Keywords

Verse

Verse she walks she walks with Buffalo under the ground they are coming across the sky they are coming through the needles of stone and pine they are coming she is waiting not knowing that this seed of bone she will carry has already found her there in the circle where they sing old songs laid down long ago they knew she would be coming feet bloodied hands rubbed raw their plastic cuffs digging into skin piercing dragged across the rusting grates made for cattle and trucks to the pens where the newcomers fabricate disease and lies to justify the ways they slaughter Buffalo and the People walk over ground they have known since Creator shaped them long ago placing them there together blood and grasses encircle the Hills but today they will be slaughtered here in their homes she is coming and you will stand here together this long winter of blood and snow standing in the wind turning to each other to remember it is time to return it is time to go home — for Rosalie Beauty is an act, not just a painting. — Manulani Meyer

Introduction

Rosalie Little Thunder was a Lakota Elder and a protector of the Buffalo. She walked more than 500 miles during the winter, year after year, in solidarity with the Buffalo, the Elder brother to the Lakota, to stand with them, to draw attention to their suffering at the hands of the National Park Service, Montana Department of Livestock, and other federal and state agencies who were slaughtering the last of the wild Buffalo herds in North America around Yellowstone National Park. She called others to join her, to literally walk their ancestral ways of knowing who they are as Lakota People. Her walks for and with the Buffalo clarified for her this question she would ask, continually, “What does it mean to be a good relative?”Footnote 1 (Rosalie Little Thunder, personal communications). And as she asked it, she never stopped walking into this question—and into its answer—with her life.

In her walking of it, she asked all of us to embody this question in our own lives. “We need to become good relatives again,” she would say (Rosalie Little Thunder, personal communications). Rosalie Little Thunder was a philosopher, whose questioning, perception, and expansive thought came from being deeply placed, rooted, and grounded within her Lakota worldview. This was a “quintessentially Rosalie question” and one that she always asked people to reflect on. It is a question that emerges from deep within her Lakota philosophy, understanding, and ways of seeing the world, as it emerges from within Lakota epistemology, philosophy, and ethics. Her question reflects this particular Lakota orientation to the Universe.

She asked this question not only to invigorate thinking and memory, but because within it there is an urgency, this call to action—and just like everything she did, it was about putting moccasins to the ground and walking it, living it. That’s how Indigenous philosophies are—they are enacted, embodied. She called this spiritual activism—spiritual action and engagement—lived and reflected upon, practiced, and committed to daily, as Lakota ethical praxis. “Remind yourself, every morning, every morning, every morning. I’m going to do something. I’ve made a commitment. Not for yourself, but beyond yourself. You belong to the collective. Don’t go wandering off, or you will perish” (Little Thunder, from Buffalo Field Campaign).

This question holds particular significance—cultural touchstones, reference points—of meaning and memory to her Lakota People, ways of knowing and being that only they will know, remember, comprehend, from within the longevity and profound depths of relationship and being relation in their places, being Lakota in those places, and being in their Universe as Lakota. And she also asked this question of others—non-Lakota, non-Indigenous people—to wake up the human beings in this time of massive human destruction of all life and the life systems of the Earth. She asked because she understood the urgency of the question and the necessity, the urgency, for non-Indigenous human beings to engage with this concept, though these worldviews may not be familiar to them, may not be immediately understood, not commonsense, not embedded within their knowledge systems and cultural practices. As she asked it, she was pushing the human beings to see ourselves—to imagine ourselves—as relatives, as a starting point. Her question reveals to us that it is already known in Lakota philosophy that human beings are relatives, that we are related to all-that-is, but it is in the quality of the relationship, the being of the relationship, the embodiment of the relationship that makes the difference.

Rosalie’s question is a wakeup call that frames human survival from within a Lakota perspective of the world—Lakota epistemologies, ontologies, and ethical principles are asking the world’s human beings—“what does it mean to be a good relative?” (Rosalie Little Thunder, personal communications). It is a Lakota re-imagination of the world. Being a Lakota Elder embedded within Lakota worlds, ethical principles, and oral-relational ways of knowing-being, her perception holds the possibility for radical re-imagination of different possibilities, possibilities for transformative shifts in consciousness, and thus the possibilities for different futures. Centering Indigenous worldviews allows for different questions and ways of questioning, different understandings and ways of understanding that hold the potential to wake us up to the urgent need to see, understand, perceive differently.

