Native American Wisdom

The Native Americans are dear to my heart. I love so much the ”Old Ways” I think most people who have read or heard about the Spiritual beliefs are touched within by the wisdom and ways of the Native tribes. They gave Mother Earth great respect and honor. They were intertwined within all of it. They look at existence as a web of life. (All things are connected.) Therefore Nature,Creepy-Crawlers,Sky, Moon, Sun,stars and all living animals. They were in-tune with the big picture of life from Creator(Grandfather) to past gone ancestors. Their wisdom is really all so beautiful to me.

My Great Grandmother was a Choctaw Medicine woman. I had never had the honor to meet her but I have always been drawn to her. I feel I know her somehow. The only picture I have of her came from my father which is only a drawing he did of her (which I will share with you) I think she had made a life-long impact in his life because of all the stories he would tell me and somehow she has also had one in my own life. It is very likely that her Genes are what gives me the desire to try to understand nature in all of it’s glory. My father told me about how she would disappear in the countryside for weeks and collect herbs and plants and such for medicines. Before I learned of this I had often disappeared myself in nature when I could. It gave me a peace I could not seem to get anywhere else. It was like a sort of meditation for me before I learned about meditation.
April Peerless2013-2014

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Teach
me how
to trust
my heart,
my mind,
my intuition,
my inner knowing,
the senses of my body,
the blessings of my spirit.
Teach me to trust these things
so that I may enter my sacred space
and love beyond my fear,and thus walk

in balance with the passing of each glorious sun.

~Lakota Prayer

Teach me

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“Man did not weave the web of life – he is merely a strand in it.
Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.”
Chief Seattle, 1854.

In 1851 Seattle, chief of the Suquamish and other Indian tribes around Washington’s Puget Sound, delivered what is considered to be one of the most beautiful and profound environmental statements ever made. The city of Seattle is named for the chief, whose speech was in response to a proposed treaty under which the Indians were persuaded to sell two million acres of land for $150,000.”

(Chief Seattle Wrote)

Yonder sky that has wept tears of compassion upon my people for centuries untold, and which to us appears changeless and eternal, may change. Today is fair. Tomorrow it may be overcast with clouds.

My words are like the stars that never change. Whatever Seattle says, the great chief at Washington can rely upon with as much certainty as he can upon the return of the sun or the seasons.

The white chief says that Big Chief at Washington sends us greetings of friendship and goodwill. This is kind of him for we know he has little need of our friendship in return. His people are many. They are like the grass that covers vast prairies. My people are few. They resemble the scattering trees of a storm-swept plain. The great, and I presume — good, White Chief sends us word that he wishes to buy our land but is willing to allow us enough to live comfortably. This indeed appears just, even generous, for the Red Man no longer has rights that he need respect, and the offer may be wise, also, as we are no longer in need of an extensive country.

There was a time when our people covered the land as the waves of a wind- ruffled sea cover its shell-paved floor, but that time long since passed away with the greatness of tribes that are now but a mournful memory. I will not dwell on, nor mourn over, our untimely decay, nor reproach my paleface brothers with hastening it, as we too may have been somewhat to blame.

Youth is impulsive. When our young men grow angry at some real or imaginary wrong, and disfigure their faces with black paint, it denotes that their hearts are black, and that they are often cruel and relentless, and our old men and old women are unable to restrain them. Thus it has ever been. Thus it was when the white man began to push our forefathers ever westward. But let us hope that the hostilities between us may never return. We would have everything to lose and nothing to gain. Revenge by young men is considered gain, even at the cost of their own lives, but old men who stay at home in times of war, and mothers who have sons to lose, know better.

Our good father in Washington–for I presume he is now our father as well as yours, since King George has moved his boundaries further north–our great and good father, I say, sends us word that if we do as he desires he will protect us. His brave warriors will be to us a bristling wall of strength, and his wonderful ships of war will fill our harbors, so that our ancient enemies far to the northward — the Haidas and Tsimshians, will cease to frighten our women, children, and old men. He in reality he will be our father and we his children.

But can that ever be? Your God is not our God! Your God loves your people and hates mine! He folds his strong protecting arms lovingly about the paleface and leads him by the hand as a father leads an infant son. But, He has forsaken His Red children, if they really are His. Our God, the Great Spirit, seems also to have forsaken us. Your God makes your people wax stronger every day. Soon they will fill all the land.

