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.