Being connected to all of life, as relative, is real within Indigenous worldviews, a collectivity that reaches far beyond the self and the human world. What would it mean to see yourself as relation, inextricably connected not only to the entire human world but to the rest of the universe? What does it mean to be a good relative? When an Elder repeats something, it is time to pay close attention. This question emerged from within Rosalie’s consciousness as a Lakota thinker, where All My Relations, a guiding Lakota ethical principle, calls to the people to live as relation, in relationship to the rest of Life—as a good relative.

Her question asks us to perceive differently, to self-reflect, to look more deeply at what we think we know, and the ways we think we know it—a critical questioning that recognizes the urgency of engagement and calls for a re-thinking of the ways we are in the world. For Indigenous Peoples, these ways of knowing and being are ancient, known as “the way it is.” Lakota knowledges, cultural sensibilities, and ways of knowing-being are articulated in the question itself. Rosalie offers this way of knowing in order to remind, renew, and restore the ways that Indigenous Peoples have always known, always done, always been, long before the onslaught of the multiple violences and brutality of Western ways of knowing-being that targeted these ancient Indigenous cultural knowledge systems and practices for extraction and disappearance.

In her articulation of the question, Rosalie lights a spark, calling for a deepening reflection on the meaning of these critical core belief systems and ways of knowing the world. Her question shifts our perception toward generosity, diversity, humility, connectedness—relatedness—as it requires human beings to shift not only our vantage point, the place from which we act in the world, but also our way of knowing the world and our assumptions about the nature of reality. Her question illuminates the idea of living life as a conversation not focused on the human world but heard and recognized among the living world, interacting with each other since the beginning of time. Rosalie’s question reminds us too that it is they who ask us, who call us, even now, to be relatives, to remember our relationality. Indigenous Peoples recognize that they are calling out to the human beings in ways that they previously have not done—an invitation to wake up, to listen, to pay attention, to enter into relationship, with increasing urgency now. Is it any wonder? Are their lives not hanging in the balance, dependent on what the humans will do, on the choices the human world will make?

Relationality and a Transformation of Consciousness

Indigenous Elders and Beyond-Human Elders are calling out the dire need for attention to this severance from relationality and thinking deeply about how to address the alienation from and violence toward the natural order. Rosalie’s question is a call to action that emerged out of her lived Lakota praxis—to speak to what it is that needs to be most urgently communicated. As Seneca Elder John Mohawk (1990) articulated, in order to pull back from this edge of devastation to the natural world and the planet, we need a transformation of consciousness.

What, then, is relationality? What does it mean to see ourselves as related? Another layer of Rosalie’s question calls for and invites accountability, reciprocity, respect, care, and responsibility to the relationship. To live as a good relative, how are you called to conduct yourself? How does perceiving yourself as a relative to every element of the universe alter your perception of yourself? How does it alter your perception of time and experience—of your generational past, your present, and of the generations yet to come? How might living a reality in which you are known as a relative to all of life shift your perception? How might you relate differently?

What is Rosalie asking? She is asking for us to consider a different way of being, an older, wiser ethic of understanding self, which is to say the self in connection, and the living world in connection to each other, practices that Indigenous Peoples have been living as embodied for millennia. Rosalie is talking about a spiritual reality that is known to Indigenous Peoples intimately, an everyday knowing that informs and shapes every aspect of Indigenous realities and engagement. Indigenous ethical principles, practices, and protocols of relationship—and the responsibility to that relatedness—emerge from particular Places, those lands, beings, elements, energies who are present together, carrying their original instructions of relatedness as a living way of perceiving and participating. How to live as a good relative gives meaning, relevance, and context to those instructions of how to live, of how to conduct yourself in a way that you will make sense to the rest of that particular world that is watching you and waiting.

For Rosalie, this quality of being a relative, a Lakota relational orientation to the world, is recognizable and coherent as each element finds life in each other. Rosalie’s centering orientation was to that Lakota relational universe, and her question reflects that central concern of being recognizable, accountable, and coherent to that universe—being known by that universe as a relative. Her question calls us to reflect more deeply on how to live in places, within the coherence of that particular place and all that is held there—its energies, sacredness, spirits, knowledges, languages, beings—the knowing that is held in that place as living coherence, living systems. Thinking about what it means to be a good relative calls us to reflect more deeply from the standpoint of the beyond-human world, worlds that are waiting for the human beings to come to understand themselves as connected.

Rosalie’s call to action emerged out of her lived Lakota wisdom praxis of relationality, a radical relationality, which is to say, a relationality at the roots, embedded within the lands, beings, spirits, and languages who belong to a particular place, the universe that is that particular place.Footnote 2 This braided thread of Rosalie’s questioning emerged from this coherent, radical relationality, these ways of behaving and conducting oneself, orienting oneself as individual rooted within and inextricable from the collective. These are the relationships that are reflected in the ethical principles, living ancestral memory, ways of knowing-being and perceiving each other, and the deep cultural practices of being present to each other.

