Sacred Springs

There was a place and time when the Sacred Hoop was intact and strong. Now, the Sacred Hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center, and the sacred tree is dead.

The ancient, sacred landscape thrust toward the sky here, sunk to watery depths there, heaving and folding unto itself again and again long before breath brought purposefulness into being. Place existed for unimaginable eons before humans claimed dominion over it in their belated but historic march through time.

To deny the synchronism of the universe is to defy natural law and fall into dis-harmony with all that is. Intuitively, the spirit recognizes that the heart beats to the life-force rhythms of Earth. Inhaling, exhaling the seasons, the living organism is nourished by the spirit in all things. Amid chaos, nature models the perfection of fractals. “We can view our lives as trajectories, parameterized by time, through story space,” writes Michael Frame.

Place is inseparably linked to—yet distinct from—time. Together, they weave into story mythical and historical heroes and deeds. It is place more than time that marks our beginnings and circumscribes events, not as we currently understand them, but as extraordinary experiences the essence of which remains after the event has ceased.

It is a concept foreign to many of us: the sacredness of all things—invisible, illimitable, sometimes impalpable. Non-Indians, imaginations fired, named this unfamiliar essence that permeates life the Great Spirit—an erroneous interpretation of the Siouan word Wakanda. American Indians saw no point in intellectualizing the unfathomable. Life was to be lived impeccably—in, through, and with the allness that simply is. We learn that they felt it as the Great Mystery—that which breathed life into the spirit—and they knew it as being everywhere.

The Cheyenne call this All Spirit Maheo. It is Earthmaker to the Winnebago, Breathmaker to the Seminole. The Blackfeet say this spirit is the Old Man, Na’ pi, who made the mountains and prairies.

It is Wakon’ da to the Omaha. For the Zuni, The Maker and Container of All is also the All-father Father.

Manitou, say the Algonquin, is the unity of all spiritual powers into an overall force. The Sioux call that force Waken or Wakanda. To the Iroquois, it was Orenda. Maxpe is the life essence to the Crow.

The breath of life . . . the mist of a waterfall . . . the sighing of a cave . . . the whisper in the trees are all expressed in the Lummi language as one word: Sah-laugh-woun. For the Pueblo, Po-wa-ha, the water-wind-breath blows without distinction through animate and inanimate existences. Separation is an illusion. As Chief Seattle’s words reflect, all things are connected above and below:

"The air is precious to the red man, for all things share the same breath—the beast, the tree, the man. Every part of the soil is sacred. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove has been hallowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished. Even the rocks, which seem to be dumb and dead as they swelter in the sun along the silent shore, thrill with memories of stirring events connected with the lives of my people."

From his Narragansett-Wampanoag heritage, scholar Walter W. Peek draws his understanding of allness and inseparability. “Wah’ kon-tah,” he explains. “The sum total of all things, the collective totality that always was—without beginning, without end. Neither a force nor a spirit, it is the inexplicable sharing-togetherness that makes all things, animate and inanimate, of equal value, equal importance and equal consequence. All are Wah’ kon-tah simultaneously. All things exist in Wah’ kon-tah, and Wah’ kon-tah exists in all things.”

American Indians understood themselves as no less, no more, than the rocks, rivers, birds, and trees. The One Truth was self-evident: all life is entwined. Sunrise to sunset, harmony and unity with the Great Allness inspired myth, ritual, art, and architecture. More than a rite of passage that solidified spiritual and cultural identity, achieving at-one-ness with place became an act of the soul. So it was with the ancestors, a Taos Pueblo Indian tells us. “The story of my people and the story of this place are one single story. No man can think of us without thinking of this place. We are always joined together.”

In 1876, at the age of eight, Yankton Dakota Sioux Zitkala-Sä (Red Bird) was torn from her mother’s side by Quaker missionaries and taken to White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute in Wabash, Indiana, where disenfranchisement from her tribal roots began by giving her the name Gertrude Simmons. Her newfound love of reading and playing the violin conflicted her desire to remain loyal to her heritage. When she left the institute 1887, Zitkala-Sä walked in two worlds. She mobilized her education to serve as an activist for the preservation of American Indian cultural and tribal identities, citizenship for native peoples, and their right to vote. Though Zitkala-Sä was buried alongside her non-Indian husband in Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, DC, she exposed her heart with these words: “A wee child toddling in a wonder world, I prefer my excursions into the natural gardens, where the voice of the Great Spirit is heard in the twittering of birds, the rippling of waters and the sweet breathing of flowers.”

