U.S. Disaster Relief

Dear Friends,

My name is Ora Abel-Russell and I'm writing today as the President of One World In Concert and a concerned citizen. My dear friends on the Eagle Butte Cheyenne River reservation have been brutally hit by severe snowstorms. PLEASE READ BELOW! They’ve always needed our help, now their need is critically dire. PLEASE, please take the time to make a donation using the donate button provided. Every single penny will go directly to the Chairman’s Office at Eagle Butte.

January 27, 2010


DISASTER DECLARED ON THE CHEYENNE RIVER SIOUX INDIAN RESERVATION IN SOUTH DAKOTA


Severe Ice Storms and Freezing Temperatures Have Knocked Down 3,000 Utility Poles - Tribal Residents Have Been without Electricity, Heat, and Running Water for Six Days
 
 


The Chairman of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe has declared a state of emergency in central South Dakota, an Indian reservation approximately the size of Connecticut with nearly 15,000 Tribal members. The Tribe is still awaiting a Presidential disaster declaration. 
 


Days of ice storms and strong winds have downed over 3,000 utility poles across the reservation. Thousands of already impoverished tribal residents have been without electricity or heat for five days, with wind chill factors well below zero. Experts estimate it may be as long as a month before all areas have electricity restored.
 


“Making matters much worse” said Tribal Chairman Joe Brings Plenty, “the loss of electricity has also knocked out the Reservation’s aging water system. We have no running water on the entire Reservation, it is also affecting off Reservation communities such Faith, whose water is supplied from pipes running through the Reservation.” 
 


The Tribe is working hard to bring families in out of the cold into shelters. The South Dakota National Guard, the State’s Department of Public Safety as well as the Army Corps of Engineers have come to the reservation and supplied some emergency generators. The Tribe would especially like to thank Wal-Mart for providing emergency food and supplies, and the Navajo Nation foe sending up a tribal utility crew to help with the downed electrical lines.
 


However, much more assistance is still needed. No one facility can host a shelter large enough for all the Tribal residents; additional generators are needed to set up additional shelters. The Tribe’s one and only grocery store has lost all its perishables, additional food is needed. And dialysis patients have had to be evacuated to Rapid City.
 


As electricity is restored and immediate safety and survival needs are met, the Chairman worries perhaps the most about the long term effects of having lost their water system in this crisis. The water intake and distribution system has already been at capacity for decades. In addition to the severe health and safety issues the Tribe now faces, it remains one of the biggest impediments to economic development on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation. “For years we have had a complete ban on any new housing or business building because we don’t have the water infrastructure to support it. This crisis has exacerbated an already impossible situation.” 
 


The Chairman further stated “We have been trying to get this water system replaced for decades. It is a public shame for any community in America to be without safe drinking water. I hope our friends in Washington, DC are listening; this is a life and death situation here. Help us protect our families, and help us create jobs and open up our stifled economy for tomorrow. ”


May the creator keep safe my people.

For additional information:

Joe Brings Plenty, Tribal Chairman (605)964-4155
Robin Lebeau, Incident Commander (605)964-7711 or 964-7712

P.O. Box 590
Eagle Butte, SD 57625
(605)964-4151 (Fax)

To donate supplies to the Tribe: please contact Stacy LeCompte at Wakpa Sica, United Sioux Tribes, Inc. (605)280-8588.

To wire funds: United Bankers Bank, Bloomington, MN
Direct to: United Bkrs Bloomington ABA # 091 001 322
Beneficiary Bank: Account Number 250 3373; State Bank of Eagle Butte, Eagle Butte, SD 57625
Beneficiary or Final Credit: Account Holder @ UBB Customers Bank
for Account Holder: Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe CRST 2010 Disaster, Account Number 103173
For questions regarding wiring instructions, please contact Wiring Dept. at (605)964-3411

Sound Healing Event

SOUND HEALING EVENT
SESSION ONE: ORIGINAL CHILD*

WHAT IT DID FOR ME: When a near death event left me paralyzed from the waist down and Western medicine offered me no options I explored possibilities that could transform my immediate condition to a more vital reality. Sound healing, shiatsu, acupuncture, amma therapy [Korean deep tissue message], meditation, and Chinese herbology offered me encouraging options. I closed my successful New York City advertising agency and began extensive studies in Amma with Tina Sohn, Shiatsu with Master Ohashi, Acutonics [sound healing] with Donna Carey and Ellen Franklin founders of Acutonics, and sound-spirit meditation with Hamza El Din and Pir Vilayat Inayat Kahn. At each stage of discovery these subtle systems penetrated my confined condition gradually restoring my mobility and my independence.