Rosalie was a visionary, an Elder who knew and understood her Lakota ways of knowing the universe in the ways of her grandparents and their grandparents, reaching through time and their collective intergenerational experience of memory and knowing of their particular place on Earth, the Lands where their Creator placed them among the spiritual beings, formations, and elements who are meant to be there and who interact with each other there in those places, as nowhere else on Earth—their own spiritual geographies. Indigenous Peoples know their Lands and the beings, energies, and relationships with whom they share their universe and their Original Instructions, as related, from long experience with each other. They exist within a relational, storied matrix, spoken and heard, felt and lived in words and through silences sung, prayed, and envisioned within their own cycles and remembered in the spiritual geographies of their Lands. These are ways of knowing-being that reflect a different way of perceiving the universe—as an interrelated universe of interaction and exchange—and that humans have a place within it that is no more significant or insignificant than any other element. A teaching in radical humility. How to understand this was one thread of Rosalie’s lifework.

Intergenerationality and Finding Life in Each Other

The perception of being relation calls us to hone our capacities to perceive, imagine, and envision intergenerationally, within the universe that is embedded within the very ground of our places, our ancestral homelands. Re-envisioning intergenerational connection is about living within cycles where Ancestors are remembered, and the ways they responded to their world are actively considered, as is what has been handed on to you to carry. Honing that perception, that capacity to envision what their work might be for us to continue, we engage in a quality of relationality that is intergenerational perception and envisioning, which begins with our Ancestors and extends to perceive intergenerational relationships with the rest of Creation and the beyond-human world.

From within cyclical time and an orientation to relationship, the living presence of Ancestors and their experience, knowledge, and wisdom become alive and embodied in an intergenerational ethic of reciprocity—what are our Ancestors asking of us and what is our unfinished work that we will be leaving for future generations. The quality of being a good relative and the self- and intergenerational-reflexivity embedded within Rosalie’s question call us to perceive the intergenerationality of reciprocity and relationship—the intergenerationality of relationality. Re-imagining ourselves as part of intergenerational cycles of relatedness supports us to find life in each other.

Wisdom as Verb: Living Wisdom, Living Wisdom

Wisdom as verb—living wisdom, living wisdom, wisdom as praxis—what does this look like, feel like, sound like, mean? Are we going to continue to center the same Western-dominant epistemological framework that is poisoning us and our world from our hearts and minds outward, to provide us with the “solutions” that we now all so urgently need? Indigenous praxes of embodied wisdom are so often only paid attention to when they are added on to Western knowledge to validate it. There is little recognition of what is being silenced—and the profound, desperate need for living, relational wisdom. Putting our lives in the service of open, clear-heartedness, as related to all-that-is, we re-align ourselves with the natural world and ways of being of the Universe—and our lives begin to take on that shape. We need to find spaces for this older wisdom to emerge, which will spark shifts in perception, so that the human beings are able to transform the ways they relate to the world and to themselves. Rosalie invited, called for, a return to ways of being and ways of being present that are rooted deeply within Lakota ethical principles. She asked people to engage in a more fully developed, deeper, wiser, more humble, more attentive sense of self, one that is grounded within the collective consciousness of relationality.

What Then, Rosalie Asked. What Now?

Rosalie never gave up trying to awaken something deeper, an orientation to relationship, to connectedness. She thought long and deep about how to do this, how to make these ways of knowing that were so implicit to her make sense to people in a society where relationships are so broken as to barely matter, a society built upon its own refusal to allow people to count, to exist, to be present as relative, much less to envision, to imagine, life as relational, or to live as if a relational world mattered.

Rosalie had the belief that Whitestream (Denis, 1997) people and their society needed to hear other ways of knowing, so that they would know that other ways of knowing-being exist. She was committed to giving voice to Lakota ways of knowing the world, in the radical hope that it might awaken the human beings, that they might hear something that would spark differently, engage a different part of their heart, mind, and spirit—and begin to listen differently, pay attention differently. I hope that writing this chapter and sharing it with you, the reader, honors and continues to bring her ways of knowing, her concerns, and her voice to new audiences, to those who would hear her message, her understanding, her perception, and her vision that she so hoped would make an impact and cause a shift in perception. I know that she hoped to engage with others in an older way, that they might begin to realize that their society’s ways of understanding the world might, in fact, be missing something significant. And that the multiple, widespread violences at every level of a society that we see careening wildly out of control are the direct result of histories and choices based in an epistemology that is anti-relational. That has little respect, little care, little time, little need for being relative, for a world that is relational. She invited, in her soft-spoken way, people to listen. To come back to listening again. To listening that could be done differently, in ways that might begin to re-imagine what it means to live as connected, to re-establish caring, ethical relations with the rest of life, to live present to how we interact with the world, to live as related, a good relative indeed.

