Out of the eight interviews and two panels we had, the one interchange or exchange that you had with all of our native friends, Houston, that still rings true with me. is in our film, A Seat at the Table, and the book that came along with that is the one that you had with Winona LaDuke. Many of you know her as having run on the Green Party ticket with Ralph Nader. She's also a spiritual activist, a brilliant writer. She and Houston were speaking about sacred lands, getting back to the land and the earth situation. And at one point, she slowed the cadence of her talk down, and some great pathos came into her voice and she said when we native people are calling for access to our own sacred lands we are not being just nostalgic and sentimental and she says this is what we are being charged with over and over by the dominant culture that we want to go back back to the time of the buffalo back to the time of the of the teepees and she pauses very dramatically and then says

[01:14]

We do not want to go back. We simply want to stay on our spiritual path, a path that was true in the past and is true now. And at that point, Houston reached over. I'll never forget this. You tapped Winona on her knee, and you said, I'm so glad you said that, Winona, because now you're speaking that Houston says that he's been charged over and over in his career. with wanting to go back to some kind of paradise when all the world was religion, the good old days. But for me, this is the most inspiring line in our book, A Seat at the Table, when you say that what you've always been concerned with in your writing is what was true in the past, what will be true in the future... and what is true now, what is timeless outside of time and space. So can you address that a bit, how your work with native people around the world has reinforced this belief that there is something to this notion of timeless truth?

[02:25]

Well, the topic this evening was plates, but the sacred notion of time is eternal and i don't think i want to try to scroll up my mind on eternity if it ever started going why the movie would go and it would be too long for the time but i i'm going to deliberately. I'm not ducking the question. It's just prudence on time. But I want to come back to the Black Hills and where carved in those rocks are those, what, three American presidents? And, you know, to desecrate

[03:32]

cliffs with not even religious figures political American political figures is a desecration and for her to go into that sacred land she has to get a permit well that just shows that highlight the injustice that is still... We're making some headway on it, I think, but it still has a long way to go. How about the idea of mutual relatedness? This is what you said to several of the speakers. Sorry. It was very interesting that for each of the eight speakers that we had, they would begin the interview by saying, first, Houston, I'm happy to be with you, but I want to acknowledge my elders.

[04:49]

place where I came from. It was remarkable. Think how that would change our culture if we said that every time we spoke in public. Thank you for being here, but I want to thank my father, my grandfather, my great-grandmother, my grandmother, and the place where I came from. It was remarkable that each of these speakers went into deep periods of consultation and contemplation with all of the elders before they got permission to speak for their tribe, their clan, and their land. That has stuck with me because of what they call this principle of mutual relatedness, that each of us are related to everybody else and the animal kingdom and the land itself. All right. Now, I think you should have, if there's anyone who wants a chance, You've been very generous, given a good part of your day. Most of you face working tomorrow.

[05:54]

So I'm going to propose that we cut this off in about 15 minutes. But if anyone wishes to ask a question, should they come? Oh, there is a microphone there. This is your microphone. opportunity. Here comes someone. And you can line up if you have questions. And please try to make the questions succinct because Houston's trying to read your lips from the stage. Okay. I don't know how to do that. This has to do with this quality of the sacred that does seem like we've lost in modern life, and also relatedness. And I wonder what you think we can do, given the current lives that we all lead, to create sacred spaces, create the quality of the sacred.

[06:57]

The question has to do with this sacredness of life. And what would you suggest to help us help modern people bring more of the sacred into everyday life. All right. Now, this is off the top of my head. Realize that not only all is all life sacred, and by the way, that doesn't mean, of course, that we don't die, but while we That's a part of the order of things. And Zen Hospice, spinning off from Zen Center, is working on that thing. But while there is life, then we are in a sacred space.

[08:03]

Let me add one more thing. we had a very high Rinpoche, Native American. We had known him for about 10 years, but he didn't come to this country very often, but he was in our living room last week. And someone knowing that he was coming asked us to ask him a question. What is the point of one individual life. And when we put that to Rinpoche, he said the opportunity to develop compassion. And then he added, and that includes compassion

[09:04]

for yourself, because you cannot really experience compassion for others if you dislike yourself and condemn yourself. And, well, that was his answer. Thank you for being here and speaking, both of you. And I wonder if you have any words for someone, and actually a few of us at least, that may find ourselves in a more our cultural paradigm, specifically counseling. And if we were sitting across from a Native American in the role of counselor, what suggestions might you have for such a situation? I have one thought, if I could. Do you recall the interview that we did with Vine Deloria? Yes. One of the great Indian authors of our time, his first and probably most noteworthy book called God Has Read shook up America a great deal in the late 1960s.

[10:12]

And he went on to write 20, 25 books or so. Recently passed away. And it was a privilege to be part of an interview that Houston did with him at his home down in Tucson. And after two days of interviews, the last exchange was quite something because Houston asked him... To the effect, if you could wave a magic wand, Vine, and bring about some kind of changes in Indian country in the near future, what would you do? What would you ask young Native people to do? And Vine, in his irascible self, leaned back like this, took a long puff out of his cigarette, sacred tobacco, of course, and said two things. a return to oratory and a return to ceremony. He said that recently he had been reading some of the speeches of the great chiefs that had been taken down all the way back to the first land negotiations in the 1600s and 1700s because stenography had been invented.

[11:20]

So when the politicians and the cavalry went out to take all the land from the Native Americans, They took stenographers with them. That's why we know word by word what was actually said at these meetings. And so Vine had been reading these astounding speeches from... Tecumseh and many many of the other greats and he says young Indian people should go back and read those because that way they would have a sense of pride that they are as eloquent as any people that have ever stepped on this land and the second thing was a return to ceremony because in his experience and this is Vine talking to Houston when native people try to heal themselves through white rituals they can often get lost So it was his deep conviction that Native people could heal themselves by going back to Native ceremony.

[12:12]

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