HOW IT WORKS: The therapy I found most dramatic and restorative is Sound Healing which is why I’ve spent the last 10 years demonstrating in a gentle yet persuasive way how these powerful vibrational applications operate and successfully correct unbalanced conditions in my patients. Using planetary tuning forks, Tibetan bowls, bells and drums, I apply their soothing and strengthening waveform signatures to impact the body similarly. They lower physical resistance and mental barriers educating the system to make this association effective in its activities throughout the day into sleep.

SUCCESSIVE IMPROVEMENTS: The effects are cumulative. The first session titled Original Child* sets you in the right direction/vibration to go about fulfilling it. Since a harmonized system needs discord to cause motion and progress, the initial installation will lose emphasis until a second session restores the memory of the interrupted activity advancing its proper condition. By the third session your physical state has rhythmically changed. Blind habits have greater difficulty suppressing upward tendencies of one’s nature.

Each session lasts an hour, and each session’s flow will gradually bring seemingly unconnected mental and physical aspects of daily events into harmonious synchronicity. Each individual according to their degree of tendency will activate capacities and powers distinctly their own.

Date: Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Time: 7:00-8:00 p.m.
Location: Sintir [Restaurant] 424 E. 9th St. (near First Ave.) New York, NY 10009
See Map | Subway Directions

Minimum donation [tax deductible] $35.00 per person
Reservations to be paid in advance by check:
One World In Concert, Inc. 527 East 72nd Street, Suite 2A, New York, NY 10021

- or - click here to donate online at One World In Concert.com

Seating is limited. Session is kept small and intimate.
Please RSVP ASAP! [Email: info(at)oneworldinconcert(dot)com]

Mascot Musketears

The University of North Dakota staff and student raucous debate over the use of “fighting Sioux” as mascot name of its sports teams is akin to the oft-told folktale about the five blind men trying to lead the equally blind elephant out of the jungle…getting nowhere without outside help.

But before we specifically define the origin of the word “Sioux”, other mascot names on the same level of misunderstanding should be noted briefly here. Because each culture of the world had their braves, warriors, and chiefs, democracy requires that we honor each in rotation to be fair. One year would feature the Mediterranean and southern Asian cultures by wearing a turban at the football games for a softer bump-and-grind; another year would honor the African culture by wearing a clip-on replica of a gold nose ring as the sole uniform required; another time would headline the European culture by wearing a peruke wig to cover up the baldness in some players or to befuddle the batter in the pitcher’s windup in the baseball games. And a hauberk being too awkward for a complete football uniform, rather a Scots Highlander kilt and sporran would do well with a Viking metal headgear. In this way each culture would be honored fairly and enormously.

Now to reconsider “Sioux” today is to review language barriers of the last century and earlier. Commonplace but complex, Lakota speakers did not understand English and conversely so that at first contact in the latter 1800’s only sign language was used.

Since then many haphazard down-to-earth translations have been used where names were thrown about in great numbers in great error. For instance in other related areas, we know enough now to discard Chippewa and Navaho as misnomers and in its stead the inestimable Anishinabi and Dineh respectively have stepped forward.

In the meantime the aforementioned language bar is being overcome with many students of the Lakota and English languages. Many dictionaries and even a few grammar books are being published: The Lkaota-English Dictionary of 1983 compiled by Rev. Eugene Buechel S.J. and the Rev. Paul Manhart, S.J. being the most widely-circulated. Also the scientific 41-letter Lakota alphabet is now in print since 1982 to cover precisely every unique sound spoken in the language. Of no other alphabet in the world can this exactness be ascribed except in Lakota. However, it is still true today that the language barrier is real as in the 1800’s. An English-only speaker and writer does not understand Lakota so that only the bilingually-fluent Lakota and English speaker is qualified to do translations today. One might as well throw away everything written and spoken in English-only about matters Lakota before 2000 and start anew. Lakota fluency requires its words be brought out to the foreground so its meanings may emerge as faithfully as possible. Most English-only speakers and writers do not do this thus their free-flowing conjecture. Therefore Lakota fluency is a necessity especially when translating original terms and definitions. Here an oversight worth pointing out is that Si Tanka was a nickname and that Hehaka Gleska-Spotted Elk is his formal name. In this the Cheyenne River community College is playing the game of them down-playing us by downgrading ourselves-what brainwashing we’ve been through!

