 The earth has a heart, and her heart beats. For Lakota people, we say that's the heart of everything that is. When the universe was created, all of the universe was given a song, and each piece of the universe holds a piece of that song, but the entire song is only in the black hills. And when we go there and we perform our ceremonies, we revitalize the beating of the heart. We delighted in the workings of the natural world. Nature was perfect in its complexity, its beauty and terror. We saw ourselves actively involved with the process of living. This land wasn't just a wild land where we went from plant to plant and ate where we could. In fact, it was a very well-managed environmental system. The research is proving our oral traditions that all of this area burned every ten years, and that over a hundred-year period, the whole place was controlled by fire. And if you look at the amount of buffalo that the Great Plains supported three hundred years ago, five hundred years ago, it's more than the number of cattle that can survive with haying and with planted food. And so in fact, it was a highly-managed environment that we lived on. All of our teachings of relationship go back to the initial relationship with the earth. That the earth has four children. And of the two-legged, she has the bear and humans. And so we not only have to behave responsibly with each other, but also with all the things that live, because they too are people, and they have a right to live, and they have a right to a good life, and we have to treat them respectfully. All our relations shared our origins, and they were our lifeline to survival. We observed them and emulated them, honored them and praised them. Their flesh became our flesh. Their spirit became our spirit. Roles and responsibilities within our daily lives are specifically defined. Rules of adherence were strict. Enormous value was placed on human life. Some people have roles as teachers. Some people have roles as artists. Some people had a responsibility to shut up and listen. And so we have some people who very seldom talk, and they keep our histories. We select young children who have arid memory, photographic memory for what they hear. These children are located at around age four or five. They're tested. Then they're taught the story by rote. And so they're like tape recorders. They're a library. And then we have other people that are taught how to interpret that story. And that training begins later at maybe age 11. They begin learning the symbolism. Why does something mean this? So we say that when you really know the story, you can take it from the origin legend, from Otchokahekta, from the time of different motion. Kota people, we have stories of when each society was brought into our people. And they followed the Kid Fox society, the trochala. The Kid Fox is low-moving. It makes an attack. It hunts in a pack. It knows when to fall back and regroup. Mean little animals. So our trochala society based themselves around that. They were the war leaders. And then we have the Choka, the Badger. And the Badger because it knows how to go under. Those people were responsible for food caches. We had the Shultkayoha, the bare lance owners. And those people were the ones who made the decision to sacrifice themselves so the rest of the camp could get away. Through the centuries, our ancestors developed concepts and customs of government and justice. Founded on the notions that leaders were in positions of responsibility, not power, and that each and every voice must be heard. Councils representing all aspects of our society made decisions of a political or social nature. Never forgetting the premise that no individual was greater or more important than the whole. This is the foundation for today's tribal governments. If you did something in Lakota society, you went on the hunt before it was time to go. You were told once, they come and slash your teepee, beat you up. The next time you did it, you were dead. Because the life of all the people was more important than the life of one person. The words of wisdom, of myth and legend often came to us to light the way in times of darkness. Sweet medicine was such a profit for the Cheyennes. These ceremonies, it's wakan. Taku wakan is something sacred. It's a mystery. All you have to do is be there, and the lessons will come on its own. It's going to be hard for the younger, for my generation, the seventh generation to hold on to these, our wallakot, to hold on to our way of living because of money, because of drugs, because of alcohol, because of jealousy, hatred, all because of these, all these different things that are diseases of the mind. The future is yet to come. The future began when we leave this earth. That's when the future began. This is just a stopping point. While you're stuck here, I don't know how you get out. There is life after death. There is life. And that's what I see, and that's what I'm looking forward to. Life after death. The end of this life, we look forward for a journey. There's so many heavens up there, a lot of places to travel. The contamination becomes, pollution begins in the mind. So that's why the whole world is in the turmoil. We totally refuse that this is to God's love power. We totally deny it. Just me. I have a wisdom. I have a knowledge. I have a power. I have a gift. This is me. I think the best thing to look at is look at the origin legends of the Judeo-Christian people. You have an origin legend that says that Adam and Eve were banished onto earth, and earth is an enemy. And you have native people, Lakota people in particular, who say, the earth is my mother. And we all have to live together as a family. And those are very, very opposed viewpoints from one who says, this is my mother to the other that says, this is a place of banishment. And you don't really have to care for it because someday you're going back to paradise when you complete your banishment. And I think those attitudes are what came into play when you had Western encroachment and the wars of the 1800s, the whole uprooting of native people.