ello Dear Ones ,




The following words were spoken by Lame Deer, he lived from 1890 to 1974 and was a medicine man of the Dakotas, a sub-tribe of the Sioux Indians.

"I AM A MEDICINE MAN - a wicasa wakan. Medicine man that's a word the white people invented. I wish there was a better word to express what "medicine man means to us, but I can't find one and neither can you, so I guess we'll have to settle for that. A wicasa wakan needs to be alone with himself much and often. He wants to get away from the crowd, away from the small, everyday things.

He loves to meditate, to lean against a tree or a rock and feel the earth moving beneath him and the weight of the vast flaming sky above him. In this way he learns to understand. He closes his eyes, and he begins to see more clearly. What you see with your eyes closed is what counts.

The wicasa wakan loves silence, he wraps himself in it, like in a blanket - a silence that is not silent, that teaches him many things with its thunder-like voice. Such a man loves to be in a place where he hears only the buzzing of insects. He sits, his face to the west, and asks for succor. He talks to the plants, and they answer him. He listens to the voices of the wama kaskan - the animals. He becomes one of them. Something flows into him from all living beings, and something also flows out from him. I don't know what and how, but it is so. I have experienced it. A medicine man must belong to the earth, must be able to read nature like a white man reads a book.

EVERYTHING YOU EAT is packed in a plastic wrapper, is neatly cut up and prepared for the pan, has no taste, and awakens no guilt in you. When you wear your fur or leather coats, you don't want to be reminded of how much blood and pain they cost. When we killed a buffalo, we knew what we were doing. We asked his spirit for forgiveness, and we told him why we had to do it. We honored with a prayer the bones of those who gave us their flesh for food, we prayed that they should come again, we prayed for the lives of our brothers, the buffalo people, as well as for our own people.

To us, all life is sacred. The state of Dakota has their own pest control officials. They get on a plane, and they shoot the coyotes from the air. They keep a record of it, every dead coyote is entered in their notebook. Cattle and sheep ranchers pay them to do this. Coyotes feed on rodents, field mice, and other small animals. Occasionally they will eat a sheep that has strayed. They are the natural waste recyclers, cleaning the land of all that is foul and smelly. If you take the trouble and tame them, they make good playmates. But if they stay alive, some people are afraid of losing a few cents - so they kill them from the plane. The coyotes were in this country before the sheep got here, but they are in your way because you can't make a profit off of them.

More and more animals are becoming extinct. The animals that the Great Spirit put in this land must go. Only the domestic animals, only the animals bred by man are allowed to live - at least until you drive them to the slaughterhouse. This appalling arrogance of the white man, who presumes to be more than God, more than nature! The white man says: "I let this animal live, because it brings me money"; and he says: "That animal must die, I can earn nothing from it, the place, which it needs, I can use better. Only a dead coyote is a good coyote". The whites treat the coyotes almost as badly as they once treated us Indians.



I HAVE THE IMPRESSION that white people are so afraid of the world they themselves have created that they no longer want to see, feel, smell or hear it. Feeling rain and snow on your face, being frozen by an icy wind and thawing out by a smoking fire, coming out of a hot sweat lodge and diving into a cold river - these experiences show you that you are alive. But you don't even want to feel that anymore. You live in boxes that shut out summer heat and winter cold, you live in a body that has lost its smell, you listen to the noise from the hi-fi system instead of listening to the sounds of nature, you watch the actors on TV who make you believe in experiences, you who have long since forgotten how to experience anything for yourselves. You eat food that tastes of nothing. This is your way. It is not good.

BEFORE OUR WHITE BROTHERS CAME to make civilized people of us, we had no prisons. For this reason, we did not have criminals. Without a prison, there can be no criminals. We had no locks or keys, and that is why we had no thieves. If someone was so poor that he did not own a horse, a tent or a blanket, he was given all these as a gift.

We were much too uncivilized to attach great importance to personal possessions. We sought possessions only to be able to pass them on. We did not know money, and therefore the value of a person was not measured by his wealth. We had no written laws, no lawyers and politicians, so we could not cheat each other. Things were really bad for us before the whites came, and I cannot explain how we got along without the basic things that we are told are so necessary for a civilized society.

MAN IS ALSO MADE OF MANY THINGS. Whatever the air is made of, the earth, the herbs, the stones, all these are also part of our bodies. We must learn again to be ourselves, and to feel and discover the diversity within us. Wakan Tanka, the Great Secret, teaches animals and plants what to do.

In nature, nothing is alike. How diverse are the birds! Some build nests, others do not. Some animals live in holes in the ground, others in caves, others in bushes. Still others manage without any dwelling at all. Even animals of the same species - two deer, two owls - behave differently.

I looked carefully at many plants. Of the leaves of one plant, all growing on the same stem, none is quite like the other. On the whole earth, there are no two leaves that are completely alike. The Great Spirit has willed it so. For all creatures on earth he has marked out the path of life merely in the grand scheme of things; he shows them the direction and the goal, but lets them find their own way there. He wants them to act independently, according to their nature and obeying their inner forces.

Now, if Wakan Tanka wants plants, animals, even the little mice and beetles, to live in this way - how much more will humans, who all do the same thing, be anathema to him: People who get up at the same time, put on the same clothes bought in the department store and use the same subway, who sit in the same office, do the same work, stare at one and the same clock and - worst of all - whose thoughts are confusingly similar. All creatures live towards one goal. Even an ant knows this goal - not with its mind, but somehow it knows it. Only humans have come so far that they no longer know why they live. They don't use their mind anymore, and they have long forgotten what secret message their body has, what their senses and dreams tell them. They do not use the knowledge that the Great Spirit has given to each of us, they are not even aware of it anymore, and so they stumble blindly along the road that leads to nowhere - on a well-paved highway that they build themselves, dead straight and even, so that they can get all the faster to the big empty hole that awaits them at the end to swallow them up."