The Indians' Personal Relationship to the Earth and to Life

All Sioux ceremonies end with the words, mitakuye oyasin -- “all my relations” -- meaning every living human being on this Earth, every plant and animal, down to the smallest flower and tiniest bug.

The Indians’ relationship to the Earth, the winds, and the animals is intimate and intensely personal, closely related to their sacred beliefs. This relationship arises out of their environment, the hills and trees around them, the prairie or desert upon which they walk. It arises out of their nature-related language and out of age-old oral traditions passed on from generation to generation.

Difference Between Christian religions and Indian religion

Some fifteen years ago, together with my friend, the Sioux medicine man, Lame Deer, I took part in a panel discussion on Indian religion. A missionary priest turned to Lame Deer and said, “Chief, I respect your beliefs. My church is built in the shape of a tipi, my vestments are beaded, the Sacred Pipe hangs next to the cross on my wall. I participate in Indian ceremonies. I tell you – The Great Spirit and God are the same. Sweet Medicine and Christ are the same. The Pipe and the cross, they are all the same. There is no real difference between your and my religions.”

Lame Deer looked at the missionary for some time and then said, “Father, in your religion do animals have a soul?”

The priest answered with a slightly embarrassed smile, “Chief, you got me there!”


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On another occasion my friend was interviewed by a rather belligerent lady who taunted him, saying, “Lame Deer, you say that you speak to animals. Come on! This is the twentieth century. Don’t put me on!”

Lame Deer grinned: “Lady, in your Good Book a woman talks to a snake but I speak with eagles!”

Another Native American told me, “Us Indians and the Blacks have the same problem living under the White Man, but there is one big difference: they want in, we want out!”

The Native’s View of The Universe Is Very Unlike White Fellow-Americans

The native’s view of the universe is very unlike that of his or her white fellow-Americans. There is White Man’s time and Indian time – Moon time or orbit time. An Indian acquires fame by giving possessions away, while whites acquire more and more property as their status symbols. Whites, if at all religious, devote an hour or two to their church on a Sunday. Native Americans live their religions twenty-four hours a day, “walking in a sacred manner.”

When eating, Lakota people always put a morsel aside for the spirits of their departed friends. “Even while making love to a woman,” Lame Deer once said, “you are doing something sacred.” He, as well as many other traditionals, maintains that the Indian’s symbol is the circle, the White Man’s the square.

“We are bound in the Sacred Hoop – humans, the four-legged, the living green things,” said Crow Dog, a Lakota spiritual man. “Orbits within orbits, circles within circles, from the Great Hoop of the universe which, eons ago, dreamed itself into existence, to the blood circles within your own body. The universe and the Earth are round. Round is the camp circle, round the tipi with the humans forming a circle within it. Round is the human hoop of the ghost dancers holding hands – circling, circling, circling until they fall down in a swoon.”

The Wasichu [White Man] Is All Square

“The wasichu [White Man] is all square,” Lame Deer added. “Square is his house and its rooms, Square is the Green Frogskin, his dollar bill. Square is his mind. It has sharp corners.”

“We think that certain things are alive which the White Man looks upon as dead,” Jenny Leading Cloud, a Rosebud Sioux, once explained. “We think of certain rocks and trees as having a life and a soul. The Morning Star once made love to a human maiden.”

“The Sacred Pipe,” says Wallace Black Elk, “while we are smoking it, is alive – the flesh, blood, and mind of the Indian.”

The Native Concept of “Power”

The Indians' Personal Relationship to the Earth and to LifeHand in hand with such concepts goes the native idea of “power.” “When I held the Buffalo Calf Pipe,” says Crow Dog, “I felt it moving in my hands, felt its Power flowing from it into my veins.”

There is power in a pebble, in gopher dust, in an eagle wing, in the smoke rising from the pipe bowl, in a braid of sweet grass. “I just cedared you up and fanned you with my eagle wing,” Lame Deer once told me, “and that way gave you a little of my power to help you doing our book.”

A grandfather might give his power to a grandson, showing spiritual understanding. A medicine person might take away power from somebody who is misusing it. In the worlds of Lame Deer: “There is power in a wild buffalo. There is no power in a White-Man-bred Angus or Holstein.”

The Special Relationship of The Indian To Nature Shows Itself In The Native Language

The special relationship of the Indian to nature shows itself in the native language. The Great Spirit is referred to as Tunkashila – Grandfather. The sky is Father, The Earth Unchi – Grandmother – whose hair should not be cut by axe or sickle, nor her body injured by spade or plow. The buffalo is the people’s brother. White Buffalo Woman, the Lakota culture heroine who brought the Sacred Pipe to the tribes and taught them the right way to live, appears first as a beautiful woman in shining buckskin, who, when taking leave of the people, transforms herself into a white buffalo calf.

