As our voices join together bring this night of celebration
Let our hearts join together light the hymn star of creation
We gather together
I'm going to introduce those of us who went to the gathering and are going to share this evening.
To my right is Lorna. This is Joe. Susan.
And Diana. I'm love.
Fired the ash that's in the bowl over there. I didn't like what that story was.
Okay. The sacred fire is a lot of Indigenous people have fire as their sacred item, you know.
The Weechole said that as soon as they're traveling, as soon as they stop, they start a fire.
So for Native Americans and other Indigenous people, ceremony is started with the sacred fire.
And so the grandmothers met on Monday morning at sunrise with the fire keeper and started the sacred fire in a sacred way.
And because it was from Sunday from Monday morning till Sunday night.
So it was a whole week of the sacred fire.
So that made us in sacred space the whole time with that sacred fire going.
And we went Sunday night after the fire was out and collected ash, which is allowable.
We could touch it until after the fire was out.
In the morning, each grandmother had one grandmother did a ceremony three hours long and then one in the afternoon and one in the evening.
And each time they would they would first go into it was like it was like a medicine wheel.
It was like twenty seven stones. I think it was in two circles.
And there was it was open to the east, just like a medicine wheel would.
And they'd walk in and they do all the directions and they do they do their own particular ceremony to their Indigenous culture in that fire.
And then they would bring that out.
And when there was downtime, we were allowed to go into that circle, give thanks to that fire or use it to cleanse yourself with or whatever.
And at the end, when the fire was was going out at the end of the ceremony, we were they told us that we were welcome to go and take some of the ash and take that out with us.
And that carried what had gone on that weekend in the in the ash.
With a medicine wheel or circle around it was in the center of the big open powwow grounds that was surrounded by a circular covered bleachers.
So it was all circular. The fire was in the very middle.
So the question was for the sweat lodges, were the stones in the sacred fire or their own fire?
They were in their own fire. Yeah. Yeah.
And it was mixed sweats. Women and women had everybody had to be clothed.
Yeah. I'd have a dress on below your knees.
How many people were in this?
I wouldn't think more than six. They were pretty small.
There were six of them and they but only three of them would be functioning at one time twice a day.
A man was talking and he was sharing how I didn't really see him.
I don't know. I'm going to say he's 50.
I don't know how old he was, but he was sharing how he all of his life had had so much
angst, anger, hatred of the white man for his life, for what we did to them.
And he said about two years ago, he came upon this realization, the oppressor
is just as traumatized as the oppressed.
And when he had that realization, it totally lightened his attitude towards the white man.
It's like, oh, you know, even though you were chasing and killing my ancestors,
you were being traumatized as well. I mean, it's not easy to chase and kill someone.
It's not, you know, it's not human nature.
That's not the divine being that we are doesn't hunt and kill humans.
And then he said, and somebody came up to me today and said,
there's a woman here in this audience who I want you to meet.
And he went and met her and he said, and she's real.
I wanted to make sure she was real before I brought her to you.
And she's the real thing.
I would like to introduce you to Custer's great, great niece.
And she's, and he said, and here she is.
And he gave her name and she stands up and she says, I apologize for my uncle's wrongdoing.
The whole audience just broke into sobs.
It was just, it was really amazing.
What I can add to it is that she didn't know.
She didn't know where she was going when she took the trip with her sister or friend.
She didn't realize that she would be on Cheyenne land.
She didn't realize.
So it was, it was, it was, um, it was a part of what was to happen there in the healing.
Um, it wasn't her intention to go there with this Lorna, Diana, myself, and Joe, who camped together.
We went to little bighorn and we took sacred ash from the sacred fire.
The fire was started sunrise Sunday morning and the fire keeper kept the fire going all the way until Sunday sunset.
He was a Lakota man. And so we gathered sacred ash, which is what is on the table, which if you have a container with you, you're welcome to take some home.
And we went there and we had our sacred ash with us.
And the first place we went to was to the, the grave site.
My ancestors were all army cavalry. My great grandfather was a cavalry. He could have been a Custer Buddy.
I have no idea. So I went there and I offered, um, I just offered my understanding of their trauma to help heal that.
And then we went to the grave site.
And we did the same thing all, all there. And it felt very powerful, very powerful.
And there was, we heard so many stories about how the Native Americans were treated going back to grandmothers and grandfathers and great, great grandparents.
And how even nowadays it is, it has been hard, I think, because they've heard the stories and live in that fear.
And one woman got up and said, I've always been afraid. I didn't know what to do.
And I couldn't go anywhere or do anything. And now I know that there are people here and now I can go forward.
I wanted to share about the cavalry. When we went inside to the little, the viewing room, the museum or whatever it was,
there was, they had recreated some of the, the, the people that had fought in Custer's army.
And looking at this gentleman, he looked so lifelike and so real. It really brought it home.
And there was a little, little thing talking about it. And it said, and I can't remember the percentage, but I think it was at least 60% of the cavalry were immigrants.
So they were these poor people that were from another nation that had no idea what they were going into.
