CountrytoCitytoNative

Ha! which is Lakota for Hello!

I am learning Lakota traditions after learning about them, and after learning that I am at least half Native by ancestry. I come to what is called the Red Road - traditional Native culture, spirituality, morality, politics, thinking, feeling, speaking, acting, living, community, which are all the same - by a long and winding road. The last step was a political step. I had come, from the Upper Peninsula in Michigan, through a radical college in lower Michigan, through graduate school in New York, to a job in Nebraska, to a political demonstration on a Native reservation in South Dakota. The woman who would become my Ina (Mother/Aunt) directed us, instead of to the demonstration, first to a traditional funeral in the middle of the night, and taught us how to attend in respect (respect is the first principle of Native life). Then she directed us to a Spiritual Man's house, a man who would become my Leksi (Uncle). The first thing that he said to me in the days we spent there was that I could not walk the Red Road because I had been trained to think with my left brain - European knowledge claims of a supposed meritocracy of ideas in philosophy and religion and science and history and law and politics and the written word - with all my years in universities, and that the Red Road requires the right brain - knowledge through feeling, intuition, tradition, personal interaction, the spoken word, nature, having "hollow bones" to hear what the Spirits tell us, respect for nature, Elders, Spirits, Ancestors, and what they tell us. I knew, intuitively that I did belong on the Red Road. The Spirits and Ancestors had been telling me I am a Native since before I learned to speak any language. They had been telling me how to play and how to dream and how to feel and what to remember and what it was to be a child as a Native B.C. Before Colombus, Before Conquest, Before Colonization. So I stayed. And my Uncle allowed me to stay. And I stayed. And my Uncle allowed me to stay. And so it went. And now I am on the Red Road that the Spirits and Ancestors were telling me about as an infant, as a toddler, as a child...all my life. I am a child on that Red Road, a child of about eight years now. I am on, in the words of the title of my Uncle's book, The Learning Journey of the Red Road. Mitakuye Oyasin (All Are My Relations), Lakota Winyan (Lakota Woman)