A child intuitively assimilates the mystical experiences of nature. Age finds solace in them.

Robert LaBatte, Cheyenne River Sioux, learned from his ancestors that the rocks of his rugged South Dakota landscape are sacred. “They are people. They are nations. They are there to help us,” he says.

“When we pray,” says Hector Lalo Franco, who is Wukchumni, a non-federally recognized tribe from Central California, “we pray for all people, not just the Wukchumni. We say ‘all my relations.’ Even the rocks are our relations.”

Tewa archaeologist Alfonso Ortiz affirms that rocks are much more than inanimate objects. Indeed, they are “potent with medicine.” For as long as they can remember, Pomo Indian life and the bountiful ocean have been entwined. Mystery and power belong not just to the water, but also to the transition between land and sea . . . the sculptured refuge of rock-spirits that share their secrets and speak the feeling-language understood by few.

For Lorin Smith, a Kashaya Pomo traditional elder who has traveled the US and abroad sharing his knowledge of healing, the time-carved moonscape of the California coast near his reservation is alive with an energy he uses in his healing work.

Along an extraordinary seventeen-mile basaltic escarpment marking western Albuquerque’s suburban boundary, fifteen thousand petroglyphs are “the symbols and legends of Pueblo life and culture.” In a statement before the House of Representatives that called for their protection from development and vandalism, Herman Agoyo, former chairman of the All Pueblo Council, explained their significance: “These petroglyphs . . . remind us of who we are and where we came from as Indian people.”

They are sacred art, visual prayers, textbooks, and blueprints for living impeccably. Petroglyphs often mark a place as sacred, recalling the mystery or ritual reconnection to the world of animal people and unseen spirits.

Orca petroglyphs of the Ozette, ancestors of the present-day Makah peoples of the Olympic Peninsula, potently reveal a centuries-old cultural, social, and spiritual connection to the sea. Coastal peoples admired the whale for its power and playfulness. Before the hunt, whalers went each to his secret place to fast and pray.

For thousands of years in reverence to place, American Indians created shrines here and there. They mimicked nature so that they were indistinguishable from the landscape itself. Holy places are not places “apart.” Instead, they are intimately bound up in all-natural processes: birthing, naming, dying, and all the cycles of life in between. They are manifest in the variety of nature: rocky outcrops or misty meadows where in prayer and ceremony one meets the dawn; windswept mountains or breathing caves where fasting dream seekers and sky walkers see creation through the eye of the eagle; sacred grounds from which all life comes and to which all life returns; observation points where Father Sky meets Mother Earth and two-leggeds learn of cycles; quarries where skilled craftsmen carve special stone into ceremonial pipes and the ritual objects of life and death; hot springs where body and spirit are cleansed and purified; cascading waterfalls—home of the water people who dance in the mist; openings in the Earth where the people of this world emerged from the last and where reconnection is possible.

The power of each sacred place connects with our subtler senses. For Cha-das-ska-dum Which-ta-lum (Ken Cooper), Lummi cultural resource specialist for his tribe on Washington’s northernmost coast, “listening with his third ear” and “seeing with his third eye” clear pathways for communion with plants and animals.

According to Sun Bear, the Ojibway whose cross-cultural prophecies borrow language from traditions of both the East and West, such an exercise as communion with animate and inanimate things is “not supernatural, but perfectly natural.” Still, that connection is possible only when one understands the inter-relationship of all things, what the Sioux call mitakayeoysin.

Elders tell us that we are acted upon by the Earth, interact with the Earth, and are spiritually indivisible from the Earth. Wind, rain, sun, and the forces of nature define us but do not contain us. We wonder: What if the dances that mark the seasons pass away? And the songs? And the rituals? Or the medicine ways? What if the grandfathers take the stories of creation with them to their graves? What, then, becomes of place? What reverence, then, saves it?

