Walk In Peace With our Mother Earth

Sweet Medicine of the Cheyennes was a prophet who lived a thousand years ago. He said, "Some day you will meet a people who are white good looking people, with light hair and white skins. They will come here to kill you and to test you. It will seem like they will kill all the buffalo, and they will give you other animals to eat and ride upon, and things to drink, and this other meat and the thing they give you to drink will make you crazy and sick.

"But they will only seem like they are killing you and all the buffalo. The buffalo will go away because you, the Suhaio and Tsistsistas (Northern and Southern Cheyennes), will not honor the White Buffalo Nation which has come down from the stars to live among us. You will forget to do the buffalo ceremonies. You will forget to hunt and live. And you will all die off.”

"When you are all dead, then I will return and we will renew all the ceremonies again, and the buffalo and the people will live again. All the nations will live together around the Sacred Mountain, Nowah'wus, in the Black Hills.

The time for fulfillment of this great prophesy is now. The elders and medicine men and women of old knew it, with the spirits of their ancestors as the messengers telling us. The Indians are indeed dying, for all practical purposes. There are no medicine people left among the Cheyenne or Lakota in the Black Hills bioregion. The ceremonies have lost their power, for the pipes and arrows are no longer connected to the White Buffalo Woman and the Yellow-haired Woman who brought them, the Winyan Wakan of the Lakota and the Ehyophstah of the Cheyenne.

These are harsh truths to have to speak, but all Indians know in their hearts it is so. Even those who do sweat lodges and sundances and smoke their pipes faithfully cannot resist the temptations of America, the egotism of false shamans, the greed invited by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Hollywood, and they cannot keep their children from the materialism and irresponsibility displayed everywhere. Many have lost their language and culture.

It is the end of this age. It is time now for the renaissance as outlined in the "Statement of Renewal" in the first issue of Yuwitaya Lakota. It will be a time of great cataclysm over the next 20 years, as this purification will require great destruction first. But when it is over the buffalo will return. We will remember the correct ceremonies, and in a matter of only a few years the great herds will be here again. For the buffalo are the only economy of this great basin stretching from Canada to Mexico, the Rocky Mountains to the Mississippi River. They are, and have always been, the spiritual necessity of this land as well. They are the heart and soul of this continent.

All people who can see the vision of the Other World, and hear the Oracle of the sacred earth Goddess, are welcome to come and live near the Sacred Black Hills in the center of it all. And in the center of the Hills, although She is a lone sentinel off to the north a few miles, is Nowah'wus, Bear Butte. On the Spring Equinox this year, at 1:48 A.M., March 20, 1992, this cycle of sacred ceremonial renewal will continue at Bear Butte. We will be praying there. Everyone is welcome to come in their own way and pray in their own way. It will not be organized in the usual way of the old dead age, so every person must communicate alone with their spirit. The Great Powers will be there on the mountain at that time.

This is just the beginning of the renewal cycle. It will continue through all the important celestial seasons of our world, as they relate to the mysteries of the other world. Mid-Spring ceremonies will be held in the center of the Hills, Pa Sla, and at Grey Horn Pipe Mountain (formerly called Devils Tower) on the Summer Solstice, and mid-summers eve again at Bear Butte. The Autumn Equinox and Winter Solstice will also always be honored aspart of the cycle.

The ancient 'Confederacy of the Black Hills' is already forming again, comprised of all the nations who have lived here. The Ikce Wicasa Ta Omininiye of the unified Dakota Lakota-Nakota Nations are gathering dozens of bands and tribes in Canada and the United States together. The Northern and Southern Cheyennes are coming this year, the Northern and Southern Arapahoes. The Crows and Shoshones and distant friends like the Mohawks and Hopis will also be here later this Spring and Summer.

My own Huron ancestor, Deganawidah, also prophesied this confederacy would be formed again, and the Iroquois are working out a hemispheric 'League of Indigenous Sovereign Nations' to bring thousands of tribes on this hemisphere together, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. In this year of the Invasion of Columbus and Christ, the half millennium of hell, as Zapotec Quetzalcoatl prophesied, will end.

