Stolen Land || Welcome to Native American Awareness Month 2009

In my mind, what has always been important has been how a human being can connect with the direct power of the mother earth, stuffed with a type of consciousness that is fully informed. In Ojibway culture we sometimes call this type of person an eight-sided character.

I have a sense that eight-sided characters exist in some small but unknown number.

I am the Keeper and Protector of the Four Directions Unity Bundle. It is perhaps the only American Indian Sacred Bundle in the history of the world which contains so many inter-tribal sacred objects.

It contains 18 sacred pipes, from 18 sacred tribal people. It contains eagle feathers, sacred pottery, weavings, carvings, rattles, sacred drums, bones, songs, silences and movements from tribal medicine people, keepers of sacred, protectors of the ancient future. This bundle, as we say, is my only client. This sacred bundle is my life’s work. I am the one who went there and face to face and heart to heart received these sacred promises and objects from American Indian actuals.

I have the eight-sided responsibility to understand what this bundle means, and where it should travel. I have the eight-sided responsibility to remember what the sacred people said to me. I am a Wabeeno.

You are all standing on stolen sacred ground.

You are all standing inside my dreams. Every bilions of you. I am not afraid of you. I am the one who has made my life. I could feel the waiting world. You are the waiting world. the waiting world has made this sacred bundle I carry in their dreams. The Four Directions Unity Bundle is the undreamed, the unsong, the unspoken prayer that rests, waiting, inside your soul.

Notes from Correction Way ceremony, world version. 2009.