“I shall vanish and be no more, but the land over which I roam shall remain . . . and not change.” That is the hope of the Omaha nation. But times have changed. And places have changed. Peopling the Earth became an act both covetous and arrogant. Time assumed a new value—a function of expediency—and wrought new patterns over place. Time works against place, countering cultural isolation, thus countering cultural preservation, too.

“Every culture has a connection with place that makes them who they are,” says Hector Franco, a Wukchumni tribal member. “These places are important to us. For years we’ve been coming here in secret. In the olden days, our ancestors would spend four or five days here doing ceremonies. When our people started losing connection with these places, problems started. Anyone who loses connection with his sacred places loses something. For example, up in the high country is a place called Blue Ridge. It’s the center of our world. Now the mountain is covered with microwave towers. In the middle of all these towers is Signal Rock. On top of the rock is an ancient carving of our valley.”

Atop nearly barren ten-thousand-foot Medicine Mountain in Wyoming, limestone slabs and boulders create a stone circle of unknown antiquity two hundred forty-five feet around. From a central rock cairn, twenty-eight stone spokes radiate in all directions. “The sun made it to show us how to build a tepee,” say the Crow. Foot-worn paths mark this mysterious structure called Medicine Wheel as a destination of pilgrimages for hundreds of years, perhaps longer. In the early quarter of the twentieth century, heavy visitation to this remote site in the Big Horn Mountains prompted the Forest Service to distance it from harm by erecting a high, barbed-wire fence around it on which hangs a warning sign: “Entrance by permit only.”

Crow, Cheyenne, Shoshone, Arapaho, Blackfeet, and Salish-Kootenai still come to Medicine Wheel for ceremonies and worship. But so, too, do others, attaching to the encircling fence that keeps people out brightly colored offerings: trinkets from the glove compartment of their vehicles, cellophane wrappers, a Harley-Davidson bandana, and bikini bottoms.

Several agencies propose to promote tourism to Medicine Wheel by widening the precipitous access road to make it less harrowing, developing asphalt trails, raising an observation platform over the stone circle, creating a parking lot, and building a visitor center at the base of the mountain. An alliance of nine tribes from surrounding states opposes these plans and others that “would seriously and irreparably damage the cultural value of the site” or “jeopardize the spiritual nature of the Medicine Wheel.” But to the alliance, the most viable alternative is its designation as a wilderness area. 

Native Americans know that even the remoteness of a site cannot save it for long. In the high desert of southeastern Utah, pick, shovel and backhoe scandalize ancestral remains. Grave-robbing and looting on federal lands are unlawful and punishable. Yet undaunted pothunters risk imprisonment and fines for discovering priceless booty. Laws that prohibit removal of artifacts and destruction of cultural resources do little to curb the appetite of a rapacious black market fed by dealers and collectors.

Authorities say more than one hundred thousand sites have been disturbed in the Four Corners region of the Southwest alone. A federal investigation reveals perhaps as much as 90 percent of all Four Corners sites already may be vandalized. States and tribes have enacted protective laws, too; yet destruction still outflanks protection. Sensitive to the desire of American Indians to restore lost or forgotten cultural heritage, many museums are re-evaluating their native collections and repatriating sacred tribal artifacts and human remains.

Sites rich in archaeological material are also vulnerable to construction of housing projects, expressways and shopping centers.

“We want to be in the way of development if they are going to disturb our grandmothers,” says Bob Christjohn of the Oneida Indian Nation in central New York. The spiritual journey of dead ancestors is interrupted when their burial sites are disturbed and their bones are removed from their resting places. Interrupting ancestors’ spiritual journey can harm tribal communities, he explains.

In recent years, state contract archaeology offices have required pre-construction surveys to determine if a site contains significant cultural material. Still, seemingly inviolate landforms across the country are increasingly at risk from development. If entrepreneurs prevail, eagles over Mt. Shasta will eye skiers descending sacred slopes. “Mt. Shasta has always been sacred to the Pit River people,” says Floyd Buckskin of the Ajumawi Band. Northern California tribes believe Mt. Shasta balances the forces of the world by uniting the energies of heaven and Earth. They say "the mountain is not an object of worship, but a place of worship . . . somewhat like a church."