Our people are ebbing away like a rapidly receding tide that will never return. The white man’s God cannot love our people or He would protect them. They seem to be orphans who can look nowhere for help. How then can we be brothers? How can your God become our God and renew our prosperity and awaken in us dreams of returning greatness? If we have a common Heavenly Father He must be partial, for He came to His paleface children.

We never saw Him. He gave you laws but had no word for His red children whose teeming multitudes once filled this vast continent as stars fill the firmament. No; we are two distinct races with separate origins and separate destinies. There is little in common between us.

To us the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their resting place is hallowed ground. You wander far from the graves of your ancestors and seemingly without regret. Your religion was written upon tablets of stone by the iron finger of your God so that you could not forget.

The Red Man could never comprehend or remember it. Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors — the dreams of our old men, given them in solemn hours of the night by the Great Spirit; and the visions of our sachems, and is written in the hearts of our people.

Your dead cease to love you and the land of their nativity as soon as they pass the portals of the tomb and wander away beyond the stars. They are soon forgotten and never return.

Our dead never forget this beautiful world that gave them being. They still love its verdant valleys, its murmuring rivers, its magnificent mountains, sequestered vales and verdant lined lakes and bays, and ever yearn in tender fond affection over the lonely hearted living, and often return from the happy hunting ground to visit, guide, console, and comfort them.

Day and night cannot dwell together. The Red Man has ever fled the approach of the White Man, as the morning mist flees before the morning sun. However, your proposition seems fair and I think that my people will accept it and will retire to the reservation you offer them. Then we will dwell apart in peace, for the words of the Great White Chief seem to be the words of nature speaking to my people out of dense darkness.

It matters little where we pass the remnant of our days. They will not be many. The Indian’s night promises to be dark. Not a single star of hope hovers above his horizon. Sad-voiced winds moan in the distance. Grim fate seems to be on the Red Man’s trail, and wherever he will hear the approaching footsteps of his fell destroyer and prepare stolidly to meet his doom, as does the wounded doe that hears the approaching footsteps of the hunter.

A few more moons, a few more winters, and not one of the descendants of the mighty hosts that once moved over this broad land or lived in happy homes, protected by the Great Spirit, will remain to mourn over the graves of a people once more powerful and hopeful than yours.

But why should I mourn at the untimely fate of my people? Tribe follows tribe, and nation follows nation, like the waves of the sea. It is the order of nature, and regret is useless. Your time of decay may be distant, but it will surely come, for even the White Man whose God walked and talked with him as friend to friend, cannot be exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers after all. We will see.

We will ponder your proposition and when we decide we will let you know. But should we accept it, I here and now make this condition that we will not be denied the privilege without molestation of visiting at any time the tombs of our ancestors, friends, and children. Every part of this soil is sacred in the estimation of my people. 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 the swelter in the sun along the silent shore, thrill with memories of stirring events connected with the lives of my people, and the very dust upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to their footsteps than yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors, and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch. Our departed braves, fond mothers, glad, happy hearted maidens, and even the little children who lived here and rejoiced here for a brief season, will love these somber solitudes and at eventide they greet shadowy returning spirits.

And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children’s children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude. At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land. The White Man will never be alone.

Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not powerless.

Dead, did I say? – There is no death, only a change of worlds.

Sitting Bull,Lakota Also nicknamed Slon-he or Slow.

 

 

 

(1831 – December 15, 1890)

Sitting Bull was a Hunkpapa Lakota holy man who led his people as a tribal chief during years of resistance to United States government policies. He was killed by Indian agency police on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation during an attempt to arrest him.

Every seed is awakened and so is all animal life.
It is through this mysterious power that we too have
our being and we therefore yield to our animal
neighbors the same right as ourselves, to inhabit this land.
Sitting Bull

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The native American Indian’s which includes most tribes always considered animals a teacher and each symbolized different messages and all if this was for spiritual understanding and growth.

If I had to pick one belief system I would pick that of our ancestors and the Old ways.

In Native American cultures most tribes believe in Animal totems.However, animals have been signs throughout all cultures spanning across the globe. Animals have some of the most powerful teachings for our spiritual being. I truly feel that if we ourselves took on the natural flow as Animals that we would have lived with nature in a purer and more positive way. Some of us have great respect for the natural flow of life and sadly there are others whom do not think twice to destroy any of it for profit.

