other instead of bringing them together.

The class systems were not left behind at Europe’s shores; they are woven into the fabric of America. Grace, kindness, warmth towards others, feeling secure, helpful attitudes—all of that may exist within our circles of peers and family. Towards strangers on the street, or anyone we think might be less than us, maybe not so much. 

In Asian and indigenous cultures, politeness is important. Being kind, honest, having integrity and showing respect towards others are valued.

When people win at the American Game of Wealth, a sense of privilege and our love for the less fortunate may start to fall away. People may donate financially to needy people but hobnobbing with the suffering is rare In America. If life is about winning, there is little incentive to be kind unless you want to be.

Now, I know for a fact that there is tremendous kindness to be found in Americans, but we also all recognize America’s competitive spirit and unfortunately, that can have a negative effect people on people. 

America is country of colonization; of going after countries in the guise of lifting them up. Most people know that colonization is more often about exploiting countries for their resources. Mostly, though, colonization is about changing one culture into another, sometimes from a smaller traditional culture to one that values the dollar and economic growth. That effects everyone, the new country and the old alike.  

As colonizer, America has an egocentric attitude of being better than others and usually that is based on wealth. On the other hand, America’s goal is often to destroy a culture in which the economy wasn’t the reason for existence. Traditions were. Traditions that may have served to hold a community together where people relied upon each other.

Colonization often has sought to crush the older traditions. The mission of America has been to seek and destroy but sadly, when we destroy cultures of old traditions, we are also crushing our own happiness. How, you may ask. 

Let’s step back a minute and imagine another way. 

In an immigrant community in California, a couple works four jobs between the two of them. Grandma stays home with the kids and they live seven people in a two-bedroom apartment. They know all about the pressures of keeping a roof over their head. Yet, they taught me more about happiness than I knew possible. 

For one thing, their small living space kept everyone close and the rent low. Their kids have name brand sneakers, the two oldest have iPhones, the parents own two cars and a truck for his business. Paying rent for a bigger home would cost them quality of life. 

Three kids sleep in a triple bunkbed and the baby slept with the parents until he was almost three. In the evenings after dinner, all the neighbors, myself included, go outside where everyone is talking and laughing, sometimes with music, loads of kids running safely up and down the street. The whole neighborhood is like living with family. For me, my apartment was only a place to sleep. Life was outside.

I often asked the father of that couple about Mexico, where he said people lived a freer lifestyle. 

A man of impressive size, he swept his hands across the community. Men were playing cards in the garden across the street. Women were watching the children, laughing and talking together, which reminded me of a suburban cul-de-sac, but there were other ways I had never known in which their traditions enhanced their lives. 

When I moved into the neighborhood, I didn’t speak a word of Spanish and most of the grownups spoke little if any English. The kids did, though, and they became my pals. I was brought into the community and enveloped in the kind of love I had never experienced before. I felt like I lived under the cover of safety and security, openness and acceptance, such as I had only ever felt with my immediate family. My life was interwoven with my neighbors in ways I had never felt within any other community.

My neighbors worried about me if I came home late. The children brought me dinner their mothers had cooked and if they had cooked one of my favorites, I was invited to their homes.

I took the children on ride bikes, played ball, walked to the ocean with them and swam with them in the rivers and ocean.

My four cats spent their days sitting at the large picture window where children and adults always stopped by to say hello to them. One man brought his new puppy over to show the cats. Another man passed by each morning with his chihuahua dressed in a bathing suit. (That’s California for you. :-)

On Tuesdays, the tamale lady knocked on my door and I always bought a few. Several nights a week, weather permitting, everyone chipped in to buy meat for a barbecue. For many, it was the only way they could afford meat.

They ate outside together, and they’d invite me, too. On Friday nights, a man raised money by selling tacos from his backyard. Another refinished furniture in his truck and another made exquisite ice cream, sold within the neighborhood.

Once, when a young man passed away, the whole community made food and sold food to raise money for the funeral. Hundreds of people participated and they all gathered in the street and ate together.

I hated to leave for work in the mornings and whenever I entered the mainstream, it almost always included a stressful experience. Traffic. Rudeness. A sense of being solitary and far from home.

Competitive drivers cut me off for a good parking spot. Once, a man’s car blocked the pedestrian ramp at the curb as I was trying to cross the street with a baby in a stroller. He refused to move for me because he had paid taxes for that sidewalk.

In five years in my little hispanic community, I was never greeted gruffly, angrily, rudely, with judgement or privilege.  People there just didn’t treat each other that way. They weren’t perfect but their kindness towards each other was deeply refreshing. I wished the whole world was like that.