In 1979, Karuk medicine man and ceremonial leader Charles Robert Thom Sr. (“Red Hawk”) was instrumental in gaining federal recognition for his northwestern California tribe. Red Hawk believes intervention in the protection of sacred sites is critical. He explains: “Over the years, many of the Native American sacred sites and mountains have been desecrated or destroyed. This is the big one—Mt. Shasta—and I’m stepping in. In the past, no one would listen to what Native Americans were saying about sacred lands. But now I have a chance and a legal voice to speak up and do something to stop it.”

Further north, under the shadow of snow-capped Mt. Baker, Cha-das-ska-dum Which-ta-lum witnesses the demise of the ancient cedar forests where he learned medicine ways and pollution of the once pristine rivers and streams where his grandmother bathed him in the chill of morning. Cha-das-ska-dum paints a bleak scenario: “If you destroy the land, the timber, and the water, then you have destroyed our culture. If you destroy our culture, then you have killed our tradition. If you kill our tradition, then you have wiped out the Indian. At the rate we’re destroying the land, our children will have no idea what Lummi Indian tradition and culture are.” Steadily shrinking ancestral lands are solemn testimony to Cha-das-ska-dum’s apocalyptic words.

From the remaining one-quarter acre relegated to his tribe, Aurelius H. Piper Sr., called Big Eagle, speaks out. In 1959, his mother, Chieftess Rising Star, named him hereditary chief of the Golden Hill Paugussett Indian Nation of Trumbull, Connecticut. The US government repeatedly denied the tiny nation—which had once claimed more than seven hundred thousand acres as their tribal lands—official federal recognition. Big Eagle traveled around the globe as a staunch advocate of human rights, particularly American Indian and minority rights. He boldly proclaims: “Ours is a land culture. In fact, the land is the culture.”

Born near the Oglala Lakota Pine Ridge Reservation, the author of Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969) and long-time professor of political science at the University of Arizona, Vine Deloria Jr. is a formidable native-rights activist. “The confiscation of our lands,” he writes, “the destruction of animals we once enjoyed, the obliteration of our valleys and rivers, the exploitation of our holy places as tourist traps . . . all of these things might have occurred anyway. We might have even done these things eventually [ourselves], although, according to our beliefs, this would have been the gravest of sins.”

Nearly two centuries before Deloria penned Custer Died for Your Sins, a Suquamish and Duwamish chief was baptized Catholic near Olympia, Washington. Wistful environmentalists and hearsay credit to the chief an 1855, never-documented letter to President Franklin Pierce in which Seattle—who was illiterate and spoke no English—purportedly stated: “To harm the Earth is to heap contempt on its Creator.” A figment of historical imagination or not, it’s a suitable sentiment that could have been uttered by virtually all Indigenous peoples, especially Seattle.

Austrian-born ethnographer, historian, illustrator, and author Richard Erdoes, active in the American Indian Movement (AIM) and an advocate for native rights, observes that while the pastimes, clothing, and means of livelihood of the Indian have changed, his spiritual connection to the land has not.

Indianness is as much a philosophy as a birthright, he and others contend. To the Indian, writes Pulitzer prize-winning author N. Scott Momaday, a Kiowa, “the sense of place is paramount. Only in reference to the Earth can he persist in his true identity. The notion that he is independent of Earth, that he can be severed from it and remain whole, does not occur to him.”

Jamake Highwater explains the Native American identity “dilemma.” “We had to release a tide of communication between two worlds, and to do this we had to be a kind of people who had never before existed. We had to abandon both Andrew Jackson’s ‘Wild Indians’ and Jean Jacques Rousseau’s ‘Noble Savage’ and emerge as a cultural mutant—the ‘Intellectual Savage’ who was capable of surviving equally in two worlds by tenaciously retaining the ritual apparatus of primal people at the same time that we were attaining the intellectual and communications paraphernalia of the dominant societies.”

