i'm going to introduce those of us who went to the gathering and are going to share this evening to my right is lorna this is joe susan of indigenous people have fire as their sacred item you know the wheat chills the each ollie said this soon as if they're travelling as soon as they start they start a fire so for native americans and other indigenous people ceremony is is started with the sacred fire and so the grandmothers met on monday morning at sunrise with the fire keeper and started the sacred fire in a sacred way and because the whole it was from sunday from monday morning til sunday night so it was a whole week of the sacred fire so that made us in sacred space the whole time with that sacred fire going and we went sunday night after the fire was out and collected ash which is allowable we could touch it until after the fire was out in the morning each grandmother had one grandmother did a ceremony three hours long and then one in the afternoon and one in the evening and each time they would they would first go in to it was like it was like a medicine wheel it was like twenty seven stones i think it was in two circles and there was a it was open to the east just like a medicine wheel would and they'd walk in and they do all the directions and they do they do their own particular ceremony to their advantage of culture in that fire and then they would bring that out and and when that was down time we were allowed to go into that circle give thanks to that fire or use it to cleanse yourself with or whatever and at the end when the fire was was going out at the end of the ceremony we were the with told us that we were welcome to go and take some of the ash and take that out with us and that carried what had gone on that weekend in in the in the ash wheel or circle around it was in the center of the big open power grounds that was surrounded by a circular covered bleachers so it was all circular the fire was in the very middle so the question was  the sweat lodges were the stones in the sacred fire or their own fire they were in their own fire yeah yeah it was mix wets women and their women have everybody had to be closed yeah i'd have his address on below your knees going i wouldn't think more than six they were pretty small there were six of them and they but only three of them would be functioning at one time twice a day a man was talking and he was sharing how i didn't really see i'm i don't know i'm going to say he's fifty i don't know how old he was but he was sharing how he all of his life had had so much anger hatred of the white man for his life for what we did to them and he said about two years ago he came upon this realisation the oppressor is just as traumatized as the oppressed and when he had that realisation it totally lightened his attitude towards the white man is like oh you know even though you were chasing and killing my ancestors you were being traumatized as well i mean it's not easy to chase and kill someone it's not you know it's not human nature that's not the divine being that we are doesn't hunt and kill humans and that is that and somebody came up to me today and said there's a woman here in this audience who i want you to meet and  went in matter and he said and she's real i wanted to make sure she was real before i brought her to you and she's the real thing i would like to introduce you to  great niece and she used it he said and here she is and it gave her name and she stands up and she says i apologize for my uncle's wrongdoing she broke it was it was really amazing what i can add to it is that she didn't know she didn't know where she was going when she took the trip with her sister or friend she didn't realize that she would be on cheyenne land she didn't realize so it was it was it was it was a part of what was to happen there in the healing it wasn't her intention to go there with lorna diana myself and joe who camp together we went to little big horn and we took sacred ass from the sacred fire the fire was started sunrise sunday morning and the fire keeper kept the fire going all the way until sunday sunset and he was a lookout a man and so we gathered sacred ash which is what is on the table which if you have a container with you you are welcome to take some home and we went there and we had our sacred ash with us and the first place we went to was to the the grave site of my ancestors were all army cavalry my great grandfather was a cavalry he could have been a custer buddy i have no idea  so i went there and i offered i just offered my understanding of their trauma to help heal that and then we went to the indian pieces and we did the same thing all there and it felt very powerful and there was we heard so many stories about how the native americans were treated going back to grandmothers and grandfathers and great great grandparents and how even now days it is it has been hard i think because they've heard the stories and live in that fear and one woman got up and said i've always been afraid i didn't know what to do and i couldn't go anywhere or do anything and now i know that there are people here and now i can go forward and want to share about  that calvary when we went inside to that little viewing room the museum or whatever it was there was they had recreated some of the the people that they had fought and custards army and looking at this gentleman he looked so lifelike and so real it really brought it home and there was a little little thing talking about it and it said and i can't remember the percentage but i think it was at least sixty percent of the calvary were immigrants so they were these poor people that were from another nation that had no idea what they were going into they had no they were probably had nowhere to go and nothing to do so the calgary a calgary or