Peerless 2014

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** Native American Ten Reminders **

1. Treat the Earth and all that dwell
thereon with respect.

2. Remain close to the Great Spirit,
in all that you do.

3. Show great respect for your
fellow beings.

4. Work together for the benefit
of all Mankind.

5. Give assistance and kindness
wherever needed.

6. Do what you know to be right.
(But be careful not to fall into self-righteousness)

7. Look after the well being of
mind and body.

8. Dedicate a share of your efforts
to the greater good.

9. Be truthful and honest at all times.
(Especially be truthful and honest with yourself)

10. Take full responsibility for
your actions.

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-Cherokee Prayer-

o’ Great spirit help me always

to speak the truth quietly,

to listen with an opened mind

when others speak and to

remember the peace that may

be found in silence.

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The soul would have no rainbow
if the eye had no tears.

-Unknown Native American

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According to the Native People,
the Sacred Space is the space
between exhalation and inhalation.

To Walk in Balance is to
have Heaven (Spirituality)
and Earth (Physically)
in Harmony..

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The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes from within the souls of men when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells Wakan-Tanka, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us. This is the real peace, and the others are but reflections of this. The second peace is that which is made between two individuals, and the third is that which is made between two nations. But above all you should understand that there can never be peace between nations until there is first known that true peace which is within the souls of men.
— —
–Black Elk in The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk’s Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux

 

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 If all the beast were gone,

men would die from a great loneliness of Spirit,

for whatever happens to the beast

also happens to the man.

All things are connected.

-Chief Seattle

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** Cherokee Blessing **

May the Warm Winds of Heaven
blow softly upon your house.

May the Great Spirit bless all
who enter there.

May your Moccasins make happy
tracks in many snows, and may the
Rainbow always touch your shoulder.

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-Native American, Cherokee-

Every person is born for a purpose. We may know our purpose very early in our lives, or it may take us some time. Very often we need to experience many things before our purpose is clear to us. Sometimes we pick our goals to please others. Sometimes others pick our goals to make themselves happy. Often this makes us unhappy. We need to pray to the Creator and ask Him what our purpose is. When we live outside our purpose, our path is full of obstacles. When we live inside our purpose, our path is smooth. When we are aligned to our purpose, we are happy and content.

-Rolling Thunder

-Image Credit:Diana Volk

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** Native American Prayer **

Grandfather,We return thanks to our mother, the earth, which sustains us. We return thanks to the rivers and streams, which supply us with water, to all herbs, which furnish medicines for the cure of our diseases, to the moon and stars, which have given to us their light when the sun was gone, to the sun, that has looked upon the earth with a beneficent eye. Lastly, to the Great Spirit, in Whom is embodied all goodness, and Who directs all things for the good of Her children.

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** Ohiyesa, Santee Sioux **

The Indian believes
profoundly in silence,
the sign of a perfect
equilibrium.

Silence is the
absolute poise or balance
of body, mind, and spirit.

The man who preserves
his selfhood is ever calm
and unshaken by the storms
of existence.

What are the fruits of silence?
They are self-control,
true courage or endurance,
patience, dignity and reverence.

Silence is the
cornerstone of character.

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** Chief Dan George **If you talk to the animals,
they will talk to you, And
you will know each other.If you do not talk to them,
You will not know them,
And what you do not know,
You will fear.What one fears,
one destroys.

When we live inside our purpose,
our path is smooth..

 

Someone must speak for them.
I do not see a delegation for the
four footed. I see no seat for eagles.

We forget and we consider
ourselves superior, but we are
after all a mere part of the Creation.

Oren Lyons

I see a beautiful Soul in the wildlife that humans fear. We must learn to understand all living beings before it is too late… We are meant to love them, not hurt them. Money should never be more important than they are… ~April Peerless

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If you don’t make time to laugh, you have no music in your heart. Like the wolf during a full moon, May your heart have many songs to sing. April Peerless

Teach me

All things are connected, like the blood that unites us. We did not weave the web of life, we are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.. ~Chief Seattle

When we live inside our purpose, our path is smooth..

Spread your invisible wings and teach yourself, just how amazingly high you can fly. Block out how high you have seen others go and take a huge leap into the unknown, where you and you alone learn the depths and the mysteries of life itself. Feel that feeling, now stay there.. April Peerless2014

 

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