They had no, they were probably had nowhere to go and nothing to do.
So the Calgary, Calvary or whatever was the way to go to survive when they came to the Americas.
So that was really interesting to them.
So what I'd like to speak to kind of follows Susan in that it's the ancestral healing.
There, there were many layers of intention for ancestral healing.
And one that I really came away with and learned a lot and I'm still learning and will always be learning about is my own ancestral healing.
And that it's a responsibility for me to tap deep into my ancestry.
One of the things that was shared through story and through smaller circles in the evening, often in our culture, white culture, we look to other cultures to find healing and to find ways of honoring prayer and ceremony.
And what I came away with really strongly is that it's time for us individually to tap into our own ancestry because we are all from indigenous peoples.
And it's not really about taking somebody else's ceremony or ancestry and using that for our own healing.
It's about tapping deep into and you have to go way back.
That was really a powerful message for me.
I don't take it lightly.
I feel it's a very important message.
And it also allowed me to understand something about my family.
We talked in circle and through listening to people share about how anger, substance abuse,
and emotions like that, bitterness, judgment, can come from the scars that we carry through our ancestors.
And for the first time in my life, and I'm not saying this lightly, for the first time in my life I felt like I could look at my mother's suffering with compassion.
But in hearing the words that were shared, I was able to understand that she actually carries the suffering of many generations in her life without even really knowing it.
And it gave me a chance to look at her through different eyes, which was really such a gift.
I remember being in the circle and watching everyone having the traditions that they had and feeling that longing for that.
Because my heritage is so many different routes.
There are so many different ways that I could go with that that I've never really followed any of them.
And which one would I follow?
So there was that longing for having a tradition and a culture.
And it also brought me back to the fact that here I've lived here on Vashon my whole life.
And I've always kind of felt like I had to apologize for that or something.
And watching the Cheyenne people being so proud of where they live and their homeland and being that their homeland.
That I thought, well I need to take that back and maybe it's time for us to have our own new traditions that we create.
I would love to talk about when the horses and the wolves came in to the arena.
And it was really amazing, but five of the grandmothers were riding the horses.
And as they were coming in and they were, it's always hard for me to talk about.
But I saw the past and the present come together.
And it became the now time and then it was healed and it was amazing. It was absolutely amazing.
I just want to add something. I remember Grandmother Agnes telling a story about that ride.
She was the one that led the horses in. She was on the first horse.
She has a mountain named after her in southwestern Oregon.
And quite an amazing presence.
She told a story, I don't remember what she said as far as the timing.
But I think it was probably maybe weeks or shorter or a little bit longer prior to the ride into the circle.
That she had a visit from her grandmother in a vision.
And if I remember the story right, she said that her grandmother came to her in this vision.
And her grandmother was a rider. She rode horses. That was her life, was the horses.
And in the vision, all her grandmother told her was, get on the horse.
She didn't know what her grandmother was talking about.
But when it came to be that there was this opportunity for the grandmother,
for some of them to ride the horses in for the first time to welcome, she knew at that point what her grandmother was talking about.
And she did what her grandmother said. She got on the horse.
My experience of when the riders came in, when they came in, they came in on the horses.
And then there was the Cheyenne were drumming a song to the horses.
They drummed a couple of songs to the horses. And there was one horse that was in front of me that was kind of sideways.
So that it was like it was looking at me and I could see, I could see that it was like an expression on its face.
And the only way I can describe it was that I could actually feel what the horse was experiencing.
And it was it was humbled and it was grateful and it was appreciative.
It was all those things. It was like it was it was the horse going through.
And the horses going through the experience of the healing also, because they were used.
And when we went to Custer's, they were used by the the cavalry would shoot them and lie behind the horses to protect them while they were in battle.
There was a grandmother from Guatemala and she had brought enough herbs to do foot washes for 500 people.
And so you can imagine what, you know, the compassion in that.
She wasn't able to do all those 500. But then the next day when she had her prayer time,
she actually went around and anointed everybody's third eye that she could reach with an oil that opens your cell memory.
So that was like a really big thing for me. I cried for a while on that, too.
The the last day when she gave her ceremony, she first asked the cloud people to come.
To give us a little bit of a reprieve from the heat, because it had been one hundred and seven and one hundred and ten.
And I'm not joking you. Fifteen minutes later, there were clouds in the sky.
I wanted to start with one of the profound things that I heard there, which was.
Allow the prayer to come. Which I thought was just just kind of blew me away.
It's like, you know how when you go to say a prayer, you're always just kind of blathering out something.
But just to take that breath. And allow it to come. I thought that was beautiful.
And anyway, I kind of a backtrack.
So the meeting grandmother Margaret was an amazing experience.
And kudos to Lorna to bringing her here.
And when I said, oh, sure, let's go to July in 2012, I figured that's two years away.
It doesn't really matter. And it kept getting closer.
I was like, oh, wow, what the heck is going on? We're going to Montana. OK.
So I wasn't really prepared for it, I guess. I didn't really know what to expect.