whatever was the way to go to survive when they came to the americas so that was really interesting to them so what i'd like to speak to kind of follows susan i really came away with in learned a lot in them still learning will always be learning about is my own ancestral healing and that it's a responsibility for me to tap deep into my ancestry one of the things that was shared through story and through smaller circles in the evening often in our culture white culture we look to other cultures to find healing and to find ways of of honoring prayer and ceremony and what i came away with really strongly is that it's time for us individually to tap into our own ancestry because we are all from indigenous peoples and it's not really about taking somebody else's ceremony or ancestry and using that for our own healing it's about tapping deep into him in you you have to go way back that was really a powerful message for me i don't take it lightly i feel it's a very important message  and it also allowed me to understand something about my family we talked in circle and  abuse and and and emotions like that bitterness judgment can come from the scars that we carry through our ancestors  for the first time in my life and i'm i'm not saying this lightly for the first time in my life i felt like i could look at my mother's suffering with compassion but in hearing the words that were shared i was able to understand that she actually carries the suffering of many generations in her life without even really knowing it and it gave me a chance to look at her through different eyes which was really such such a gift you know i remember being in the circle and watching that everyone having the traditions that they had and feeling that longing for that because you know my my heritage is so so many different so many different routes i mean there's so many different ways that i could go with that that i've never really followed any of them and which one would i follow and you know and so so there was that that longing for having a tradition and a culture and also it brought me back to the fact that you know here i've lived here on fashion my whole life and i've always kind of felt like i had to  apologize for that or something and watching the cheyenne people being so proud of where they live and their homeland and being that their homeland that i thought why i need to take that back and maybe it's time for us to have our own new traditions that we that we create i would love to talk about when the horses and the wolves came in to the arena and it was really amazing but five of the grandmothers were writing the horses and as they were coming in and they were so it's hard for me to talk about but i saw that the past and the present come together and i found it and it became the now time and then it was healed and it was amazing it was absolutely amazing and i just want to add something i remember grandmother agnus telling a story about that ride she was the one the lead the horses in she was on the first horse she hasn't a mountain named after her in south western oregon and quite quite an amazing presence she told the story i don't remember what she said as far as the timing but i think it was probably maybe weeks or shorter a little bit longer prior to the ride into the circle that she had a visit from her grandmother in  vision and if i remember the story right she she said that her grandmother came to her in this vision and her grandmother was a writer she rode horses that was her life was the horses and in the vision all her grandmother told her was get on the horse she didn't know what her grandmother was talking about but when it came to be that there was this opportunity for the grandmother some of them to ride the horses in for the first time to welcome she knew at that point what her grandmother was talking to you know about and she did with her grandmother said she got on the horse my experience of when the writers came in when they came in they came in on the horses and then there was the shy and were drumming a song to the horses they drummed a couple of songs to the horses and there was one horse that was in front of me that was kind of sideways so that it was like it was looking at me and i could see i could see that it was like an expression on its face and the only way i can describe it was that i could actually feel what the horse was experiencing and it was it was humbled and it was grateful and it was appreciated it was all those things it was like it was the horse going through and the horses going through the experience of the healing also because they were  used when we went to custer's they were used by the the calvary would shoot them and lie behind the horses to protect them while they were in battle there is a grandmother from guatemala and she had brought enough herbs to do food washes for five hundred people and so you can imagine what you know the compassion in that she wasn't able to do all those five hundred but then the next day when she had her prayer time she actually went around and anointed everybody's third eye that she could reach with oil that opens your cell memories so that was like a really big thing for me to i cried for a while  that to the last day when she gave her ceremony she first asked the cloud people to come to give us a little bit of a reprieve from the heat because it had been one hundred seven and one hundred ten and i'm not joking you fifteen minutes later there were clouds in the sky i wanted to start with one of the profound things that i heard there which was allow the prayer to come which i thought was just just kind of blew me away it's like you know how when you go to say a prayer you're always just kind of blathering out something but just to take that breath and allow it to come i