Prayers, Fasting, and Understandings at Bear Butte
Shunkmanu saw the sickness spreading everywhere. The cancer of materialism, greed, and selfishness was swallowing up his people, language, spirituality, and children. For some relatives, the love for the dollar and material power had become their Creator.
Shunkmanu looked to the mountain, where he would fast, make offerings, and ask Tunkashida how to direct his footsteps into the future. He would pray and ask how he could bring gifts to the People at sunrise and braid what he had learned and would learn into the Sacred Hoop of the People.
The Old Ones said you could see the whole circle of Mother Earth and Father Sky from the top of this Sacred Mountain. You could look to the Creator, the Four Directions, Mother Earth, and deep within yourself.
You could see and understand the Sacred Designs of Life from this sacred place. If you sincerely prayed and sacrificed enough, the Old Ones would bring you gifts of wisdom and healing for the People.
Shunkmanu tried to understand the Red Road his relatives had traveled before him. He saw how the Sacred Hoop of the People had been broken into many pieces, each with its own center. The people no longer camp together in the same unity, compassion, love, kindness, and oneness of the past. Instead, the People walked with mistrust of one another and learned of the ways of machines, jealousy, slander, and greed.
Yet, all the prophecies of the Old Ones promised that the People would come together again in even greater spiritual unity and strength. All would unite in the Sacred Hoop of Many Hoops before the Sacred Tree.
The Way of the Sacred Pipe recognized this all-embracing unity.
First, the Sacred Pipe is offered in humility, thanksgiving, respect, and honor to Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit, and our ancestors who have walked the Red Road before us.
Then the Sacred Pipe is offered to the East, from where comes the Red Sunrise, the Dawning of a New Day, and in time, the Day that Shall Not be Followed by Night, in thanksgiving, respect, and honor of our Indigenous peoples of the Americas.
Then the Sacred Pipe is offered to the South, the place of the yellow deserts and where the Sun stands in greatest brilliance, in humility, thanksgiving, respect, and honor of our Asian relatives.
The Sacred Pipe is then offered to the West, where darkness, thunder, and lightning come in humility, thanksgiving, respect, and honor to our African relatives.
Then, the Sacred Pipe is offered to the North, where the cleansing and purifying Snows and White Giant of the North come in humility, thanksgiving, respect, and honor for our European relatives.
The Sacred Pipe is then offered in humility, thanksgiving, respect, and honor to Father Sky and Mother Earth and the Sacredness within every member of our Human Family and All Life. The Sacred Pipe is then turned to honor the sacred beings. We are
Shunkmanu recognized some of the good white brothers, whom the Hopi prophecies promised would work with Indigenous peoples of the Americas to bring together the Sacred Hoop of Many Hoops. As he had taught in school, Shunkmanu was happy that not all of Europe's Wise Ones had been burned in the Inquisition.
Being mixed blood, Shunkmanu had also been able to travel disguised into the worlds of European tribes and nations. He had listened to their councils, seen how they treated their elders and children, observed them practice their religion on Sundays, learned from their books, and seen their ruinous wars, greed, and selfishness.
Although many of these ways he witnessed saddened Shunkmanu, he found some white people equally cared about Mother Earth, other human beings, and the sacredness of themselves. They tried their best to understand the spiritual thoughts and feelings that soar with the Sacred Eagle of the People. Shunkmanu found some that had the knowledge and wisdom of their ancestors that fit perfectly into the understanding of the Sacred Hoop of Many Hoops.
Shunkmanu learned about a European elder named Jung in one of his University classes. Jung traveled around Mother Earth and learned from Indigenous peoples. Even though Jung thought in a Western scientific way, he came to understand the Wisdom and Sacred Teachings of the Four Directions.
Jung called the Four Directions differently but understood that they all lead to the same Sacred Place. From Jung's experience, there was a path he called cognitive, analytical thinking, and a second path of our psycho-motor and physical senses. The third path was our affective, emotional, and feeling gifts, and the fourth was traveled by developing and using our spiritual eyes, ears, and intuition.
