Chief Arvol
Looking Horse, 19th generation
Keeper of the
Sacred White Buffalo Calf
Pipe. The leader of the
Lakota Dakota Nakota Oyate, the great
Sioux nation, is a man with a vision.
A
Great Urgency: To
All World Religious and
Spiritual Leaders
My
Relatives,
Time has come to speak to the hearts of our Nations and their Leaders. I ask you this from the bottom of my heart, to come together from the
Spirit of your Nations in prayer.
We, from the heart of
Turtle Island, have a great message for the
World; we are guided to speak from all the
White Animals showing their sacred color, which have been signs for us to pray for the sacred life of all things.
The dangers we are faced with at this time are not of spirit, mistakes that we cannot afford to continue to make.
I asked, as Spiritual Leaders, that we join together, united in prayer with the whole of our
Global Communities. My concern is these serious issues will continue to worsen, as a domino effect that our
Ancestors have warned us of in their Prophecies.
I know in my heart there are millions of people that feel our united prayers for the sake of our Grandmother
Earth are long overdue.
I believe we as Spiritual people must gather ourselves and focus our thoughts and prayers to allow the healing of the many wounds that have been inflicted on the Earth.
As we honor the
Cycle of Life, let us call for
Prayer circles globally to assist in healing Grandmother Earth (our Unc¹I Maka), and that we may also seek to live in harmony, as we make the choice to change the destructive path we are on.
As we pray, we will fully understand that we are all connected. And that what we create can have lasting effects on all life.
So let us unite spiritually,
All Nations, All Faiths, One Prayer. Along with this immediate effort, I also ask to please remember
World Peace and Prayer Day/ Honoring
Sacred Sites day.
Whether it is a natural site, a temple, a church, a synagogue or just your own sacred space, let us make a prayer for all life, for good decision making by our Nations, for our children¹s future and well-being, and the generations to come.
Onipikte (that we shall live),
Chief Arvol Looking Horse sees a great danger threatening "Grandmother Earth" and a great hope for restoring her wholeness. So he is calling all nations to prayer of any kind in an effort to return the planet to balance, the people to spirit. I asked him why this path is the right path to take.
"
A man or a woman without spirit is very dangerous," Looking Horse explained in a recent phone interview. According to this Sioux chief, the absence of spirit is causing suffering everywhere. "
We are in a time of survival," he said. "But we don't want to believe it because we have forgotten our spirits. We have forgotten that Grandmother Earth has a spirit."
Disconnected souls are hurting others without even knowing they are hurting others." Those being hurt include animals, trees and waterways.
The Sioux have an inclusive worldview, but it was not shared by the transplanted
Europeans who undertook genocide on
Indian land, culminating in the
Wounded Knee massacre of 1890. That final brutality broke the "hoop" binding
Indians together; however, Sioux prophecy foretold that in a hundred years the people would be reunited.
Although surviving tribe members and their descendants were stripped of religious freedoms (returned to them only 32 year ago by the
U.S. government), the rituals were kept and the prophecy not forgotten. So the Sioux nations set out on horseback to "mend the broken hoop" of their nation in
1986 at a sacred site known to non-Indians as
Devils Tower or the Great
Horn Butte; their ritual went on for four years and concluded in
1990,
100 years after
Wounded Knee.
During the course of that long ritual, Looking Horse was surprised by a vision that came to him of
peace and unity that included not only the Indian nations but all the nations of the world, each gathering with ritual plants around sacred fires on every continent. The Sioux chief felt called to oversee a much broader mending. But who was going to listen even to the chief of a people largely ignored in the country where they lived?
"
It's everyday life for us that we hold Grandmother Earth sacred, we hold the trees and the plants, everything has a spirit. We need people to be really respectful for each other.
The Great Spirit put us here all together. If we're going to survive, we need to have spirit and compassion. We're asking people to go to their sacred places or sacred spaces to pray."
"
Sioux Indian chief calls all nations to action on June 21" by Juliane
Poirier
Music gifted by
Tony Gerber
http://cypressrosewood.com/tonygerber/
For more videos like this, please visit www.culturecollective.org.
Learn more about Arvol Lookinghorse at: www.wolakota.org
Learn more about White Buffalo Day at: www.whitebuffalochildren.org
- published: 27 Aug 2010
- views: 242460