In a different situation, a Lakota woman who’d just had a baby told me she was leaving her California suburban home and returning to her reservation. 

In South Dakota, a newspaper stated, “A fire burned down a house, killing the ten people who lived there,” and the judgement in Rapid City spread like the flames themselves. “Ten people living in such a small house!”

The young mother told me that the American Dream of a home with two parents and their children was too hard for her. “When I lived on the reservation, ten people in the home was normal. We have always lived like that. I never had to leave my baby with strangers. My mother, my sisters, my aunties, were all nearby or in the home. Life was so much easier when I didn’t have to do everything myself.”

In my Hispanic neighborhood, everyone counted on each other. Together they cooked, they fixed cars, they watched each other’s children, they planted vegetable and fruit gardens. I was never lonely and I never lacked purpose. As I approach retirement age, being an integral part of my community gave me purpose and constant company.

In America, we have neighbors, friends, and family. In my California community, neighbors and friends called each other “primo.” Cousin. From a variety of countries, unrelated by blood, they had brought together traditions of love, generosity, purpose, and connection with each other. This was the way of life they had all known.

In America, we are so individualistic that being intensely connected with neighbors doesn’t occur to us. We don’t need it. We may not even imagine we want it. Being so separate, so focused on our own lives, we may even see each other as competitors rather than as relatives.

Life is busy from the start. We go to school, get married, have kids, buy a home, get a job, raise the kids, send them to college — and when we finally have time to breathe, we look around and wonder, Now What? 

My mother was too busy to help me with the kids and in her old age, my family sent her to a nice nursing home, where she is very happy and doesn't seem to miss her family. 

As I get older, I look around a Connecticut community where people talk about feeling isolated but make little effort to remove themselves from that. I think possibly because people cannot envision the kind of a neighborhood where everyone acts more as family than individuals. 

If we strengthen our connections, if we keep grandma close, if we raise the kids to value neighbors as family, we will find staying connected makes us happy and gives us purpose. Not through our individuality, but through our connections. A strong vision of individuality can result in being rich or poor, but alone.

Don’t take this as a personal attack, America. Everyone has strong connections to someone and values them. But in looking further, beyond the obvious people we love in our life, by welcoming everyone we meet into a circle of loved ones, as cousins, we can change the hardness of the world.

How? There is so much already being done in other places. Connection and purpose effects justice, disassembles discrimination, levels all of the playing fields, and can help America reach its promise for equality for all. Next week, I’ll share some ways that create a safer environment for the youth, the disenfranchised, people of color and any one else who slips through the fingers of the mainstream. 

See you next Saturday, right after dinner.

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Thanks to Lisa Lund Leach, who allowed me to interview her right then and there in the middle of a tea date. I asked her the question above, “Why are Americans so unhappy?” She said, “We live in a Culture of Misery.” That got me thinking, and while it was a profound thought, you might not read such a sad sounding blog. 

“We live in a Culture of Misery.”

Think about it though. It’s a powerful thought.

A Natural Connection

By Christina Rose, featuring Lynette Two Bulls

There is a tremendous sense of history in Connecticut. I live near one of the oldest colonial cities where everything is still so intact that the veil between centuries falls away. Streets are lined with lovely or decrepit Victorian homes and it is easy to envision women in long black, bustled, skirts and wide bonnets chatting on the porches of grand homes or the wives of mill workers drying laundry behind their apartment buildings built more than a century ago.

The land for the city was donated in the 1600s to the colonists by Uncas, a Mohegan chief who maintained a powerful working relationship with the European newcomers as well as the surrounding tribes. In the 1800s, Norwich experienced an incredible industrial boom, creating some of the largest mills in the country.

I turn around and the veil drops in a different way. I see a magnificent landscape of rolling mountains, wooded areas lush with wildlife and birdsong, rushing rivers and wandering streams; Connecticut at its most beautiful. 

Reality awakens me. Those rivers and streams were poisoned by those sprawling mills. Those hills, now paved, are long and winding streets, crowded with cars. Highway exits run through blasted rock formations. Trees torn down, housing developments; bridges pass over streams littered with shopping carts and plastic trash. 

I think back over the centuries and consider what else has changed about American life. Well, stress for sure. We have tighter schedules, more pressing business matters, traffic, deadlines, and if we are lucky, a two-day weekend to enjoy life. Maybe we can squeeze in a walk or maybe we just get chores done, happy to work in the garden or plow snow, just to be outside. 

We know nature is beautiful, we know we feel good in it. Exercise is healthy, the sun gives us our vitamin D, the key to happiness. But what else do we get from nature?

