Women of the White Buffalo

During the winter months,

two warriors were out east of the Black Hills

looking for buffalo,

when they encountered a beautiful woman

dressed in white buckskin.

One man had impure thoughts about her.

The other recognized her as a sacred being.

The one who had impure thoughts approached her

and thought he could take her and do what he wanted.

But as he reached out for her,

a cloud enveloped them both.

And when the cloud lifted,

the man was lying upon the earth as a skeleton.

At the place where his stomach had been

was a ball of snakes.

She then instructed the other man to return to his village

and prepare a place,

as she was bringing something for the people.

When the village had done what she'd instructed,

it is said that she approached the encampment

and was singing a song that said,

"With visible breath,

I approached this buffalo nation."

The Creator had given the gift of the sacred pipe

to the starving nation

and the White Buffalo Calf Woman told them

to utilize the sacred pipe in all seven of their ceremonies,

as now they had the ability

to speak directly with the Creator.

When she completed her instructions to the people,

it is said that she rolled to the earth several times,

transforming into a mature black female buffalo,

then turned into a red female buffalo,

then into an adolescent yellow female buffalo,

and finally, into a white female buffalo calf.

And then she disappeared.

The reservation is like a third-world country.

A lot of people don't even know we still exist.

So many people have given up,

with the poverty and the depression.

Because of what happened to us years ago

when they first killed off millions of our people,

we're still feeling it to this day.

It's in our genes.

Whether people want to admit it or not, it's there.

I want to say good morning to the relatives listening,

and thank you for welcoming my voice into your home.

Join me in the morning prayer this morning.

Father, Creator, the great spirit...

the four directions and the Mother Earth,

all our ancestor spirits,

the White Buffalo Calf Woman,

all the spirits

that are at the altars of all of our medicine people,

I ask you to be with us today,

the White Buffalo Calf Woman and our...

...our Mother Earth,

our Grandmother Earth.

Thank you for the gift of who we are.

Colonel Pratt coined the term,

"Kill the Indian and save the man."

Pratt sent his sister here.

They have a hall still named after her.

She made this school in the direct image

of that Carlisle Boarding School.

Their whole identity was stripped away.

If you spoke your language, you would be beaten.

So the school was really violent, which is really crazy,

because they're supposed to be nuns and fathers.

To begin with, okay, it was a no-choice thing.

You had to send your kids away

or you went to jail.

You're talking about generations too,

'cause, you know, you've got the first stolen children

put through the boarding school.

Then you get the next generation

who have been separated from their families.

And this was an orchestrated thing

to destroy the Indian or the Native culture.

Very much a planned-out, thought-about thing

on how to disenfranchise the...

...the nuclear families.

In the old days when we were a strong and happy people,

that sacred hoop was unbroken

and people flourished.

In that, the Carlisle experience especially,

and I'm sure the other ones are much the same,

we were being prepared as the next labor,

like the slaves.

Originally, Carlisle was a school for the black people

back then to educate them to be the butlers,

the maids, and whatever else mainstream culture needed.

But that's where the world was broken apart.

That's the word for forcefully teaching things

and that's the boarding school.

A gentle kind way of teaching.

Great-grandmothers.

And that way of life was interrupted

by taking their children away.

In our culture,

the hair is the most important part of who we are.

And so for us, the hair,

the only time we cut our hair

is when somebody dies close to us.

And so when our children were sent to boarding schools,

they cut their hair,

they took their traditional clothes away,

and some of them ran away.

And they ran away to come home to find out who died.

"Who died? Is it Mom? Is it Dad? Who is it?"

Some of them lost their legs,

froze their legs trying to get home.

And some of them died trying to go home.

By now, with many of the non-Indian teachers

that we have in our school systems,

we should have some experts

on how we teach Native children.

We should be the center of excellence and expertise

when it comes to being culturally competent,

and even about our own history and language.

I wanted to come back to the RES to learn.

And then, in me being inspired to learn,

everybody else could learn.

Because I have a perception

of what I think a Native person should know and understand.

And when I came here, I was, like,

really smacked in the face with reality.

Because growing up in the city,

you automatically become a representative of your people,

being Native.

And plus, my name, SunRose IronShell,

it's not like Stacey Smith,

or not like I could blend into places.

So of course, everyone would come up to me all the time.

"Oh, you're Native?

Oh, I didn't know you guys existed anymore."

And that was in the city.

So right away at a young age,

I understood that, "Okay, I'm Lakota,

"and there's no question about it.

"So I have to be an open book for people,

"in educating them,

because the whole system tries to erase us."

The students face this contradiction,

'cause they see us all talk about,

"You need to learn your language,

"you need to know how to be Lakota,

because we're losing it."

We're so caught up in that money and that funding

that everything has to be by state regulations.

And I'm over here saying, "No, no.

"Like, this is Lakota regulations.

"This is our values and our virtues.

And you can fit your state into wherever you need to fit it."

Why do I have to go by all the state laws

and then try to figure out

where I can pinch little pieces of Lakota in?

I always refer to this metaphor of being a unicorn.

And this comes from my experience

of being out in the city

and being that Native individual

that was the first Native that white people saw.

"We didn't know you existed.

Do you live in a teepee?"

And I'm like, "No, I live in a condo.

I drive a car."

Being a unicorn out there,

then here I am, surrounded by unicorns

who don't even realize they're unicorns.

They're few and far between, rare breed.

Helping our people,

learning who they are,

using those things that we still have before we lose them,

you know, that's our responsibility.

Those of us that have the language,

those ceremonies that are important

to our sense of belonging, our spirit name.

That strengthens,

because there's four aspects of who we are:

our mind, our heart, our body, and our spirit.

We excel so much at being white

that we forget those teachings from our culture,

who we are.

And then our children go on without knowing who they are.

And in search for who they are,

they're gonna get into the wrong spirit.

Alcohol, drugs, relationships.

Here, we're at the source

where we got all the grandmas, we got the language speakers,

we have ceremonies,

we have all these beautiful things,

but most of the population and my students

have never been to a ceremony,

have never been to a sweat lodge.

And that was really heartbreaking to me.

I was like, "What? For real?

"You've never to a sweat before?

You don't have your Indian name?"

Someone who's adopted out, who lives in the city,

who has no connections to the land,