The Environment

Reverence for the magnificence of the

environment didn’t come until later in life. The responsibility for

the beauty of it, I didn’t know until my son came along. It was

then that I became connected between generations of people who came

before me, and generations of people who will come after me. It was a

sobering thought.

My disconnection from being a caretaker

of the environment began long before I was born. My upbringing is a

consequence of the boarding school experience of my parents. I had no

sense of being rooted to place, time or circumstance until I was an

adult. It was during my healing and a result of my reconnection to

our Native ways of living that I was reintroduced to the essence of

being amongst the beauty of nature. It was in this realization that

there was a calling for stewardship. It was a deepening of an

understanding of the need to care for the beauty that I am surrounded

by.

Being an acculturated Native, I often

times meet some strange characters of people who love Native culture

and spirituality. They are well-intentioned environmentalists,

typically, they are new age people, wannabe-Natives or grungy

activists. What they all have in common is they talk and supposedly

know about Nativeness. One of those moments stood out so from a

former, potential suitor of mine:

"When I take my shoes off I feel

the vibration of Mother Earth through my body. That energy goes up

through my chakras. I can sense her vibration through my crystals. I

love Native people and their spirituality. Do you want to touch my

medicine bag? You’re cute."

I’m cool with the vibrational frequency

that you’re feeling without your shoes on but it’s a major turn-off

when you want to talk about spiritual matters when we first meet. I

don’t know you like that. Also, if we meet in a bar, then – no, I

don’t want to touch your medicine bag. Nope. Here’s some advice, take

a shower cause your funk is devastating me, your hair is stringy and

eat something cause you are awfully thin.

My connection to the environment began

with me staring out of my window at the rolling reservation prairie.

I’d daydream about adventures, the world and people different than

me. I learned about the exotic places in the world from books. I

wanted to discover those places, I wanted to meet those fascinating

people. I wanted to do all of it so I could compare how similar they

were to what I created in my mind.

Here are some steps to helping the

environment.

1. Walk more, drive less.

2. Use cloth grocery bags.

3. Buy Recycled/Recyclable Goods.

4. Compost.

5. Use less Water.

6. Plant a tree.

7. Plant a garden.

8. Plant a garden.

9. Don’t liter.

10. Teach your children to care for the

environment.

 The river is the place where I go to

when I want to think, to pray, to reconcile my desires and to release

some pent up emotional baggage. It is there as I watch the water

glisten, listen to the water crash along the river banks and feel the

cool breeze hug my body that I feel the release. My body calms. My

mind finds a smooth rhythm. The noises in my mind quiet. It is in

that moment that I began to recognize how my life is a brief moment

in the environment. The world will continue on long after I’m gone.

I recently went home to the Rez for a

funeral. Over the years, my life in the city has gotten busier and

more rooted, so the opportunity to go home is not there. When I first

left the reservation, I would go home monthly. Over time, it was a

several times a year then once every other year. Now, I go home to

bury family. Yet, the reservation where I was born and I was raised

still calls to me. I yearn for it.

Home is now Minnesota. It has been my

home now for a few decades. Being a plains Native, I’ve learned the

comfort of the trees, the appreciation of lakes, of the frigid cold,

of the beautiful spring, the colors of the fall and the moments of

summer. What I thought when I moved here in 1994 was going to be for

a few years became a love affair with this land that continues.

What I’ve come to know about the

environment is: there is a rhythm to nature. We’ve been listening

to it for many generations. We know the stars. We know the earth. We

know the animals. We know the wind. We know the weather. We sense the

sacredness of everything around us. My hope is that you can sense it

too.