A Conversation with
Hyemeyohsts Storm and Swan Storm

GLOSSARY
Zero Chiefs - Spiritual teachers, scholars and healers
Medicine - Power, spirit, healing and sacredness of life
Medicine Wheel - Ancient earth science and spiritual philosophy
Wahkahn and SSkwan - Creatress mother and creator father

The Monthly Aspectarian: Seven Arrows and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee are probably the two books that first gave the rest of the world an idea of what happened to the Native Americans from your perspective, and they have been quite educational. I read Seven Arrows back in the early seventies, and it was very interesting to me. Even though I was already into metaphysics, I really had no connection to anything true about Indian spirituality. How was it for you to write them?

Hyemeyohsts Storm: I would like to mention one other book that was also very important at the time, and that was Custer Died for your Sins by Vine Deloria.

What many people need to appreciate is that many times it is very difficult for a young person who is reading an article to understand the pain of the past because their have their pains in their present . . . and usually those pains are very different. As an example, the questions that were a result of my life that I lead were all before Martin Luther King. And Martin Luther King meant a lot to breed people -- mixed blood people -- Indians, Chicanos and, of course, Blacks in America, because after Martin Luther King, Americans began to have more of a heart for issues that actually pertain to most Americans. What I mean by that is the fact that according to a statistic from Davis University in California, there are eighty-five million people in the United States -- this is not counting Canada or Mexico, just the United States -- eighty-five million people with one degree or another of Indian blood.

TMA: I'm one of them.

HS: Yes, of course you are. And it's important for the youth who are reading your article to understand that when you say "a nation" and "people," you are talking not from 1776 but from about 1492. We have been on this continent as a mixed blood people for going on six hundred years! And that's a long time.

Two things exist in America. We have families, as an example, who have lived on this continent since 1500. I'm talking about white and every other color, by the way, Jews, Germans, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Africans, of course, who have since 1500 been born Native American. Now this is a very complicated issue, because it deals with something that is at the heart of the matter right now, in fact, about mixed blood people on all reservations. The fact is, there are no more full-blood Indians. That is a thing of the past. In other words, young Indian people are born mixed heritage, Indian and everything else you can imagine, different kinds of Indian tribes and different kinds of other peoples on the reservations. By the way, the reservations center around a complication that exists with breeds. This same thing exists off reservations, as in your case. You're a breed, a mixed blood person.

This question, both on and off the reservations, bring us to some very vital issues: What am I doing here? I am here to experience, first, who I am. Then who other people are, and other creatures. Where am I born? Mother Earth is the answer.

Now what I mean by that is that when you look at the sun -- our chiefs teach us that the sun is alive; it is a deity. By the way, deity means "two" . . . du, tu, dos and deity -- the same word. These are different words, German, Italian, Spanish, et cetera from the Indo-European languages. Two. Why two? This is very important to understand: Because all ancients knew there was both female and male in all things. In other words, there's the creator and the creatress, Wahkahn and SSkwan. Wahkahn is female, SSkwan is male. To understand this, think of the yin and yang symbol from ancient China, the Tao. You have the male and female in all things.

TMA: Even in physics you have a positive and negative pole on either side of an electromagnetic field.

HS: And it's not that the female is negative and the masculine is positive. There's one in the other and both in each. Well, that's the way it is with the deity of the sun. You see it's not just a light bulb screwed up there in the sky. It is alive. Sun is my grandmother and grandfather. Now the people who will read your article for the first time will hear, as they heard in Seven Arrows, some very new things said on earth. My mother and father sun. It belongs to me. That helps me be present in my life and present with my grandmother and grandfather sun. My grandmother and grandfather earth. These deities are alive.

You don't have a dead sun up there giving us energy, and a dead earth giving us butterflies and fish and minnows. The earth is very much alive, and she and he are our grandmother and grandfather, and they give us our life. We are on earth, and while we're on earth we have life. So you can see, our earth is alive. It's very important to know that she and he is not dead matter, as science has told us. So my grandmother and grandfather sun, my grandmother and grandfather earth, are with me, and I can talk to the sun and I can talk to the earth because they're alive. And no, they don't answer me, like, How ya doing? They don't speak Chinese or Russian or something. Oh no, we can't hear them that way. But on a total cellular level, a spiritual level, we can certainly hear them. And they guide us and they teach us. It's these things that we will miss when we die.