Like the Old Ones, Jung understood we can gain wisdom, knowledge, and spiritual strength from all four paths. Paths that all lead to the Sacred Place from where the White Buffalo Calf Maiden comes, and the "two men coming from the east, headfirst like arrows flying," that Black Elk shared the Daybreak Star Herb, the Herb of Understanding, with Four Blossoms: Red, Yellow, Black, and White. With this Herb of Understanding, Black Elk said, "You shall undertake anything and do it."
Using the knowledge, wisdom, and spiritual power that could be gained by traveling to the Four Directions, Shunkmanu could see that the people would manifest the promised vision of the future. A time when all people would be unified in one understanding and would understand and see the beauty and the unity in diversity of all members of our Human Family. The promised time of the Eighth Fire.
Jung also traveled the inner, spiritual worlds where we speak to one another without words, hear of things far away without ears, travel to distant places without legs, and see in our dreams what appears in the physical world tomorrow or in five or twenty years.
Like the Old Ones, Jung realized that the Sacred Designs of Creation are sheltered within the Soul of Human Being and that we all come from the same Source of Life and Understanding. We are all spiritual and physical beings.
It was sad that Jung's first teacher, Freud, couldn't understand this spiritual and holistic reality. Even though our Human Family has different gifts and ways, we are all conditioned, molded, and guided by the same Universal Spirit and Design. It is good that Jung dared to leave his first teacher and journey from the European world of physical sensation and analytical thought to the other worlds of emotion and spiritual understanding.
Shunkmanu laughed when he thought of what Jung had written about his visit to the Pueblos of the Southwest. Jung began questioning a Pueblo Elder about what the Pueblos thought about the Americans, and the Elder told Jung that they thought the Americans were crazy.
Jung was astonished that they would say such a thing and asked him why. The Elder explained to Jung that Americans thought with their heads but that no human being thinks only with their heads. The Elder told Jung that the Pueblos also thought with their hearts.
With this understanding, Shunkmanu could more easily see why European people had such a history of violence and oppression of other human beings and cultures. These actions reflected European thinking from only the head, not the heart and spirit. Shunkmanu had also traveled to the lands of the European Tribes and saw the devastation left by the war that had occurred only eighteen years before.
With just head thinking, people separated their physical being from their emotional and spiritual dimensions. When out of touch with the spiritual and emotional realities of our being, head-thinking people may often deal with other human beings as parts of a machine, to be used or destroyed, as the machine operator's desires dictate.
Shunkmanu thought how sad these thinking relatives must have been when they journeyed to the Other Side Camp. They found that what they had believed in and built their lives upon were idle fancies and vain imaginings. They had utterly missed the purpose of our physical life: to grow our spiritual arms, legs, body, and spiritual qualities for the next stage of our eternal spiritual journey.
One of Shunkmanu's teachers shared how to change the colonial powers and structures surrounding him to the future prophesied by Black Elk and other Spiritual messengers. First, we must determine where we are in the present, our strengths and weaknesses, and where we want to be.
The next step is to examine our strengths closely and see how we can further enhance them to align our lives and actions with our vision. By strengthening our good qualities, strengths, and gifts, we must use this strength to overcome the weaknesses that we have identified. He is clear: Build on your strength. Don't dwell on your weakness.
Shunkmanu understood that spiritual and emotional power would be generated to transform our weaknesses into strengths by focusing our hearts and minds on our strengths. Shunkmanu also understood that to unite people. We must respect and understand the paths of emotion and spirituality and carefully nourish interpersonal relations. Grandfather Deloria told him, "When the people are happy and unified in one heart and mind, they can accomplish all things."
Humans could see that the path of physical power and control was not a path to travel. Humans are not beings whose only purpose is to make and consume material things. The coming of the Fourth World, the Hoop of Many Hoops, and the Eighth Fire would not support or allow this.
Shunkmanu understood, "We are all the children of Father Sky and Mother Earth." Just as Father Sky has a heavenly, infinite, and spiritual part, so do we human beings have a divine, infinite, and spiritual part, and just as Mother Earth is physical, we are also physical beings.