The white man disrupted the Sacred Circle of Life, states the 1987 bulletin produced by the Washington Office of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction about Alaska Native and American Indian culture. In the report, author Willard E. Bill, PhD, explains the consequences of breaking the Sacred Circle, the Sacred Hoop that Black Elk spoke of. Bill sums up the lasting effects of the centuries of change for the estimated ninety million native people in North America at contact, about the same as the population of Europe at the time:

The foundation of the philosophies of North American Indigenous peoples was the idea of cyclical reaffirmation and the goal of maintaining a harmonious balance with nature. Traditional Indian activities were conducted with the circle in mind, reflecting the belief that the power of the world and nature worked in circles. Plants and animals were accorded equal value with humans. The white man broke the Sacred Circle and caused a loss of spiritual power. The most serious of the white man’s actions was the formation of the reservation system, an alternative to genocide. Land was a spiritual ingredient of Indian cultures; removal to the reservations broke the Indians’ ties to sacred ancestral lands and led to spiritual and cultural disintegration.

“Oh, yes, I went to the white man’s schools,” wrote Tatanga Mani, known as Walking Buffalo, a Stoney-Nakoda, Canada, leader who preached world peace, environmental protection, and Indigenous rights until his death in 1967. “I learned to read from school books, newspapers, and the Bible. But in time I found that these were not enough. . . . I turned to the Great Spirit’s book, which is the whole of creation. You can read a big part of that book if you study nature. If you take all your books, lay them out under the sun, and let the snow and rain and insects work on them for a while, there will be nothing left. But the Great Spirit has provided you and me with an opportunity for study in nature’s university: the forests, the rivers, and mountains, and the animals, which include us.”

Walking Buffalo was critical of Christian missionaries, even though many were friends, because they tried to eradicate traditional beliefs and practices. “They underestimated the Indian faith when they used fear to make us change.” During his long life, Walking Buffalo witnessed many changes, not just the disappearance of the bison. He watched the Indian way of life shift from the Sacred Circle to that of humans relegated to reservations, humans who had lost their capacity for self-sufficiency.

Convinced that most non-Indians and corporations have little or no understanding of the consequences of severing the Sacred Hoop, Vine Deloria hurls a condemnation: “You do not raise your voices in protest at this destruction because it is intimately tied in with your command to subdue the Earth.”

Harkened that changing times might signal changing perceptions about our interconnectedness to and responsibility for the health of our planet and the preservation of sacred places, Earth-awareness and environmental advocates have joined forces with native groups, benefiting from their wisdom and guidance. Among the lessons they learn is that non-Indians don’t need to and shouldn’t appropriate Native American culture and spiritual traditions to gain insights into becoming more Earth-centered. However, say tribal leaders, non-Indians must first suspend the rationalism that disallows non-ordinary realities. Sacred places defy logic and challenge perception.

Tewa archaeologist Rina Swentzell was born at Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico. She attended the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) school, which taught a way of relating to the land radically different from that of her Puebloan culture. That disparity became an impetus for her to speak for places sacred to Indigenous peoples. Swentzell compared some of those conflicting views in a 1990 presentation to The Berkeley Symposium on Cultural Landscape Interpretation at the University of California, Berkeley. Swentzell never shies from an opportunity to invite us to regard physical settings as more than resources for our use now and in the future. Instead, she urges us to look beyond what the eyes see so that we can sense the mystical nature of the land and honor it—to let the land reveal natural shrines where it’s possible to make contact with different levels of existence.

Ever since European contact, native peoples have been telling us that they sense the power of natural phenomena—waterfalls, evergreen forests, crashing waves, mountain summits, open expanses of rock—to change perception, reduce fatigue, invigorate body and spirit, and heal. Only in the last handful of decades has advanced equipment enabled researchers to make empirical sense of native peoples’ non-phenomenal claims. Are they stories on the wind? No. Technology can now detect measurable concentrations of negative ions, magnetic fields, and the rhythmic Earth pulsations at sacred sites that some people can sense. In fact, we now know that the earth mysteriously pulsates every twenty-six seconds, like clockwork.