People don't like to die. They fight for life. They want to see the next sunset and sunrise. They want to see these beautiful things. So it's the same thing when we look at the rivers and the oceans and the lakes. These are not dead. They're alive. The ocean is alive. The rivers are alive and trees are alive, the flowers are alive. And again, these are our relatives. These are our great teachers. When we get tired and we get sick and we get lonely and we are crying, we automatically will go to the river, go to the trees, walk on a shady part of a lane of a street, being with the trees, being with the flowers. We send flowers to people who are sick, and that we love, because everybody on this cellular, human level know that all these grandmothers and grandfathers are alive and that we can communicate with them. And that's why I hug a tree. It's the same thing when we're talking about the birds, songbirds, the eagles, buffalo, our cattle, our sheep -- anyone who's ever worked with animals knows that there is a wondrous communication between these beings; the sweet medicine, these pictures of life.

What we have always taught as Zero Chiefs is a very simple thing: We teach people to appreciate themselves and celebrate their lives, and that way they can understand that they are a self, a being, and that they have choice . . . that means that they have a mind. And that we as human beings can make a choice to destroy or to build or to love or to ignore. We have all these things to teach us as a spirit.

Now what do I mean by spirit? I mean that you understand that we dwell in the world of spirit, which is "death," by the way; you have to die to go back to spirit. Many people don't think of that.

TMA: Well, whether it's a little death or the big death . . .

HS: Yes, either way you're going to spirit, and the spirit is formless, the spirit has no body. We dwell much longer as the essence of the spirit than we do living on earth as a being inhabiting a body. While we're on earth, a spirit living in a body, we learn of ourselves and we learn of what our limitations are and we learn of our stupidity and we learn of our triumph, we learn of our love and we learn of our hate. In other words, we're spirits living in the most wondrous of schools ever invented by Wahkahn and SSkwan, creatress mother and creator father: life here on earth. And while we're here on earth, we say, Well this city is just terrible and people are so awful. And what I'm going to do is, I'm going to just get rid of everything. Yeah sure, you can do that. Then you get more and more and more isolated. Also, you miss the point of why you're on earth: to face these wondrous challenges.

It's fantastic to overcome a lot of our bigotry and hatred, because then there's a wonderful thing that happens in the art of overcoming it: people feel that they have achieved some greatness when they do that. It's wonderful when a young person realizes that yes, our world is in trouble; yes, our earth is being polluted; yes, there are people who do not care. But if you just crush yourself with all of this information and not realize that there are things that you can do about it on a second-by-second, day-by-day basis, and that your prayers do count, and your planting a seed in the ground and just planting one tree, whether it's next to a freeway or some by road or in your backyard, or going to the river and praying for the river to clean up, all of this works, because what happens is, people feel the energy of these things. They sense that your purpose is much brighter and clearer. Mother Earth will answer those prayers in ways that are very beautiful, and people feel good when they go to the river now. They're cleansed spiritually because they're caring for the river. They're cleansed spiritually because they begin to care about the mountains and don't want the guts ripped out of a mountain.

By the same token, I would like to bring up the fact that we as human beings do like to wear shoes, pants, clothes, hats. We like our television sets, we like our radios, we like our computers, we like our recording equipment. There's nothing the matter with this. What there is something the matter with is we build cups to disintegrate. We build recorders to destroy themselves. In other words, we could do better, couldn't we. We can do better with everything on earth. If we can really begin to understand, especially the young person reading this article, that one day they will have their say. There will be that moment. Maybe they will become an exec. Maybe they will become a mother, a father. That mother or that father might be the one person who shows a child how to respect life and to respect the mountain and the grass and the grasshoppers and the birds and everything equally. That person might be the next great woman or man on earth who will make all the difference. In other words, if everybody begins to hold precious their opportunity in life, then things begin to change.

