 If you enjoy watching Common Ground online, please consider making a tax-deductible donation at lptv.org. Common Ground is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money from the vote of the people November 4th, 2008. My name is Michael Muirz, and I have written a book about the words and teachings of Larry Stillday, whose Indian name was Gitchi Maingen, which means Big Wolf. He was a teacher, a healer, and a spiritual and cultural advisor for the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians from the community of Obashing, or as many people know it better as, Ponima. The title of the book is Road to Ponima, and the subtitle is The Teachings of Larry Stillday. Well, I've been working for Red Lake as a public relations person for just over 20 years, and about six or seven years ago I met a fellow by the name of Larry Stillday, who was a cultural and spiritual elder leader in the Red Lake Reservation. He'd been gone for many years and then came back, and his family were spiritual leaders at Red Lake from Ponima, where most of them come from. And he had a philosophy about him that I found unusual in the sense that he wasn't talking to just Indians. He was talking to whites out of the colors of the medicine wheel, red, yellow, black, and white. And that struck me as unusual. I think that it probably had something to do with the time that he spent in Vietnam. He was in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. He would be now 72 years old if he was still alive. He also went through a period of, I'm not speaking out of school here, he was also, I went through a period of alcoholism. Spent some time in Louisiana, married to Louisiana Belle, moved back home and started studying under a former spiritual leader, Tommy, Tom Stillday, who was a, I believe, an uncle of his. And as Tommy started getting sick, he would ask Larry to take over his cultural-spiritual duties. For an example, Pow House is where he first started out. He just had this different way. He was a teacher somehow. He was more than just a person to give advice on cultural and spiritual things. He was a teacher and a healer. The first time that I recall noticing something really different about him and his approach to teaching, he had what he called a well-briety event, which is a way of approaching alcohol recovery, addictive recovery. And he had this well-briety event down at the waterfront here in Bemidji, or as he would say, Bemidji Gamag. He also got the mayor at the time to sign a proclamation, making that particular day well-briety day in Bemidji. And he invited everybody to come, and it didn't matter what color, white or red or black or brown or yellow, you know, please come to this. It seemed unusual because I don't recall ever having an Indian event in Bemidji before that. I never recall it, anyway. So I was attracted to that, and so I started following him around because with my job as a public relations person, it was my job to attend many of these events that he would be the spiritual and cultural advisor for. And then he would say these things that were almost poetic, chief Seattle-like, you know? People are familiar with the words of chief Seattle. And there was a poetry about them. He had a way of forming an argument that built up and also the way he chose his words. Unlike me, who has a tendency to be a little chatty, he would get his point across in just a couple of sentences. It was really impressive. I can think of one time we were out at the Panema Roundhouse, and we've been doing youth camps for cultural and language out there, and it's way in the backwoods of Panema at a very special sacred place. After this thing was over, there's 50, 60 rambunctious kids between the ages of all 6 and 12 or 13. And at the end of this thing, he started to speak and the kids just quieted. It was just amazing. And he lectured the elders there, the older people, the language people and the elders. And he said, quit teaching these kids that they've lost something. They haven't lost anything. Their culture and their language is contained in the land. I don't know, you just said those kinds of things that we haven't lost anything. Nobody is coming across the sea anymore to hurt your children. We need to rediscover who ourselves in order to heal. And you talk about balance in your life, the emotional and mental and spiritual and physical, saying they're integrated, they're all one. And in order to be a successful human being, you have to balance all those aspects of your life. If I claim this property here as my land, if I claim this as my land, it seems to me that I also claim its history. And there's so many people in the city of Bemidji that think that history started in Bemidji in 1895. And the people in Minnesota think that history started in 1858. And the United States thinks that history started in 1976 and the pilgrims before them, and Columbus, good lord, before them, that that's when history began. But there were people here for thousands and thousands of years and they had a culture and they had a language, and I might add that the Ojibwe language is probably one of the most complex languages in the world. You can conjugate verbs 64 times, 128 times you can conjugate verbs. It's just incredible the language. I don't expect to ever learn it, but I