One of these researchers is Britain’s Paul Devereaux. At sacred places throughout England and the United States, he measured geomagnetic, electrical, and radioactive forces, confirming to himself and some of the scientific community what many cultures have long understood: Earth is “alive with subtle, but powerful, forces flowing through its body, the land.” Devereaux now believes that the finely tuned native Earth-mind develops a “psychospiritual kinship with place” that influences their selection of vision caves, healing sites, shrines and other sacred places. He theorizes that “universal forces of some kind [were] sensed by early peoples living closer to nature than we do today.” Do these forces explain why the great vision of Oglala Sioux Black Elk occurred at Mt. Harney, South Dakota, an area rich in uranium?
 
Studies show the Four Corners region—where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah meet—draws the most concentrated lightning activity on Earth, sufficient, a few scientists speculate, to keep the entire planet in electrical balance. Fact or fiction, some researchers have begun to wonder if, perhaps, our distinction between scientific and intuitive knowing is artificial—and a hindrance to achieving total well-being.

The power of place calls attention to itself. Garden plots, sheep, cattle, wild horses and ancient Anasazi—now called Ancestral Puebloan Indians—ruins dot the sheer-walled, ribboned meanderings of Canyon de Chelly in northeastern Arizona. To the Navajo, this is the heart of the Earth. In late afternoon the redwall cliffs burst into flame. Under moonlight, they are transformed, iridescent, luminous. In the canyon, sacred places are everywhere, coterminous.

In each of the four directions, the four sacred mountains envelop and protect the world of the Navajo and Hopi. Pueblo Indians say they are the pillars that hold up the sky and divide the world into quarters. To the Apache, the mountains are alive and are the home of the mountain people. The peaks offer protection and a source of power.

Before Europeans stepped onto the so-called New World's shores, millions of American Indians lived in harmony with the land. They wove plant fibers into cloth, selectively harvested planks to preserve host trees, raised five-story masonry complexes, collected water in aquifers, irrigated fields, embellished and ornamented things ordinary and sacred, committed to memory the secrets of their culture, organized powerful pan-tribal confederations, synthesized the new with the ancient and became masters at adaptation.

A mirror held up to our past reflects a history not taught in textbooks: “The American Indian Holocaust.” “The 500-Year War.” The real stories send chills up our spines. By some researchers’ estimates, more than one hundred million North American Indigenous people died from smallpox, cholera, measles, typhus, bubonic plague, influenza, whooping cough, diphtheria, and scarlet fever imported from Europe. Many millions more died in skirmishes. With deadly efficiency, federal and local government policies of “Indian Removal” have all but succeeded in eradicating Indigenous peoples and their culture and appropriating ancestral lands. When native resilience defied their total extermination, non-Indians employed strategies such as disenfranchisement and forced assimilation.

Education molded native children into the white man’s image, attempted to erase their language and, hence, cultural heritage, and unraveled their ties to families and ancestors. The non-Indian world view of dualism clashed with cultures whose languages expressed the oneness of all things. For native peoples, Earth is infused with the sacred, a balance and harmony that human creatures adopt when they walk the sacred path, represented by the Sacred Hoop. Cha-das-ska-dum's words have been echoed widely: “If you kill our culture, you kill the American Indian just as surely as if you shoot a bullet through our heart and spirit.”

Some Indians ask, what will change if chert flake or fragment of bone or artifact one day proves our ancestors’ were born, gathered and hunted, and died in this place many tens of thousands of years earlier than archaeologists had believed? “It is enough that the Creator put us here on this land,” friends say. “The Creator formed us from the rivers and the mountains. And it is there our spirit cries out to be heard.”

Slashed, burned, poisoned, the land, too, cries to be heard. Hopi elder Thomas Banyacya implores us to protect the sacred landscape: “People—all peoples—must return to living within the natural laws known to native people. To the native people, the law of the Great Spirit is the law of the land.”

Nothing has divided red man from white more than ownership and use of the land. This book, Stories on the Wind, represents many impassioned voices for Place. The voices who speak to us here intend to jar us off our course, yes, but they also urge us to respond anew to the spirit of place. Educators, artists, spiritual leaders, activists, they share with us from their individual and unique cultural perspectives the stories of their spiritual ties to the land. Collectively, they echo a sweeping injunction: destruction of our environment must stop; desecration and destruction of our sacred sites must stop; the “highest use” gauge for sacred places must not be measured in dollars and cents.