People will go to a soothsayer or to a woman that will read their "fortunes," but you know, you can't read fortunes, because there's no such thing as reading a future; a future isn't written in words. But these people are sensitive. Sensitive to what? I'll tell you what most of them are sensitive to: life. L-I-F-E. Life, mother life, father life, is real, and anytime you don't believe that, just put a plastic bag over your head and you'll fight for air. You'll begin to see that life is important. Understand what I mean? Life, then, is something you have to learn to appreciate.

TMA: It sounds to me as if the essential teaching is the one-ness of everything.

HS: Yeah, what happens too much is that people begin to hear about how to get off the birth wheel, how to get away from earth . . . how to go out and beyond the self, these sort of things. These are things maybe a monk would want to do.

TMA: It's almost a spiritual death wish.

HS: Yes. Somebody who is, let's say, a very high adept already has these things, but for you and I who work on it on a daily basis and have to feed our cattle and have to feed children and are married and have families, and have a cat who needs her saucer of milk, have to fix the cars and write the books, it is a very different thing, because we are here, challenged with feeding the children. We can't just sit constantly in meditation. We have to talk to our kids. These things are important.

The most important thing that Swan and I do while we're working with people building a medicine wheel, is that we help them get back to life, L-I-F-E, and earth -- not to belief. Some strange things have happened in the last 2,000 years: people are asked to believe in so many things. But you know, you don't have to believe in life. Life is right there. You need to learn to appreciate life, to respect life, not believe in life. You don't have to believe in the sun, it's up there. You don't have to believe in the hundred billion trillion quadrillion squared parsecs of space that's up there. That is creation. I believe that belief itself is something that is just way out there in left field -- or mostly from right. The right wing type thing, belief, belief, belief, instead of doing, sharing, loving, appreciating, being friendly, thinking other people are equal to you, knowing that other people, even if they are not of your faith, have a loving creatress and creator who loves them also and guides them. These things are important.

TMA: Celebrate life.

HS: Celebration of life -- exactly.

TMA: I think the way you are stressing the oneness of all things rather than the division of all things is really interesting -- considering that there's so much noise coming out of a number of Native Americans right now about how white people shouldn't be doing any sort of Native American spiritual practices.

HS: Do you know what that's called? That's called racist. Did you know that the reservation itself divides its own people into degrees of blood? You could imagine . . . if you lived in Ireland and your Irish mother married a person from London, then the rest of your life you would be a half breed Irish, one half. And then your kids would be less, and less, and less, and pretty soon in Ireland, there would be no Irish.

TMA: I very much appreciate your perspective that there is really only one people.

HS: Yes. This racism is something that needs to be really looked at.

TMA: I got into a discussion with one particular hothead, and what I eventually said was, Hey, you don't have to be Jewish to love Rosen's Rye bread, and you don't have to have red skin to dance in a circle.

HS: Exactly. That's a very, very important thing for you to publish, that you don't have to be an Italian to be a Catholic.

TMA: I've believed for some time, going back to Seven Arrows, that the Native Americans have spiritual technology that the rest of the planet desperately needs to have as many people possible practicing.

HS: Exactly. The teachings in Seven Arrows were from the Zero Chiefs that I learned from. And in my book, Lightening Bolt, I describe them and who they are and were in detail.

TMA: Where does this term "Zero Chief" come from?

HS: The zero probably was the most celebrated thing in all of the ancient world. The discovery of the zero by humans anywhere and everywhere on earth is probably equal to the discovery of fire, atomic energy, electricity, or any of the great upon great, powerful upon powerful discoveries through humanity. Because zero described the invisible to humanity. It described the spiritual, way beyond just belief and looking at a thing. For the first time, humanity could talk about the invisible.

TMA: What is apparently not there.

HS: Exactly. And they could talk about it in a way that made sense to the human mind. As an example, within zero are all things. There is nothing beyond zero and one. Everything in the universe is one, one, one, one . . . because each thing is one. So, if you have a number that is nineteen, then that is just nineteen ones, do you know what I'm saying? A computer only knows zeros and ones. Computerized language now is the same language that our Zero Chiefs mathematicians and philosophers taught years and years ago, and so the world is kind of catching up with it.