The sacred herb used sacramentally by those belonging to the Native American Church is referred to as “Grandfather Peyote.” The Sacred Sundance Pole is addressed as if it were a warrior. It is “captured.” Its captors are counting coup upon it. It is prayed and sung to by the people. The name a person receives at his or her first vision quest is usually that of an animal, plant, or phenomenon of nature... White Hawk, Cedar, or Yellow Thunder.

The World -- Past, Present & Future -- As Seen Through Indian Eyes

Humanity’s relationship to a living universe extends beyond the Earth. Very old people, who during their childhood were told stories by the ghost dancers of 1890, passed them on to their children and grandchildren. Many of these narratives tell of a dancer falling down in a trance, dying, and then coming to life again. Upon awakening, men and women spoke of having traveled to the Moon or to the Morning Star, coming back with “Star Flesh” in their clenched fists, flesh of the planets which had been turned into strange rocks. In some traditional families, these souvenirs from another world had been carefully preserved and, at the time of the American moonwalk, were brought out, some from within medicine bundles, the owners convinced that these were Moon rocks. As Old Fool Bull said,: “We have been on the Moon long before the wasichu and we didn’t need any rockets to get there.,”

“Don’t hurt the trees, the seas, or the Earth,” pray the people during a peyote meeting. Native Americans are intensely aware of a deteriorating environment, of polluted streams, evil rains, and poisoned air. A Hopi prophecy, as Thomas Benyacya, spokesman for the Hopi Nation, once related, predicts a possible end of an abused and plundered world . “When a black sun rises in the East and the Hopis go to the House of Mica.”

Traveling to the United Nations in New York to warn of a coming Earth catastrophe, the Hopis passed Gary, Indiana, and saw a sun rising, blackened by the soot and smog from the industrialized city. Arriving in New York, they recognized in the United Nations Building, the “House of Mica” mentioned in their prophecies. Similar foretellings of our world being replaced by another, worthier one, unless the people inhabiting it change their heedless ways, occur in many tribes from Meso-America all the way north to the Arctic. Some traditional men and women are saying, “White Man. Better watch your step!”

The world as seen through Indian eyes – the sacred and the profane, the good and the bad, the extraordinary and the humdrum, things alive and things dead -- upon closer look, might not be all that dead.

I sometimes wonder uneasily what will become of us white superpowered Americans. Will we still be here one hundred, two hundred years hence? I am sure the Navajos will.

In the words of a Lakota holy man:

There is a word meaning “All My Relations.”
We will live by this word.
We are related to everything.
We are still here!
We shall live!
Mitakuye Oyasin

©1989, 2001 by Richard Erdoes. All Rights Reserved.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher
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Bear and Company www.InnerTraditions.com


This article was excerpted from:

Crying for a Dream: The World through Native American Eyes
by Richard Erdoes.

Crying for a Dream: The World through Native American Eyes by Richard Erdoes.A powerful collection of text and full-color photographs that offers an intimate glimpse of Native American life. • Includes rare photos and firsthand accounts of the sun dance, sacred pipe, yuwipi, and vision quest ceremonies. • By internationally recognized ethnographer Richard Erdoes, author of Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions and Gift of Power. In this phenomenal combination of landscape, ceremony, individual portrait, and prose, Richard Erdoes brings forth the lesser seen world of the Native American experience and vision. With the aid of firsthand accounts collected during three decades of personal interactions with indigenous tribes, the author chronicles the traditional rites, individual lives, and historical persecution of North America's indigenous peoples.

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About the Author

Crying for a Dream: The World through Native American Eyes by Richard Erdoes.Richard Erdoes is the author of more than twenty-one books, including Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions and American Indian Myths and Legends. An Austrian-born historian, ethnographer, and artist, he contributed to many publications, including the New York Times, Time, Life, Fortune, Smithsonian, and the Saturday Evening Post. He was given the Lakota name Inyan Wasicu  by John Fire Lame Deer. He was a student at the Berlin Academy of Art in 1933, when Adolf Hitler came to power. He was involved in a small underground paper where he published anti-Hitler political cartoons which attracted the attention of the Nazi regime. He fled Germany with a price on his head. Richard Erdoes died at the age of 96, in 2008, at his home in New Mexico.