More than four thousand sites historically and culturally significant to the Indian are being discovered each year. In time, anthropologists, ethnographers, and historians will find countless more. Yet only a fraction of sacred sites identified will ever fall under tribal control. The rest—ancestral lands off reservation—already are spawning creative new co-preservation arrangements between tribes and management agencies, sometimes agreements with private land owners.

“Unless sacred places are discovered and protected and used as religious places,” says Vine Deloria, “there is no possibility of a nation ever coming to grips with the land itself, and national psychic stability is impossible.”

John Peters is executive director of the Massachusetts Commission on Indian Affairs. Peters is Wampanoag, a decedent of the tribal people who greeted the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. Members of his Mashpee Wampanoag Nation know him as Slow Turtle, or Cjegktoonuppa, the supreme medicine man for their tribe. But his duties are far ranging. Slow Turtle has traveled widely, performing traditional Indian ceremonies around the world, including in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in memory of victims of the atomic bombs. Slow Turtle brought the Native American Circle to prisons, spoke up about treaty violations, and was respected for relentlessly pushing against resort and residential developers that would hasten the loss of sacred land around Cape Cod.

Making a commitment to protect archaeologically rich sites as well as fragile landforms requires us to enter into relationship with the living Earth. Colorado author and photographer Martin Gray, emerging from a decade of ashram life, contends, “You don’t have to be an experienced shamanic or spiritual practitioner to hear the Earth. But you do need to look within your heart and cultivate openness, trust, and humility. The Earth spirit responds not to the hardness of the mind but, rather, to the softness of the heart.”

That, believes Chippewa medicine man Sun Bear, is the ultimate goal: “to live in a way that you are centered and carry the law within your heart. That’s strong medicine.”

Navajo poet Luci Tapahonso expresses the wisdom of the Sacred Hoop:

I am, I am
In wisdom I walk
In beauty may I walk...
In beauty it is restored.
The light, the dawn.
It is morning.

Kevin Locke’s Lakota name is Tokeya Inajin, meaning “The First to Arise.” He has been described as the preeminent player of the Indigenous Northern Plains flute, storyteller, global cultural ambassador, and visionary Hoop Dancer. His goal, he says, is “to empower today’s youth in culture and raise awareness of the Oneness we share as human beings.” To remind us and bind us, Tokeya Inajin performs the traditional Hoop Dance worldwide with a profound purpose: “to give voice to the beauty of the land and to help define the role of the human spirit in relationship to the immensity of this illimitable hoop of life.”

Indigenous scholar and author of The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, Paula Gunn Allen writes: “I am Laguna, woman of the lake, daughter of the dawn, sunrise, kurena. I can see the light making the world anew. It is the nature of my blood and heritage to do this. There is surely cause to weep, to grieve; but greater than ugliness, the endurance of tribal beauty is our reason to sing, to greet the coming day and the restored life and hope it brings.”

River, grassland, forest, desert, mountain, sea shore—each speaks to us in a language we can hear if we listen—as Cha-das-ska-dum asks us to—with our hearts.

It is as the Apache grandfathers tell their grandchildren: “Mountains are the teachers of songs and other sacred knowledge. They must be cared for and respected. To receive their blessings, you must perform the rituals as you have learned them from us. When the rituals are no longer performed, the living bond between man and nature will be broken.”

This, then, is the Sacred Hoop. The power of Earth and Sky and all life in the four directions.

Is it possible to mend the broken Sacred Hoop? In the chapters to follow, we’ll talk with elders and others about what that would look like.


Copyright © 2005 Charlotte Meares

the sacred hoop is broken

from stories on the wind

Time was and remains the matrix of human experience. Dawn, dusk—cycles of the sun, moon, stars—birth, death. Passages solidify through ritual and place. Preserving the Sacred Hoop ensures continuity and knowledge. Everything is intertwined. 

Copyright © 1990 Lorran Meares