This renewal will not be easy or fast. Years will go by in which it seem nothing good is happening. Civilization must collapse of its own corruption. Roads and cities will blow away like the topsoil and clean air, sweet water will be drained and poison will flood the earth. There will be plagues, famine, earthquakes, drought, and firestorms. Most people will be killed in these times to come, which have already begun, according to the prophesies, because most people have forgotten that there is no death and so they live in fear all the time. They are not warriors. They are afraid to live in the dream world. They do not know that that is where all life comes from, where the buffalo come from, where the creation myths tell the only true stories.

Only a few people will be on Bear Butte on this Spring Equinox, as on all Equinoxes and Solstices; but they will be the spiritual survivors of the cataclysm to come, the founders of the new Confederacy of the Black Hills. Regardless of race, age or sex, these spirits will form the new government of this bioregion in the years and decades and centuries to come.

America will not last long. Its laws and broken treaties will fade as bad chapters in human history. One hundred years from now the USA will be remembered only as the villain greater than the Romans or Russians, Cambodians or Mongols, English or Dutch, Israelis or Arabs. The American economy and religion are doomed by their own greed and blindness. According to the 'Statement of Renewal', the BEAR BUTTE COUNCIL has already been meeting since last midsummer as the spiritual government of the Confederacy of the Black Hills. It is a Council of prophets, spirits, warriors, chiefs, and ancestors who remained faithful to the Great Mystery. It will always be the only true government of this sacred land. It is the only authority to which citizens of this Confederacy will submit.

The world media is being alerted to these prophesies for the first time - which is also part of the prophesies. HBO -TV will shooting a documentary abou the Black Hills this year, focusing on these prophesies and sacredness of H'e Sapa, with Indians, for the first time on 'commercial' television, in all the major creative positions of writer, producer and director. My novel sequel to _The Powwow Highway_ will out this year, titled _Sweet Medicine_. Many other books and films and events are being planned around this dubious 500th anniversary when the world ended once before for us.

Presidential candidates, during the South Dakota primary were being forced to discuss the Fort Laramie Treaty by the press for the first time. The national awareness is being heightened about Indians; more and more people are becoming attuned to the indigenous knowledge of the magic in all Nature, and all Peoples. The path of truth is the one less traveled. It does not favour or recognize race, color, knowledge, wealth, ideals, or past. It happens to be in accordance with Indigenous concepts, principles and philosophy of life. Lakota being one. This implies that one need not participate, but allow other to express themselves freely.

One must respect and ascribe to achieve the same degree of freedom. Who, when their life has come to an end, will say they chose to pursue the return of all that is due to their people: Prosperity. Freedom from injustice. Freedom to manage their own affairs and land. Freedom to define and manage their own government and policies. Freedom to choose. Freedom to educate. Freedom to live without fear except from nature itself. Freedom.

If truth is our ultimate common path of mutual destiny with our freedom and the freedom of our people at the end, why should anyone have to endure any suffering of any kind by waiting??? What we choose for our life today is what the children of tomorrow will have to live with.

The American political system has failed. The politicians are calling for complete reform in all areas of the government. The fact is that the country and the system has grown free reign and has become too large and overburdened to be manageable. Capitalism has grown too many arms reaching into and out of the country. Economists are saying that even if reforms work that it will take years to know. Boosting production and manufacturing and development will only contribute to the serious problems that need immediate attention and correction.

In effect, they are saying admittedly that there may be no solution with the present system. The Tribal governments are in trouble as a result of federal control. The people are calling for reform. How under the federal government, that can't even manage their own affairs, provide additional money and control to the tribes? Be serious. Legislators and other legal representatives are questioning the justice or injustice of the over-legislated system. People are within our borders, but we can certainly provide them better considerations than they have been provided to our people and to them by their own. Development and settlement not withstanding, it is time to do what is best. And it is better to shut the borders down and start over, than to continue on in a continually depreciating condition.

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