Very pleased to have you with us Tiokasin. Good to be here, John. Thank you for inviting me. Good. I have happy memories of first meeting you at The Morgan Library in New York where you were giving a talk very fine remarks that prompted me back then to open an invitation to come and talk to some students at Yale. We've kept in touch since then, and I thought this would be a really fine occasion to talk about the Northern Plains peoples, the environmental awareness, and those larger questions of how people relate to themselves, relate to the world. But I think it would help our viewers to open up if I simply ask you, could you say a word about your people and where you come from? Wow. Lakota, LA-KO-TA. We come from the geographical center of North America, Turtle Island, and it's located near the Black Hills of South Dakota in Wyoming, and that's just where our people originate from. As one of the many peoples combinations that come from that area too. When you look at the American history, you think that there is only Lakota in that area or Sioux people, but the Lakota are one of three divisions so to speak, the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota. So, the particular clans of the Lakota that I come from, they're seven. I come from the Hokwoju, or Mniconjou they call us, and the Itazipcho (Itazipcolo, as some would say) and Ogalala. There's three of the seven bands that I come from. But the Lakota essentially means in relationship to everything. That's basically what it is, and that's where I come from. As we've talked over these past few years coming to know one another, I've followed some of your journeys and recently you've been traveling, and in our conversation you mentioned that you're involved now in the developing a course in the United Kingdom, in the UK, on spiritual ecology which is one of the terms that's often used religion and ecology, spiritual ecology, some people say religion and nature. We have a number of approaches, but what is it that you're undertaking in that course, and does it relate to your own people and their awareness of place? I would think about the last thing you said relating to my own people and the awareness of it. I think to me, we can assume that native people know about the spiritual ecology, the relationship to it. But since the onset of colonization, we begin to forget that relationship and put into the realm of just trying to sustain a life from day to day, so we don't have the culture as much as we could or used to. When I think about it in my position of privilege to being able to sit down and think and actually practice the ceremonies and be with that thought process, then I go back to like, this is what we need to bring back to not just to Lakota people but to all people who have lost a connection for centuries before. Because our contact is interesting because we in our conversation earlier is that, the contact period happened for us in 1492 is contacting with the Western people and then what happened after contact. When we think about the cultural continuity and in relationship to your question, the cultural continuity is what I'm searching for and to bring to other people saying that how did we become and why are we still resilient to something that came to change us? I think as natural as we can be, we adapted to the change. When I'm bringing the knowledge to other peoples, it's not that it's primarily a Lakota thing, because at one time we all had this knowledge. It's that the Lakota and those nations within the center of Turtle Island or the United States were one of the last peoples to be contacted, and so the elders say that may be 150, 260 years ago that we basically got into contact with a Westerner and that's far less than those who live on the Eastern seaboard here, or maybe 400, 500 years ago. We think about that how much of the knowledge do we retain, and I would say there's rather a lot of storing of that knowledge through the seven ceremonies, through how we spoke with Earth and how it was held in relativity. When I'm speaking to the people in the UK, the young people who have the degrees in biology and ecology and all these science degrees, they come forward and say there's something else missing and that is the actual contact. There's something to go and dissect the plant and say well it has so many molecules and it has to do with certain proteins, and then we continue to think about and dividing it up and fragmenting what is there but it's a spirit behind it. Now I think to me that would be an evolving, is to know what the plant knows. In other words, the communication process that is there so that we don't have to take the plant apart. The plant will say, I'm good medicine for this ailment you have, but this is how you treat me in order to have that cure so to speak. It's a relationship back and forth. Now when I'm speaking to the young folks, it's going to be what was taught to me by a few elders and I'm not getting paid for it because I said I don't want to be paid for it, that's like we can't sell spirituality. I'm going to be talking about the consciousness that I've experienced but explain it as much as I can to the people who maybe feel it inside but they haven't been given a thought process to know how to feel it. They've always wanted to own what they knew. Sort of an ownership to prop up that they did feel something but yet it was not about a feeling, it's still about I am vacant inside, I have the knowledge but what do I do with it? I'm very keen on the connections that you make between traditional thought and by using that phrase I certainly do not want to back