A Different Epistemology

Different epistemologies. We are in desperate need of a different worldview, a different way of being in and seeing the world. Not a new one, lest the human beings become lulled yet again into believing they must chase a new shiny object, one more distraction. The Western way of knowing is forever looking for “the discovery,” “the exploration,” “the frontier,” “the uncharted territory,” as if no one else has ever been there, seen this before (regardless of the fact that peoples, and multitudes of beings, have lived there, experienced this, since time immemorial). The violence of such a worldview. When life is viewed as an endless resource to be “discovered,” extracted, isolated, engineered, developed, and altered, the inevitable result is violation of Being-ness. It is a worldview that does not allow for—because it does not comprehend—the inherent Being-ness of every part of the natural world.

Relational wisdom emerges from knowledges that have been born out of longevity of experience within places, holding relational instructions that reach back to the beginning of time, in constant, cyclical interaction with each other and all the elements contained within their worlds. In this way, over countless generations, we come to understand the ways we require each other to become fully who we are, to be able to fulfill our promise to our Original Instructions of who we are and who we were meant to be.

Being a Good Relative … and Resistance

I think for Rosalie, asking this question out of the heart of her Lakota ethical, oral, and embodied wisdom that emerged from within her own Elders’ intergenerational wisdom praxis formed part of the core of her resistance and her resilience. Her resistance took many forms, including that quiet assertion of continuing Lakota presence, perception, pedagogies, and practices through Lakota language and philosophy. In asking this question of what it means to be a good relative, from within her Lakota language and knowledge system, she was at the same time resisting settler-colonizing conceptions and definitions of the world, resisting settler-colonizing claims of the right to define and cage the world in their image.

Centering her Lakota epistemologies and ethical principles provided a bedrock of resistance to colonizer conceptions of the world and her existence in it. She drew on this knowledge/knowing as a deep well that nourished her ability to resist ways of knowing that she saw as a brief, violent aberration in relation to the longevity of her Lakota People’s presence. She talked about the Lakota ethical system, where generosity is a core cultural value and practice—and how this became so problematic for her People when in encounter with a Western system that is oriented around greed, accumulation, competition, and individualism. “To be a good relative” for her, her parents, her grandparents, and her great-grandparents, as she would say, meant a generations-long continuity of Lakota resistance to dominator paradigms of living and models of life, to predatory Western capitalist culture that views life as its commons to exploit at will, greed at the expense of any and all; a culture, a disease, that reduces the living world to commodity, that cannot envision beyond its linear, single-use view of the world as disposable. A worldview that cannot—and refuses to—envision a coherent, balanced, integrated, interconnected world that needs each other healthy, whole, connected to each other, and communicating with each other in their own unique ways, in order to exist at all, and certainly to thrive. This central, orienting way of knowing the Universe—oneself in the Universe and one’s People in the Universe—as relation formed the resilient, unshakeable core of her resistance to the ongoing brutality of colonization.

Rosalie’s question on Lakota relationality emerges from within the core of Lakota epistemology and views of the world, ways of knowing-being, and orientations to and relationship within a Lakota Universe, their lands and sacred sites, their language, cultural memory, philosophies and teachings, sacred histories, and ceremonial cycles (Holm et al., 2003). It is an invitation to her People, a welcoming them to return to (re)connect to who they are within their cultural memory and knowing, a particular framing centered within their own Lakota worlds of knowledge and knowing that extends far beyond, and will always elude the reach of, settler-colonizing violences.

Somehow—in ways that she navigated as an Elder—her particularly Lakota question was offered simultaneously as an invitation to others, to non-Lakota peoples, a call from deep within Lakota cultural knowing, to wake up—to listen to an older, wiser, more attuned, culturally skilled, skillful listening, whose orientations toward perception are profound and ancient. She shared this question and call to spiritual activism with the world because she loved the world that much.