Beauty. Wonder. Expansive minds that open to starry night skies. We wander quiet woods, sit at waters edge and enjoy the quiet lapping on the shores of rivers and streams, lakes and bays. Our imagination stops, unable to comprehend the vast oceans, thrill at the power of crashing waves, ocean waters that would eat you up in a second and never even spit you out. Feed the fishes. 

Awe. The poets of the past knew it. Of the Top Ten poets of all time, many were  famous naturalists. The youngest one is in her 90s. 

Western culture has always appreciated the divine inspiration of nature. Remington’s paintings of Montana sunrises and Ansel Adams landscapes, photographed under a full moon. They are loaded with awe.

Today, so much poetry is about angst. So many paintings express chaos. When was the last time you heard a song like “America the Beautiful?” A modern one? 

The lack of nature reflected in popular culture is a very important mirror of our times. For certain, plenty of artists still express beauty, but they are not the mainstream’s rock stars they were 150 years ago.

While living in California, at least two hundred children passed through my life. Most were from the 145 international families that I worked with, and of course, the kids in my community who visited me daily and always invited me on their adventures.

I assumed my role as a child trainee. They reminded me how to laugh easily, to stop and look at weird things washed up on the beach and go eewwwwww or suck in my breath and exclaim Wowwwwwww! What’s that?! Look out for the wave! Climb those rocks! Ride that bike (me too) as fast as you can! Bake! Paint! Make play-dough build blocks spin slide swing, teach a four year old to garden and watch his attention to nature grow like the seeds he planted. Take a ten year old on a walk and have him scream in delight because he saw a real, actual butterfly. 

Wait, what? 

For many children in day care, it may be ten years into a child’s life before he sees a real, actual butterfly. That’s a long time to wait and honestly, can you think of all of the other wonders he has missed out on? And if we are depriving our children of the wonder of nature, what will ground them when they get older? 

For a year or two, I was lucky enough to attend several presentations by the founders of Yellowbird Lifeways Center, Lynette Two Bulls, Lakota, Executive Director, and Philip Whiteman, Traditional Chief, Northern Cheyenne. Yellowbird is a non-profit resource on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, Montana. You can read more about their work here: https://www.yellowbirdlifeways.org/

They often speak about the importance of connection, which comes naturally to them through their culture. This may seem off topic at first, but you’ll see.

“Our circular way of life is spirit based, or love based” Lynette explained.  “Mind, body, spirit. It’s all connected and in our ways we knew that.”

“In our indigenous ways, we are all connected. When we are born we are sacred and holy, closest to spirit, this place of origin, so when we are born we are connected to that.”

“We are not born into sin, we are born into connectedness. We came from the other side, through our parents, to have this sacred experience. As we start to make our way through the circle of life, we start forgetting that. 

“We go to school, and as adolescents, we forget we are connected to everything. The linear thinking begins to be imprinted in childhood and is absorbed in adolescence,” Lynette said.

Linear thinking is that which sees a beginning and an end to life, rather than the circular way, the revolving of cycles throughout life and earth.

“The education system really separates us from the spirit,” Lynette said. “The arts are so important. Music, that’s where we say healing lies. The right brain is circular, holistic, that’s where you are connected to spirit. So, if you look at all those things, music, flute music how soothing that is; that is connecting us to that place.”

In America, when schools experience budget cuts, the arts programs are usually the first thing to go. For many, the arts are considered too frivolous to be a meaningful career.

But are they? Has America paved over all of our happy places? Have schools undermined our spirits by disconnecting us from the subjects we need most? 

Math could be taught to inspire insight into nature. Science could be taught to connect us to the stars.  They could be, if connectedness and beauty were the goals.

Lynette suggests, “People will go to the highest mountain and the greatest depths of the ocean in search of themselves, always asking what is my purpose because they are disconnected from center. When you can live your life to its fullest, in the present, those are the things that brings you back to center. That’s heaven on earth. We no longer have to be seeking everywhere because it’s right here.”

So, do yourself a favor. Make that trip to the tallest mountain or the gentlest stream often. Listen to music and maybe even pick up a paintbrush or write a poem. Support your spiritual center by getting outdoors in the beauty so that when you need that balance and centering, inspiration and awe, you know exactly how to find it. 

Out there is in here, in your heart. Keep it open to stay in touch with yourself. The modern world won’t give you that, but the earth— as it is, as it was, and ever will be — is a very important part of who we are. Connection is everything. 

More about Connections next week, assuming I don’t get distracted.

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To learn more about Yellowbird and their other program,  Medicine Wheel Model Training, visit https://www.yellowbirdlifeways.org/  They are doing life changing work and I highly recommend their programs.