TMA: Now are you saying that in past times, way past times, that these Zero Chiefs existed as a brotherhood?

HS: Women and men -- I'm one of them . . . and they have been practicing and continuing to teach on both continents, South America and North America --

TMA: So these teachings are pan tribal.

HS: Yes, most certainly. If you study Indian stories, you would see that there is pan Indianism within all things. The stories begin to repeat themselves, the concepts repeat. The colors, whether they moved left or right, repeat themselves. Everything is repeated from one tribe to the next, which gives every scientist and scholar in the world the obvious hint that there was pan tribalism and Indianism long before the white man ever got there. And of course, what happens is very simple, though you must understand a very simple concept here. Let's say that Christianity began in Greece and North Africa with the Septuagint and then branched out and then finally went to Rome --

TMA: Borrowing heavily everywhere it went.

HS: Well, everywhere it went it borrowed heavily from other cultures, and it was changed by those cultures. And so some of the words and wordings changed. Right now -- and I'm being very conservative here -- you have six hundred major varieties of Christianity. Though they will disagree on that and agree on that, you can kind of call that a pan Christianity.

TMA: Most of them believe that there was a Jesus, yes.

HS: Well, some of them don't. But it's kind of pan Christianity. So it was the same thing with the Native American world. The Zero Chiefs have been teaching forever, and the thoughts and the philosophies have been around forever. If you go to the east to Buddhism, and you follow the Buddhists tenets, way back from Buddha, who was in India, and then Buddhism took root in other countries. By the way, Buddhism failed in India. There are hardly any Buddhists there at all. There are books you can get on this. And then Buddhism changed as it went to each country, so again, you have kind of pan Buddhism, do you understand what I'm saying? All of these things, though, point to one beautiful thing -- not a terrible thing, a beautiful one, and that is that people do seek to know who they are, where they fit into life, and they understand spirit.

All of this academic talk you and I have just shared here is wonderful. But when it gets down to the kid in the street who is scared to death that we're destroying all the forests, we're polluting all of our oceans, we're destroying the air, there's AIDS, there's every kind of disease they can think of, and the population is going to double -- the child feels completely isolated from everybody and everything. All of these things weigh heavily upon our youth and hurts them. Breaks their heart. What we're saying is, don't let all of that stuff crush you. Look at your facts. You're a spirit, born into this body at this point in life, and that alone tells you that you're here to learn of who you are, and to grow spiritually, and that there's something for you to do. And that something for you to do is wonderful.

I know that you want to say a few words to Swan also. Oh . . . she came up behind me and she's right here, standing by me! Swan will talk to you about the medicine wheels and women, and what it means for women and some other very important issues that we talk about when we're with people.

Hey, my friend, much love to you.

TMA: Yes, and to you.

Hello, Swan. I guess you heard what Hyemeyohsts and I were talking about. I think it's interesting that the feminine is becoming more represented, even in the Native American spirituality -- especially through Hyemeyohsts' and your work -- but I think that there's a general perception that for the most part, the medicine was passed through medicine men.

Swan Storm: I think the best way to respond to that is to ask a few questions that bring a measure of the human element into it. I think that many times when people are reading and dreaming and being influenced by films about Native Americans, there is a romanticism and really an oversimplification of what has existed in the past. A question I was asked years ago when I first started learning to bring the human element back into my heart and my intelligence is, What would have happened to the traditions and histories of the Jews if Hitler had won World War II? I was asked by my teachers to contemplate that, because we've heard from philosophers, in poetry, even in modern rock and roll lyrics, the reality that histories are written and re-written by the winners of wars. But to in that hypothetical situation, for Jews to apply that while they're reading the histories is another thing. To be able to put it into the action of our own imagination is still another thing, a completely different challenge. I thought very deeply about what it would be like to have the grandchildren of many of the Jews that had lost their lives in World War II try to articulate -- through the text that would have been written, that would have come out of Nazi Germany -- to try to articulate what existed of their traditions before the war. Obviously, what would have survived would have been highly distorted -- especially if the children of those few Jews that did survive have been forced to attend special reservation schools, studying a Nazi curriculum designed especially to convert the children to a new religion.