thought that was beautiful and anyway i kind of a backtrack so the meeting grandmother margaret was an amazing experience and kudos to lorna to bringing her here and when i said oh sure let's go did you know i had two thousand and twelve i figured that's two years away it doesn't really matter and then it kept getting closer and like oh wow what the heck is so i wasn't really prepared for it i guess i didn't really know what to expect and i didn't know why i was going and you know i was just kind of along for the ride so we just blew and we set up our tent and the next morning you know i got up and know i had this perception that the shy and people would be thinking who are all these people coming into our territory and you know and and not feeling necessary necessarily good thoughts about us invading their space and doing the ceremony who are all these white people pretending that they know what's going on and i found that it was absolutely to the contrary the cheyenne people were just the most warm and welcoming people and people came from  over the world there was a woman from scotland that was in her kilt and she was talking about how she was embracing her heritage and she was doing her thing there was one from spain who came and talked and she was going to she was saying you know pray for us we're in trouble right now and they were just from everywhere i was taken back by the landscape because it is so barren and yet so fertile at the same time the contradiction there th it's just the it's like nothing could live there and yet the sacredness of the land is so great and on the last day we were there i woke up thinking i just really missed the water  many way i miss the sound i miss the coolness and the water and both the grandmothers that day their focus was on the water and the blessings of the water and one of them talked about how we come into this world in a river and and the other one was saying what she said i found very profound was this that every time you use water to just thank it and so it's become a real it's just become a part of what i do now when i drink my water i'm just like thank you waters they drink it so and i mean she said you know when you flush the toilet when you take your shower when you get into water so just be aware of that at one point at the ending of the ceremony there was somebody that got up and they were talking about the cheyenne people and she said i made a commitment that every evening that i would say a prayer for the shy and people and she asked us all to get up and all make a commitment to say a prayer for the shy people the last day one of the chiefs because there was a number of chiefs wasn't there yeah even  and one of them got up there and he had tears in his in his eyes he said this is good this is hard this is difficult this is good this is hard but this is really good you know because so many so many people in their individual lives were healed during this week and the reason that we were there was not it was not about politics it was not about all the things that you think that it would be about it was really about prayer and ceremony and acceptance of everybody and it was so powerful the question is what can we take away from this sharing of what comes to me is to remember to tap in to your divine self that with that connection you will be doing the work you did it changes it and if so how for me my summer was very full i did three incredible pieces of work  aware of water number one and you know and being very grateful i mean however it touches me whether i'm showering in the morning i'm just the thank you water and i'm drinking it's thank you otter i have i have a lot of questions that i still need to answer so there's always it's always a continuing journey that this brought up that kind of fueled a little bit more definitely more aware of prayer and the power of prayer and trying to incorporate it more in my life i think that would be the changes what did i take away well you know what what really lasts it's if it makes a strong impression i was impressed by th the power of a group group energy focused on something higher that was real that was that was really real what what certain people were experiencing  intensely and what i felt and it was real in the direction of helping and opening and connecting and personally just the conversation is i had with giant men three of them in particular never forget those i don't know it was like i was talking to somebody from another world it was so different it was new for me i'm sure there are people who had those experiences a lot maybe they are that way there was much that i felt in my heart through the six perience and the interconnection of all things and how i can't exist without water i can't exist without the earth under my feet i mean i i'm here because of something or someone else and and i feel that was that weekend for me in a lot of ways and that i also felt that it was such an honor and i'm very grateful the for this to have the opportunity to be there in this group within this group and to not have any expectations of what was going to happen to be but to be a witness and to be a part of a group that was holding sacred space for whatever was going to happen to happen and it was safe it was a safe place for that and i feel that that's going to be in my heart forever in it it is my belief that we are all part of the collective consciousness and every time someone speaks from the heart or give someone well wishes or says i love you it's adding to that and in me becoming of that collective consciousness in that space things like what are happening now tend to cease and will begin to cease and are beginning to cease so it'll happen less and when it's in a group like it was when we went to see the grandmothers it was amazing