try. But anyway, if we claim this as our land, then we also claim its history, all of its history. And if we claim that history, I think that we also should respect and maybe even celebrate the culture of the indigenous peoples of this land. They've lived here. They know where the spirit is of this land. If land is related to nature and nature to God, then they've got something to teach us about this place that we live and the sacred spots. And they've got things to teach us about the animals and the plants and they do. I mean, there's medicines, these plants, that a lot of the medicine people don't want to share with us and one of the reasons why they don't want to is they're afraid that Santa's going to come along and put a darn patent on it, you know, or something. So, I don't know, I think they've got a lot, there's a lot to teach and that's what my approach is with the book is that he's talking almost like a psychologist, kind of psychology and spirituality kind of mixed in together. I think it's a really good message that he puts out there. It's not only these, you know, the four aspects of your life need to be balanced but he uses the medicine wheel, which is, there's four quadrants and very deep, many, many layers, he used that to teach. He turned 70 years old on the 14th of May, 2014 and he died on the 20th, six days later and then he had another one of his healing lodges scheduled for the 10th of June. Very much looking forward to that but it never happened. One of the most surprising things that happened when I started gathering all my material that I had on Larry, all his words and teachings, is that I ran across something that doesn't surprise me that I did at all, is I asked him at an earlier day three or four years before he died when I first started realizing what a great teacher he was, is I asked him, can I write about this? You know, because for an example, you don't shoot pictures during spiritual ceremonies on reservations with Indian people. So I wanted to ask, can I write about this? You know, can I write about your teachings which many of them are very cultured, some of them spiritual, can I write about this? And he wrote me back and he said, well, you know, if you think this will help people, go right ahead. And then I sent him three things that I had written about Ojibwe culture. And he wrote back and he said, wow, I've never read those before. I can't quote him exactly but he was, he said words to the effect that he really liked it and he thanked me for being the messenger of the teachings. So when I found that, I thought, well, hey, I've got, I can do this. I've got his permission, you know? And I kind of felt like I did, I could almost feel it, and that's in the forward. One of the biggest problems I've had was finding all this information that I had on him. I had emails from him. I had the stories that I'd written about him. I'd just taken notes. Sometimes he'd start talking about the wolf or something. When the wolf unstarted, he'd start talking about the wolf. And I'd start writing and finally I bought myself a tape recorder because he'd say these far-off things. I asked his wife one time, does he talk like this at home? She said, no, he just seems to flow from him when the time comes, when the time is right. He's just a very impressive person. He touched a lot of people, touched many more people than I'd ever imagined. But I had to put it together and one of the other things, probably half the book, was made up of PowerPoint teachings. What Larry did was he took these teachings, and this includes the teachings of the seven grandfathers, which is seven virtues that he would talk about and each is represented by an animal, and then of course balance in all parts of your life. Bringing that all together and then deciding how it ought to work together was a very, not tedious, because I found myself learning. I was feeling bad because he was gone and I wasn't being taught anymore. But as I went through these PowerPoints and all these stories that I'd written about him and all the stories that I found about him and I even found some film that I transcribed. KTCA did, he was in the language revitalization, revitalization that KTCA did out of the Twin Cities public television. So I transcribed that as well. All putting that all together took me hours and hundreds of hours, I'm sure. I didn't try to document how long, but it took me a year of fairly regular working on it. When the book comes out, folks would like to pick it up and read it. It was done by a local publisher called Riverfeet Press. He's got a Facebook page, he's also got a web page, and if you just put Riverfeet Press in your search engine, it'll come up. But it'll also be available on Kindle. It'll also be available from Amazon and there'll be various bookstores that this publisher has got here in the city of Bemidji and actually all across northern Minnesota that handle his books. I see importance in the teachings that he had and I see it even more now that he's gone which is what happens oftentimes is you realize, oh wow, this guy was really a great teacher and you knew he was a good teacher at the time but when he's gone you realize, oh wow and I'm hoping that people will get something out of it and make a better world. Little by little we all do our little part.