TMA: To eradicate a culture.

SS: And, most particularly, to missionize them into a new religion. I know a lot of Americans have had an interest in really studying the Indian wars, and they've found that a lot of what took place during that time was missionizing. Most Native American people now are Christians. Ninety-some percent. As it's mentioned in Seven Arrows, there were a lot of works in depth about the missionizing of Indians and what has happened on reservations, and how reservations have been parceled out by different churches. One part of the reservation may be Mennonite and one part Catholic, one part's Baptist, and depending on where you were born on the reservation, you're raised that way. And the cultural view -- now that's not saying all of those people were bad people.

TMA: Oh no, most of them thought they were doing good.

SS: Absolutely. So I'm not making a judgment here. I'm not pointing fingers, but I'm responding to your question. If you're just walking around a circle with me, the measure of my response I think will become clear to you, because now we're talking about people who had a world view. In that world view there was a male Father God, and in that world view mostly war chiefs were leaders. In that world view, up until the time of the building of a democracy here, Native philosophy and history and tradition influenced democracies in this country enormously, [but the world view of the white population was] of a feudalistic one male god and one male father and one male leader. As Wolf -- Hyemeyohsts -- was talking about before, when a very strong belief system of the culture, the mission of the culture, is to missionize everyone else to believe the same, you are not necessarily going to be very open and rewarding when you hear very different philosophies, world understanding, governments, spiritual traditions from other cultures -- when you believe your job is to change their belief system to yours.

I want to give you as example an old belt that was given to me. Many times, in our discipline of the Zero Chiefs and medicine wheels, some of the histories were literally woven into symbols on belts that were passed from generation to generation. It wasn't a system of writing, per se, but it was that each symbol reflected an entire teaching. For those people who have read, for example, Seven Arrows, you know that a mouse means more than a mouse. The symbol of a buffalo means more than just a buffalo. There's an entire part of the medicine wheel, an entire teaching, it reflects. These symbols were literally stories that would open up. Histories were kept that way and certain ceremonies and family traditions, etc., were kept that way. Wolf talks about this some in Lighting Bolt and there are other writers that have mentioned different kinds of belts. In the Smithsonian there are trader belts, but there are many different kinds of belts, including belts of knowledge. So in this one example, this early anthropologist who is also a clergy, a translator of certain Native American belts, is allowed to see a belt. The Native American medicine person that was speaking to this anthropologist translator was explaining what the belt was saying. And when they got to the words, "creatress" and "creator," the translation into English by the translator was "God."

So what you are discovering at this time, what is happening, is not that something new is being born in the native world where women are chiefs and you're hearing more of the creatress -- but suddenly, for some reason, this is becoming uncovered and unveiled. In other words, it isn't a coincidence. It's always been there, but it was not rewarded. In fact, it was punished.

A lot hasn't been said about survival. A lot of hasn't been written about it. Just for the survival of the information itself and a few of the traditions, many Zero Chiefs and other chiefs had to go underground completely to survive; not only to survive in the white world -- no, not just that -- but to survive the converts in their own families and the converts on the reservations and the converts in their own world. Which is no different from any time when suddenly you find yourself with a tradition or a way of seeing the world that is not accepted and you're surrounded by a culture who wants to annihilate you.

Then all of a sudden, you're in a very different position, and how you share your information and how you share your knowledge, what you say and what you don't say changes radically. Obviously that's happened to many different cultures at different times, certainly not just to the Native American. So yes, women chiefs is not such an unusual topic . . . it's just one that finally has a little bit more opportunity to be shared, like seeds in the garden. But this information is of very old trees and very old knowledge, and they're not just ideas in Lynn Andrews' books. There have been many women medicine chiefs and healers and those who were knowledgeable that just weren't really talked about; many times, the male chiefs who didn't talk about them were protecting them.