When the powers of Mother Earth and Father Sky, women, and men, are in equal balance, respect, honor, and understanding, the result is a rich and beautiful environment. When we balance, respect, honor, and understand the powers of our physical and spiritual beings, our lives within and without will be sacred, harmonious, unified, and beautiful.
Walking in this sacred manner, we will understand the Beauty Way. We will walk with only beauty because we know where we are going. We will walk with only beauty behind us because we know where we come from. We will walk with only beauty above our heads, beside us, below our feet, and within us because we walk the Sacred Path of our Creator.
When Shunkmanu shared one of his University books with his father, Mato Gi, Brown Bear, that said we were just products of our environment. Mato Gi only looked briefly at what was written within the book and smiled.
He said, "Take an English Setter and raise him in an apartment in New York City for five years. Then, take him out in the country to hunt pheasants. An English Setter will point to a pheasant as if he was raised in the country, not in an apartment in New York City. Both our ancestors and the world we live in impact our lives. But when we understand and follow the Sacred Teachings of our Creator, we can completely change the path of our lives."
Mato Gi always shared that all life has a spirit that must be respected and that the power that sustains the spirit moves circularly. He said that when serving the People, leaders must realize that their primary responsibility, when standing at the circle's center, is to be an example of the Sacred Teachings. You must be a leader who keeps the circle spiritually healthy and unified.
Brown Bear also explained that there were different ways to sit within the circle, leave the circle, enter the circle, and bring many circles together for a common purpose. He said the Dakotas always knew how to prayerfully organize the physical and spiritual environment to create the spiritual energy to heal sickness and sustain health.
He said our Dakota camps were always formed in a circle so that everyone would have an equal distance to walk to reach the Council Lodge in the Center of the Circle. He said unique colors, smells, songs, dances, foods, and designs created an environment that brought about the most incredible unity of mind, heart, spirit, and purpose for moving forward in oneness and addressing challenges.
Shunkmanu discovered that other people were also studying these energy designs in universities. They used many different names for their studies, such as environmental, organizational change, ecological consultation, and socio-physical organization. However, what he learned from Brown Bear was beyond what was understood by the University professors that Shunkmanu had met.
One time, when Shunkmanu shared Jung's perspective of life, Mato Gi took his understanding of life further. Shunkmanu asked, "Why didn't you tell me this before?" Mato Gi said, "Son, you never asked me."
Shunkmanu looked ahead to the top of the mountain where many of his relatives had fasted before him. His understanding, design, and vision of what was needed became more apparent. We must prayerfully learn as much as possible about our Creator's Sacred Hoop of Life and the Spiritual Gifts, Knowledge, Wisdom, Energies, and the Sacred Powers of the Four Directions.
Shunkmanu and his relatives would need excellent spiritual guidance and strength to unite the powers, tribes, and nations of the East, the South, the West, and the North, as the Old Ones had promised. As he reached the top of the mountain, he faced the Four Directions and waited for the voices of the Old Ones.
This was written by Shunkmanu on June 1, 1978, for a psychology class at the University of Washington. The poem below was written by a dear friend who loved Shunkmanu and wanted to support and inspire him in his fast on Bear Butte.
Tatanka no longer thunders over the prairie,
And we have been fenced into the edge of memory.
Yet, a dark-eyed boy is named Horse Thief.
Did he who named you thereby give you
Moonless nights, close to alien camps?
Or did he only know that you would bring us gifts at daybreak?
The wind blows across the prairie somewhere in my soul,
Hearing sounds of distant pounding hooves,
I see again the faces of the Old Ones,
Dim, blue-rimmed eyes flicker pride when they say your name.
Horse Thief, you have touched our spirits with the certainty of what will be.
Is it any wonder that at the first half-light of dawn
I braid thoughts of you into my hair,
My fingers weaving images of your grace and beauty,
Between the strands of yearning for your touch,
And still on my lips are prayers for your safety in the night,
Shunkmanu.
Lakota Win