Rosalie always circled back to the Lakota foundational philosophy and orientation of relationality through her embodied practice of being in relation, of being a good relative. The teachings she had received from the wisdom praxis of her own parents and grandparents and Elders made her deeply aware of how her People’s traditional knowledge systems, practices, and language formed the core of their resistance and resilience—and would also form the heart center of their resurgence, as it had formed the core of the People’s strength, courage, and resilience since the beginning of time. Part of the large and abundant work of her life was this reminder, this call, to the beauty and the rich abundance of their Lakota language and cultural ways and ethical principles, and the ways these carried the promise of health, healing, wholeness, and resilience held within them.

Relationality and the Future

Elders like Rosalie have been saying for a long time now that the time has come to wake up and accept that the knowledges the Western world has attempted so long to subjugate, to prove as sub-human, pagan, savage, heathen are those that must now be recognized to hold the key to the continued existence of life on this planet. To be a good relative, it is imperative that human beings learn how to listen differently, from different places. It means practicing radical humility and radical listening, becoming better able to perceive what it means to be a good relative. Radical listening with an open heart means listening as a good relative.

What does it mean to embody relationality? I think it means ways of living, walking, breathing, singing, dreaming, comprehending, and perceiving the world that engage with and call upon this quality of Being-ness, this quality of interconnectedness, as one of being in continual interaction and exchange with the universe. This call to relationality suggests an ethical framework that springs from within different, and wholly divergent, worldviews. Indigenous Peoples not only hold on to and carry these ethical frameworks from deep within their epistemologies, they also live them as an intrinsic part of their ways of life, languages, knowledge systems, and ways of knowing-being, spirituality, and a deep richness of cultural practices. These imbue every aspect of life, as these continuities are present in cycles of regeneration.

Closings

Rosalie, her Elders and Ancestors, and generation upon generation of Lakota have been leaning into this question, this central, centering cultural philosophy of what it means to Be a Good Relative since their Creation Story. Within their knowledge of the quality of being in relationship are embedded protocols of relationality—the relational, collective narrative experience of being in ongoing, intergenerational conversation that is being held in the Lakota Universe and the collective remembering of embodying relationship together. Rosalie talked about how Lakota ways of knowing the world are guided by ancestral relationship with the lands and beings of those places, and by the sacred, by ways of knowing that comprehend and hold the capacity to perceive the natural world in its places as ongoing, continually regenerating conversation, a constantly re-emerging invitation to be in relationship. These conversations and relations are held in Places, on Lands, by Original Instructions, ways of being that orient, invite, carry, and call to being in real ways the necessity, the imperative of relationality—whose core, critically, is love.

Indigenous Elders carry the ancestral collective knowledge systems that are the seed of renewal and regeneration for Indigenous communities. They hold a critical place at the nexus between worlds—Ancestors in one world and younger generations in another—carrying the longevity of knowledge ways, resilience in the face of constant flux, and the ongoing reality of transformation. This, I think, is what Rosalie was guiding us toward. A different worldview that understands us as relatives—something fundamental and inherent within not only Lakota language, but within every aspect of a Lakota orientation to the world and the practice of living—relationality as the critical necessity of Being-ness, without which the world does not, cannot, exist.

This is the worldview and lifeworld from which Rosalie spoke and lived her spiritual activism—her spiritual responsibility to be a good relative to all-that-is. Her walk here among those of us who loved her left us way too early—but I am certain that she continues to help us here to continue to learn what it means to be a good relative. I know she is walking over there now with all her Relations, and occupying a special place among them, I am sure, are those she loved so much—her grandfathers, teachers and leaders, the Buffalo Nation. Maybe they will all continue to help us if we gather our hearts and minds and spirits together in a good way, for the benefit of all our relatives and our coming generations.

Verse

Verse All Our Relations. ---- we lay you down deep in earth who has always been your home we lay you down in the soft bed of your mother you so loved we lay you down singing we lay you down there among your relatives your family where your people have lived and walked on since emergence into prairie grass and wind hills of endless song and sky song magpie picks up tossing it to prairie dog runs it over to buffalo passes her to lightning this song they have carried passing gently in the night a bundle wrapped up tight protected from prying hands and eyes of those who refuse and intrude on our knowing of all this of all this of all this we sing now to lay you down we sing now to lift you up we sing now to send you on we sing now to wrap you up gently we lay you down singing as Buffalo they are coming now hooves pounding earth for they know their relative friend warrior who stood up and walked and walked and walked carrying your voice among the humans so they would know who you are so they would know who you were so they would know you as their home they are gathering now there beyond the hill of grass and wind earth shakes with their steps they are coming as we sing their song as we sing you are becoming their song now as we sing you gently into earth to see you this one last time — for Rosalie