As we're heading toward the twenty-first century, Wolf is very much now [making this issue known.] His most important teachers were women, although he had very powerful important male teachers as well. His main Zero Chief teacher was an incredibly important holy woman that he writes about in Lightening Bolt. It really is the time for Americans and our earth people around the world to start hearing that there have been ancient cultures -- and not so far ago -- that didn't just say goddess, goddess, goddess, goddess, and didn't just say god, god, god, god, but actually said balance.

TMA: Who recognized both.

SS: It's not a new thing, but it certainly is a thing we desperately need again, because isn't that the statement of our earth? Now we're talking about people who didn't have necessarily a belief that humans wrote down, but looked to life and said, Well, how is life teaching us? How does life show us creation? If you look at the design of the garden, you're going to see that there's a balance of female and male in every garden, or the garden won't grow. Or you look at the animal garden -- in the animal world, there is female and male. In the human world there is female and male. Our chiefs didn't think that creation spent four billion years to evolve life on earth that suddenly was to be ignored. Actually, a lot of the teaching [about] creation is though our experience of earth and our experience of life. One of the first big messages from life that we learn is the one of quintessential balance in nature, that which exists between female and male. That's a really old teaching of the [Zero Chiefs].

TMA: Looking just strictly at white culture, how long is it that women have even been allowed to vote or own property or be regarded as equal in any way.

SS: But if you look back in that culture, way back in the ancient Celtic world, you will discover a time, pre-Inquisition, when women had more voice.

TMA: It's been a crazy age. I'm not sorry to see it pass.

SS: Absolutely. And that's why the decision on our part to renew a very old tradition of the Zero Chiefs and the carriers of the medicine wheels, the tradition of female and male teaching together, that goes way back before this round [of Western European] interaction.

The medicine wheel sings with a female and male voice. There's certain parts of the teaching that males do, certain parts of the teaching that females do, an interweaving that touches women and men who are there at the medicine wheels that we build, that we teach, that we share. This balance of female and male isn't just something to talk about intellectually. The tradition isn't something that Wolf and I are creating, it's something that we're renewing . . . and certainly we've been guided to do that. It's worked really well to have both of us working together to share the information of the medicine wheel, because the medicine wheel speaks of the balance of the earth and of the balance of creation. That balance is really important and has a lot to do with female and male.

What I love about how the medicine wheels share is that it's not a moral issue: it's not that men are bad and women are good or the other way around. We're talking about looking to the earth and seeing that what works best in life is a balance of female and male. That voice is coming into the culture now, really having women have a say in what we build, in what we design in our cities, in our homes, in our businesses, in our lives . . . what we do with that balance is going to support men and women. It's not about lifting up women and pushing down men.

TMA: It's about transcending "us and them" altogether.

SS: In my early learning, one of the teachers I worked with, a woman, a Zero Chief -- which she was as a carrier of the medicine wheels -- said to me that if I was born as a women at a time when it was all female leadership . . . females running every religion of the world, females running most businesses, females in positions of power in every government . . . and males had no voice, and as a result we were incredibly out of balance, then whether I was a woman or man, I would start to speak for the creator father. I would start to speak for men having more voice because I would be responsible as a carrier of the medicine wheel and a lover of the earth, as a lover of humanity, to speak for balance.

TMA: Things would be just as out of whack.

SS: Just in a very different way. If anything that the medicine wheel teaches, and I was always taught, is how we can live in balance with ourselves, bring ourselves into balance, and learn directly from the amazing, sophisticated loving balance of our earth. That balance starts with female and male. Of course, there's a balance of the elements of the earth, the fire and the earth and water and air, and how these are parts of us.

The medicine wheel also introduces people to their intimate relationship with the earth, with life, and not having that be so abstract. A lot of young people are so moved when they begin to realize that the living planet that we are on, this conscious being we call Mother and Father Earth, is this great school, not a place to transcend and to get off the birth wheel and get out of life as fast as possible and escape! But that beyond human ignorance there are amazing teachers on earth. The great honor in being born on earth is that we can learn from the teachers of earth who are the great elders of the earth: the elders that our ancients went to -- the ocean, the mountains, the desert, the seasons, the storms, the sunrise, the sunset, the natural laws of this planet. These are the great spiritual teachers of the earth, our chiefs say.