And I didn't know why I was going. And, you know, I was just kind of along for the ride.
So we just blew in. We set up our tent. And the next morning, you know, I got up and everybody's out and about.
I don't know why everybody's standing around to see me do this.
But I get out of the tent and take the first step.
And I just trip and fall and hit my face right on the ground.
I was like, OK, we are going to be humbled and kiss the earth before we start this journey.
So it was good. So it was all good.
But I kind of went there thinking, you know, I had this perception that the Cheyenne people would be thinking,
who are all these people coming into our territory and, you know, and not feeling necessary,
necessarily good thoughts about us invading their space and doing this ceremony,
who are all these white people pretending that they know what's going on.
And I found that it was absolutely to the contrary.
The Cheyenne people were just the most warm and welcoming people.
And people came from all over the world.
There was a woman from Scotland that was in her kilt.
And she was talking about how she was embracing her heritage and she was doing her thing.
There was one from Spain who came and talked and she oh, my goodness, she was saying, you know, pray for us.
We're in trouble right now. And they were just from everywhere.
I was taken back by the landscape because it is so barren and yet so fertile at the same time.
The contradiction there, it's like nothing could live there.
And yet the sacredness of the land is so great.
And on the last day we were there, I woke up thinking I just really miss the water in so many ways.
I miss the sound. I miss the coolness. I miss the water.
And both the grandmothers that day, their focus was on the water and the blessings of the water.
And one of them talked about how we come into this world in a river.
And another one was saying what she said that I found very profound was that every time you use water to just thank it.
And so it's become a real it's just become a part of what I do now.
When I drink my water, I'm just like, thank you, water, as I drink it.
So I mean, she said, you know, when you flush the toilet, when you take your shower, when you get into water, suggest, be aware of that.
At one point at the ending of the ceremony, there was somebody that got up and they were talking about the Cheyenne people.
And she said, I made a commitment at every evening that I would say a prayer for the Cheyenne people.
And she asked us all to get up and all make a commitment to say a prayer for the Cheyenne people.
The last day, one of the chiefs, because there was a number of chiefs, wasn't there?
Yeah, seven clans. And one of them got up there and he had tears in his in his eyes.
He said, this is good. This is hard. This is difficult.
This is good. This is hard, but this is really good, you know, because so many so many people in their individual lives were healed during this weekend.
The reason that we were there was not it was not about politics.
It was not about all the things that you think that it would be about.
It was really about prayer and ceremony and acceptance of everybody.
And it was so powerful.
The question is, what can we take away from this sharing?
What comes to me is to remember to tap in to your divine self,
that with that connection, you will be doing the work.
Did it change you, each of you? And if so, how?
Did it change us? And if so, how?
For me, my summer was very full. I did three incredible pieces of work.
And I feel clearer, like more really here.
Well, again, I'm much more aware of water, number one, and, you know, and being very grateful.
I mean, however it touches me, whether I'm showering in the morning, I'm just thank you water, whether I'm drinking, it's thank you water.
I have I have a lot of questions that I still need to answer.
So there's there's always it's always a continuing journey that that this brought up that just kind of fueled a little bit more.
Just definitely more aware of prayer and the power of prayer and trying to incorporate it more in my life.
I think that would be the changes.
What did I take away? Well, you know, what what really lasts if it makes a strong impression?
I was impressed by the power of a group, group energy focused on something higher.
That was real. That was that was really real.
What what certain people were experiencing intensely and what I felt.
And it was real in the direction of helping and opening and connecting.
And personally, just the conversations I had with Cheyenne men, three of them in particular.
Never forget those. I don't know.
It was like I was talking to somebody from another world.
It was so different. It was new for me.
I'm sure there are people here who've had those experiences a lot.
Maybe they are that way.
There was much that I. Felt in my heart through this experience and the interconnection of all things and how.
I can't exist without water. I can't exist without the earth under my feet.
I mean, I I'm here because of something or someone else.
And and. I. That was that weekend for me in a lot of ways.
And that I also felt that it was such an honoring and I'm very grateful that for this to have the opportunity to be there in this group,
within this group and to not have any expectations of what was going to happen,
but to be a witness and to be a part of a group that was holding sacred space for whatever was going to happen to happen.
And it was safe. It was a safe place for that.
And I feel that that's going to be in my heart forever.
And it is my belief that we are all part of the collective consciousness.
And every time someone speaks from the heart or gives someone well wishes or says, I love you, it's adding to that.
And in the becoming of that collective consciousness in that space,
things like what are happening now tend to cease and will begin to cease and are beginning to cease.
So it'll happen less. And when it's in a group like it was when we went to see the grandmothers, it was amazing.
Shine on the earth in the cosmos, in the inner light.
Shine on illuminating ending this long, long night.
Shine into you and shine into me and shine until everyone is dancing and free.
I can see the candles lighting in heights across the land.
I can feel our souls igniting as hand touches hand.
And the whole world is lifted up in a shining web of light.
And we are all there to behold the beautiful sight.
We can again become a planet of light.