something that existed only in the past because we hear in what you're saying living tradition. Tradition has a consciousness. Some people might use the phrase symbolic consciousness, the attention to symbols, and also contemporary pressures on Lakota people with regard to environmental issues. Really interested, this course is trying to be aware of both. If we would talk for a moment and say of that traditional knowledge and to think of buffalo as we were speaking earlier, of that consciousness of buffalo. I've heard the phrase used, and it's very much in public awareness of all my relations. That sense of the sacred and the buffalo and all my relations has real traditional gravity to it, it has weight to it. Is there something that you could speak about in terms of this understanding of relationship to people in place? Yeah. Let me see if I can say, well, if a company comes to the reservation and is proselytizing a better way, either through religion, science or politics, what they're doing is asking the people to sell, and when it comes down to it it's about the land, so you give something in order to take something, and instead of reciprocity it's still a one-way street that you're giving to take something and somebody is left without and somebody is having whatever has been taken. When it comes to the relationship, it's almost that. You see it in the traditional sense if there is a patch of wild sage growing. It's not that there's an abundance of sage so we can take it all, because it leaves a bare spot. But if you're coming and you know what the sage is about then you know that you take only a small plant of the sage area, there's sprouts of sage in one area, so you take one because you know if you take one there'll be much more the next year. But in a sense even the sage itself, you ask a sage and you tell a sage what you're going to do with the sage. You're in communication with it, the relationship. When we say Mitakuye Oyasin, we're talking about interrelationship to everything. Some people use E equals MC squared, everything is relative type of thing equal EMC. I forgot what the formula was. Equals MC squared. Yeah. When we think about that equal to something, you're equal to that plant, you're equal to that bird, you're equal to everything. When you're in equality, you're more or less in a consciousness of the equality, and so you don't really have to go out and search for the balance of equality because you're feeling the consciousness of a plant. You're feeling that in respect that you are able to communicate with the plant without taking it apart because of your people's knowledge over the millennia and more in experience with that plant that you know how much you take, you know what to take and you know when to pick it, and even the plant is saying I'm ready now. But then again there is a division between that type of sage. There is a male sage and a female sage, and many people go and pick the wrong gender so there's less of it, and that these old ways in relationship to everything from that sage I described to what the people would say. What could be laughable was that that's a buffalo patty or bison patty. Now you think about the relationship that they used to have with that. Now let's modernize all those ideas. A buffalo patty. What do we use for fuel? Or we dig deep and we grind up the guts of Earth. We bring it above, we bring her blood and water or oil, we bring it above and we pollute. In our modern minds, we think of buffalo patty is, oh that's not sanitary, it's whatever. But yet we don't think about our own process of extraction but we're polluting the Earth we're not supposed to. In relationship to buffalo, you have to view the buffalo in a sense of that they don't go in water, they don't defecate in water. They go on a land because we watched the buffalo. They don't pollute what they put into themselves. We watched that, but on the other hand you watch domesticated cattle. They pollute the water that they drink, so putting what they're defecating into themselves and the same in a metaphorical way, that's what we're doing to ourselves. We're defecating on what we're putting into ourselves because it's in everything we use from plastic to the food we eat to everything, so we're basically eating in the modern sense the dirty buffalo pie , the buffalo patty. That's striking. In a relationship with everything, you have to see where you're coming from and we talked about the humility, the humbleness of it. In a sense to be humble is the most powerful place. Yes. There's a sense of the vision even the name for vision questing carries embedded in it that sense of being humble. Always humble and knowing that you're not greater or less than anything, and to objectify it by saying anything, it's not a good thought process for me, but since I'm using his language, let's just say to think that you're better than or worse than anything is removing yourself from the balance that we say, and I understand it as a sense that everybody is looking for that balance with the knowledge that we learned in educational institutions and we continue our life to come back full circle to what we were born with. That intuitive value and sense of being and the humbleness that we know and this is why one of the mottos, I guess you'd say, is to not educate the wisdom out of yourself. Because we are born with the wisdom, we just educate it away because we're talking about experiences with your intuitive values of our language with that sage or even with the buffalo patty. I know that might not sound like a good example to talk about. It works. It works. When we're