TMA: And the various animals.

SS: And all the animal and plant family. These things are talked about not in abstract ways but in really tangible ways so when people leave our meeting, they have some tools to take home to continue to begin to build or deepen their relationship, even if they're in the middle of the deepest part of the city . . . that we're still on a living, breathing planet. And they can begin to relate spiritually with this planet, mentally with this planet, physically and emotionally.

TMA: I'm happy to hear you and Wolf repudiate the racism of the Native Americans who are saying that anybody who isn't an Indian should not work with medicine wheels or shields or go into sweat lodges.

SS: As a balanced response, first of all I agree that it's incredibly racist and also impossible! We live in America. Though I do not consider the medicine wheels in any way a religion --

there is a freedom of religion in America.

TMA: We live on one planet.

SS: I agree, but I think the concern is, and that needs to be articulated, is that for some of the people, there are really big racist issues that they have to deal with. A lot of that is coming from a place of pain, because for a long time, what was theirs was illegal to them. You were not allowed to Sun dance, you were not allowed to pray with the pipe.

TMA: Obviously a wrong position.

SS: And now finally when they can, they are dealing with the fact that at some times there are white people who claim to be more experts at these things than them.

TMA: One thing I always want to ask is, do the dissenters have any awareness that this has happened to every culture that's ever lived? It happened to the Celts; it's happening to the Tibetans right now.

SS: Absolutely. But when someone's in pain, I don't know that they even care.

I think that in the next generation, there's going to be whole new generation of mixed blood Native Americans, because every generation they become more and more mixed. There are something like eighty-five million Americans with one percentage or another of Native blood right now.

TMA: Yes, like you, I've got a tiny little bit of Cherokee myself.

SS: Right. This is so common in so many of our meetings, at least half of the people come up to us every time we teach and say, my great grandmother, my great grandfather, was a Native American. My family never spoke of it. It was like in the woodpile, secret. Finally, I'm getting to hear about it on the deathbed of my grandparent, and I want to know more about who that part of me is.

I think another really important aspect of what we're talking about, beyond the racist or cultural issue here, is the reason that the chiefs, the Zero Chiefs and their apprentices, had Hyemeyohsts move forward and publish Seven Arrows. Originally, Seven Arrows was to go across reservation boundaries. The bigotry of the reservation boundaries -- this is Arapaho, that's Crow, this is Cheyenne -- is incredibly intense, and it was really important to be able to give the medicine wheels back to Native children, many of whom knew a lot more about Western European history, and knew a lot more about Christianity, than they knew of medicine wheels and their chiefs . . . especially because many of them had been forced to attend reservation schools.

So [getting that book out] was one level of real dedication and commitment -- for Native children to have their own culture, to have their own teachings give unto them again. This information belongs to humans. It doesn't belong to one race of people, it doesn't belong to one gender of people. It belongs to earth people.

TMA: My position exactly.

SS: And earth people, every human born, is an earth person.

Of course, there is the care that these things are shared with respect, with sophistication and with love, and that isn't always the case.

TMA: There's always going to be rip-offs and knuckleheads.

SS: That's true with every religion, philosophy -- and when new information is shared with the world, that happens.

TMA: Yeah, twenty-five years ago you could call anything you wanted Tibetan, and there was almost nobody around to contradict you.

SS: Exactly, so I think that's a concern, the respect factor. I don't think racism will ever answer that problem, but more quality teaching can. More sophisticated teachers speaking in sophisticated ways about the medicine wheel, about the cells, about the earth, about the medicine pipe, about the rainbow lodge. We don't call it a sweat lodge, as an example. No Native language ever uses the word "sweat." Can you imagine saying, if we're going to go pray at the Notre Dame cathedral, "We're going to go pray at the sweat house." We talk about this in our teachings and Wolf wrote about it -- that to speak in English across boundaries is a quick way, and even Indians have conformed to it as a quick way. But if they go into their native languages, it's "the beautiful rainbow lodge," it's "the purification lodge of the grandparents," it's "the sacred stone's lodge." There's many ways of describing this holy lodge, but sweat is not one of them.