Finally though, to recapture the prime meaning of the derivative word “Sioux” is to stay within its denotations at the morpheme level as much as possible. The prevaricated “Sioux” had been roughly traced to the French and/or a Chippewa term in the past. Be that as it may, it is not the French nor the Chippewa under discussion herein. “Sioux” as spelled is not an original word in Lakota although soo and su are other spellings of the same sounds, the latter spelling having some significance in the Lakota. But su is nearly always used with other qualifying words as in iwoju su or garden seeds. Still the very first European arrivals into the Lakota territory were uninhibited and boisterous given to downgrading everything in front of them.

Just along those lines the Europeans latched onto the diminutive su of the full noun susu which means the penis in the Lakota. And so in their initial approach, the European idea was to diminish the Lakota by naming them as half-penises. Then since the Lakota did not understand the spelling “Sioux” they did not see or know the full impact of the meaning “Sioux” for well over a century. Part of that 100-year span was the time of the forbidden conversations in Lakota.

Except now the wordplay of English vis-à-vis Lakota becoming familiar to the Lakota it is the right time to change these obscene errors in translations of who is whom, and other misinterpretations.

In the legal terms when all is said and done, the misnomer “Sioux” goes against the intent of the Draft of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous peoples, since adopted by the United Nations General Assembly by Resolution 61/295 on September 13, 2007. In the draft United Nations document, indigenous means original, native peoples of each continental area on Grandmother Earth. Here, quoting from the United Nations Draft Declaration at part I, article 2: “Indigenous individuals and peoples are free and equal to all other individuals and peoples in dignity and rights, and have the right to be free from any kind of adverse discrimination, in particular that based on their indigenous origin or identity.” And at part II, Article 7: “indigenous peoples have the collective and individual right not to be subjected to ethnocide and cultural genocide, including prevention of and redress for, (at subpart (e): Any form of propaganda directed against them.”

In this linguistic review of proper names, “Sioux” was and still is the first deception and fraud committed because of bilingual ineptitude mainly by the United States Government since both the Treaties of Peace of 1851 and 1868 were written in English under questionable circumstances. This historical error continues in the naming of several reservations in South Dakota as Rosebud-Pine Ridge-Cheyenne River-Standing Rock “Sioux” tribes. In truth they are properly: Sicangu Lakota, Oglala Lakota, Wakpa washte Lakota, Hunkpapa Lakota respectively of the Peta Sakowin of the Titunwun Lakota or Lakota Nation.

In the subject of mascot nicknames, what irony that places for enjoyment of sportsmanship, for higher learning, and other ideals instead becomes places of gross and unrefined ignorance of an elemental area as proper names.

Wicahpi Wanjila-Leroy C. Curley
January 15, 2010

Lakota Values

Wicohan Wankatuya are the valued high standards of behaviour expected of everyone in the tiospaye and the oyate, extended family and nation. These values and virtues are there to prevent chaos in the community and the nation and the world.

Waunsila is to have compassion, kindness, generosity, sympathy.

Wocekiye are the prayers to Tankasila individually as well as congregationally.

Wowacintanka is respect, honor, politeness.

Woohola is respect, politeness, reverence.

Wacantognaka is affection, to like, to love, compassion.

Woohitika is bravery, courage, hardiness.

Wakokipesni is courage, unafraid.

Woksape is wisdom, philosophy.

Wolakota is the continuous process of making peace in the world.

Wacinkiciyapi is trust in each other.
And thereby, a Lakota man, women, or youth walks confidently in the nation and community, especially if he or she knows the discipline of moral laws. In the language of the Lakota,

Woanapte means prohibitions and restrictions, and these come from enduring spiritual, religious understanding of the Lakota Way.

Owakankan sniyo means not to lie.

Waasin sniyo means do not covet.

Wamanu sniyo means do not steal.

Mnisawitko woyatke-sniyo means do not abuse alcohol.

Wacaniye sniyo means do no violence against women.

Tiwicakte sniyo means do not kill also icikte sniyo = no suicide.

The above listing is not exhaustive to say the least but they are the most important ones for the moment.

Wicahpi Wanjila-Leroy C. Curley
Dec. 28th 2009