talking in relationship, we're talking about a value of consciousness rather than conscience. I think I said before, the conscience is the stickler to obey the rules that are owned and defined by somebody else's reality. This is why we don't have the word for religion or worship because they have to deal with a conscience rather than consciousness. It's inherently ecological. It's inherently. Yes it's always been that way. In other words if you look at it this way, John, I had been taught in the Western way to go discover something, but I never had the notion of that tree already knowing about me, discovering me and letting it talk to me to tell me how it's to be treated. In other way I think of when I explained it to younger folks is that, when was the last time Mother Earth appreciated you? Because we're always going out into the park and appreciating nature. We're saving. We're saving nature, and we're thinking about that and like, no, when was the last time you were able to take down that park boundary, that fence? When were you able to allow Mother Earth to breath by taking that dam down and letting her circulatory system work once again, to restore all that life that goes with it? This is out-of-control thought process to the box of rationality, the duality of conscience that there needs to be rules, there needs to be civilization. Wild to me really means with spirit, and you talk about domestication or tame which means without spirit. You're talking about we're domesticated. Nations depending on another nation doesn't make you sovereignty because sovereignty doesn't mean what we're talking about, it's really being tethered to another mindset, and I think all people are tethered to a fear mindset. When you come out and think Ska, that Ska is not really fearful of that mindset. It's again, I think if I hear you correctly, to a realization in the conservation community of late that to have an idea of wilderness and then to conserve a wilderness with little or no awareness of the people who might have been there for some period of time, literally centuries if not millennia, and to have a sense of separating out wilderness apart from people. Yeah. That that's fortunately is beginning to change in the conservation community, but it seems to me an example of this separating that you're speaking of. It is in a sense to speed the process up is that when was the last time we allowed Mother Earth to save us? We're always out there trying to save Mother Earth from what? What are we saving it for and to whose benefit? We're so benevolent that we can actually go out to that forest and save a tree and forget who was there before by destroying that culture and then the tree misses the culture that was there, the Indigenous peoples in his case and they're gone now and they can't speak to the tree and the forest dies. Did we really save a tree? If so there's that park where we can save out of the whole forest? Yes. It's like this powerful anthropological work. How Forests Think, recently generated a whole new discussion in the anthropological community. Yeah. I'm thinking Tiokasin, that the word environmentalist or environmentalism has some reverberation in this discussion. In other words it has the connotation of commitment to natural processes, but at the same time the dynamics or the consciousness behind that environmentalism may miss some of the points that you're presenting. I think from my experience with environmentalist, it's pretty much, when I go out to the land and I'm with movement out there even the activists and an environmental movement, they're pretty much non-Native people or non-people of color. Sometimes I'm surprised that where are the native people here, and maybe there's a token there or not or a person of color in this case and where are their views in this. People are trying to say well the forest has been devastated, the land and water, and we better clean it up. But there's that clinical approach to everything with a scientist. What I'm saying is when the Native people such as the Animas River in New Mexico was damaged and basically dead because of the mining release of toxics into it is the Native people, the youth and the other people along that river. They view the river as a living being, so what did they do? They came out and they apologized and they did a ceremony and they continue to do that and we don't hear about in the big news. We hear about war, we hear about other things and how we're going to save Earth. But the Native people have these thousands and thousands and thousands and 10 thousands of years experience with which way the river flowed at one time to why it had to change to what is necessary for it. But this is the new news is that it's dead, and how do we bring it back to life? How do we nurture how we talk to that Earth again without having to take water out of you and they say, Okay we know it's dead and what's going to bring it to life, and we play creator with it by taking it apart and saying, okay I can bring the life to you, look at us we brought technology and science and therefore look at us we are benevolent as beings and therefore we are superior to life that we think we created? Now I think how can you be superior to life that you created? Isn't that ironic? The Native people are out there, and to this day I know of native people going to that river in New Mexico and sitting down and having ceremony and talking to it and talking to other life besides the water, the fishes and the deer and other animals that came to drink and then now are dead. They're talking to all of those beings around it, not just the river.