In our view, the way to protect the sophistication and the balance and the healing of this information is to have more sophisticated teachers out there cleaning up how it's shared, deepening how it's shared, bringing in the sophistication of the original teachings. That is one of the reasons why Hyemeyohsts and I for a short period of time will tour and will teach -- to help bring a dignity and sophistication to the teachings of the medicine wheels.

TMA: Well, good job. Somebody's got to get out there and do it.

SS: Hyemeyohsts, through his arts apprentices and the teaching of the medicine wheels, is working to touch humans, to really renew their relationship and respect for life. Through books and through art and through teaching events, we really are working to touch mixed blood people, because so much of the destiny of our earth is in the hands of mixed blood people.

TMA: Because we're almost all mixed blood by now.

SS: Exactly!

TMA: I firmly believe that Gaia or Mother/Father Earth, however you want to term it, is fully capable of cleansing her/himself all on her own. Would you say that working with the medicine wheel, having larger and larger numbers of people engaged in the spiritual technology that the Native Americans have, would that enhance the process of healing?

SS: Well, absolutely one-hundred percent, definitely, certainly! Hopefully, I'll give more of an example in the physical, and then an example of how it affects the earth, and then how it affects us, because those are two different questions that relate very deeply. If we create a technology physically that reflects a new way of thinking . . . for example, we do not want to dump our pollution and literally our feces into the same river that we then want to have our children swim in . . . and then that renews our interest in cleaning our rivers -- is that going to allow the Mother Earth and the Father Earth to heal their selves faster? Well, of course.

TMA: Certainly, if we can stop doing harm.

SS: When we pull back our ignorance, she can do her own work to heal herself. No question. The few experiments that have already been done with this with different lakes in America and certainly in Europe . . . as one example, in Germany, they rerouted all of their underground systems that were dumping effluence into the water. They built a circular pipe under the ground which would catch it all, and then that circular pipe took it far away from the lake. They thought it would take seventy-five years for the lake to heal herself, for the swans to come back, for the fish to come back, but as a result of their work, within only four years there were fish in the lake. That is one physical reflection of what it means to change our thinking.

The way we build our cities and whatever we build as humans, is really a direct reflection of the way we think. As we change through the teaching of the medicine wheels and the teaching of our real relationship with the earth, we change not just physically, but also spiritually and mentally and emotionally. If the physical way in which we interact with her changes, it will allow her to heal herself a lot faster than if we don't.

TMA: Okay. So that's the first part of the question.

SS: Right, and being that we're heading towards six billion humans living on earth very, very soon, it's a change of thinking and physical interaction with earth that's desperately needed, and quickly.

TMA: Now how would working with the medicine wheel and dancing in a circle and so forth enhance the curative process?

SS: It enhances it because it changes the self perspective of everyone who's there.

TMA: Is that somehow more than just a change in consciousness?

SS: Yes, it is. It's also a change in the perspective of self responsibility. Also, one person, in changing certain ways in which they interact with themselves and with life, affects more people. Not only more people in general, but starting with their own children and families, and then beyond that. The change of self perspective to begin to really care for the earth in a personal, intimate way . . . not just an intellectual environmentalism, but a spiritual relationship, a self relationship.

Hyemeyohsts Storm is a Northern Cheyenne Indian and German half breed -- a mixed blood person. He was born and raised on the Northern Cheyenne and Crow Indian reservations in Montana. In addition to being a best-selling author for over twenty-two years and having taught and lectured at many universities throughout the U.S. and Canada, Storm is also the founder of the International School of Metis Art and founder of the spiritual organization, The Circle of the Earth Temple and Institute.

Swan Storm is a writer and Earth Teacher who brings a deeply inspiring and powerful female presence to her teaching. For over the last twelve years she has studied extensively the knowledge of the Zero Chiefs, and has particularly focused upon the ancient teachings and histories of many of the brilliant Zero Chiefs in her lineage who were women. During the last decade, Swan has taught many different kinds of women and men about the ancient Earth Wisdom of the Medicine Wheels and is the Executive Director of the Circle of the Earth Temple and Institute.

Visit the Storm's Website

Next Article