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 mrs jo susan and i am i'm i'm love the thirteen grandmothers were created within the container of the center for sacred studies jyoti has made it her life's mission to study indigenous ways of life and she created the center for sacred studies it is a nonprofit organization dedicated to sustaining indigenous ways of life through cross cultural spiritual practices ministry education and a commitment to peace and unity for all people their activities include prayer services ceremonies and of all righty of gatherings for worship according to various traditions the purpose of these offerings is to invite individuals families and communities to develop devotion and to strengthen their relationship to the divine they have the council of the thirteen grandmothers as one of their programs another program is their ministry training program it's a two year program towards getting a ministry available for you to use multiple indigenous ways of honoring spirit or practicing they have a stargate mystery school which is a residential program that explores non ordinary states of consciousness and they have the may tree breathwork certification training i don't really know what that is but it's obviously some kind of breath work in the fall of two thousand and three the center for sacred studies sent out an invitation to sixteen grandmothers of the sixteen thirteen answer they all had stories of how they were connected before they were connected but grandmother read a bloomin steen who's a seventy five year old you pick traditional healer was guided by her great grandmother hundred forty two when she was nine years old her great grandmother gave her thirteen stones and thirteen feathers eagle plumes and told her she would be part of a council of thirteen and to save these precious relics for that time at their first gathering of the thirteen grandmothers in two thousand and four the day after declaring themselves as an alliance grandmother rida passed these thirteen stones and feathers to the members of the newly formed alliance it is a form of government ruled by a circle rather than a hierarchy of command since the inception of the international council of thirteen indigenous grandmothers numerous elders around the world who are gathering their own councils or renewing their ancient rituals of leadership have approached us center for sacred studies in this era we are witnessing a reemergence of the voice of the wise ones and the elders the gathering of councils the unfolding of our prayer shows us that many councils of elders are emerging in europe australia the middle east to karinda suffering world out of its misery the international council of thirteen grandmothers is only one voice in this unity and i'm just going to read a little bit of their from their alliance statement in october thirteenth two thousand and four they all signed this alliance we are thirteen indigenous grandmothers coming here from the amazon rain forest the alaskan tundra of north america the great forest of the american northwest the vast plains of north america the high lands of central america the black hills of south dakota the mountains of the desert of the american southwest the mountains of tibet and nepal and from the rain forest of central africa we are affirming our relations with traditional medicine peoples and communities throughout the world we have been brought together by a common vision to form a new global alliance ours is an alliance of prayer education and healing for our mother earth all her inhabitants all the children and for the next seven generations to come we come together to nurture educate and train our children we come together to uphold the practice of our ceremonies and affirm their right to use our plant medicines free of legal restriction we come together to protect the lands where our peoples live and upon which our cultures depend to safeguard the collective heritage of traditional medicines and to defend the earth herself we believe that the teachings of our ancestors will light our way through an uncertain we join with all those who honor their creator and to all who work and pray for our children for world peace and for the healing of our mother earth so the intent of the thirteen grandmothers is healing and peace each six every six months approximately thirteen gather grandmothers gather in a new homeland they gathered in montana a grandmother margaret's land well was it was supposed to be our land but the fires made us move to the powwow grounds each grandmother who's holding the gathering has a special intent grandmother margaret's special intent was healing and c'est royal trauma so that's what we walked into so a couple years ago two years approximately i went to a movie at the theater called the next seven generations and i didn't want to go i was dead set against it and everybody here was going and i had heard about the thirteen grandmothers for a very long time and i just was like nope and then everybody left and i was driving by the theater and i heard buffalo hart and i went for get this i'm going and so so i sat in the theater and i i cried because their purpose is so beautiful and i came back here and i said i want to be a grandmother and i'm going to bring a grandma here i want grandmother to come here so somehow everything fell together and grandmother margaret came by in two thousand and twelve is where the next big gathering for them was going to be and she said there would be the thirteen tepees there and i said i'll be there and everybody else said we'll be there in two thousand and twelve came and there we were and that's our story of of how  we got there and it was the journey's been pretty amazing we were all there we were all in the same place at the same time but we all experience this event and it was amazing we got there and we were setting up our camp we had a couple of tents to set up and thunderstorm came over it was lightning and thunder and the wind picked up really had a fairly large structure halfway constructed and susan was saying you know on to one of the corners of it i was saying on the other and it was going up in the air and finally we got the fabric of it and everything settled down so it was an introduction  we got our camps set up in a cheyenne man named danny sue just kind of wandered over to our campsite introduced himself and welcomed us to the place that was so important to his people he talked to us about his life and what he had done in his life and it was different  he was part of that that ground and you could kind of feel it another highlight for me was we actually had buffalo meat there was a kitchen and there was one meal that everyone partook in on one of the days and it's a tradition in the buffalo is very important somebody said he's got the buffalo in his pickup truck so i went out with three or four or five other people and there was  buffalo and said yeah i got an hour ago and then he told about how it he'd been waiting for three days for an animal to separate itself from the herd because that's what they do when they offer themselves for th said one came out this morning it's a two year old bull and he said the hard part was getting in the pickup truck by myself i couldn't believe he did that anyway they prepared they prepared it and it was very good and it was special there were all kinds of people i could talk to about all kinds of things on a higher order but i had conversations with giant men that were different from me the ones that came to this gathering were the ones that i believe hold very important for them their traditional values and their culture and the things that they want to read really really touch for themselves and there was a call missing a confidence and just an emptiness almost and and the strength i don't see it very often guys in our culture you know well we won't go there right now but i sure related to this i and then to add to the buffalo story one of the things that i noticed is they had an area off to the side of the circle where we all gathered every every day where they were teaching different different techniques of of making hand tools and things like that and the i don't know what direction it was but they had the buffaloes again the hide stretched so they did yes so basically they kill he killed it for the meat but then they actually stretched the hide and grandmother yes it was curing throughout the whole thing and grandmother margaret she scraped it and actually gave some to each one of the grandmothers to take back so it was a it was a part of the ceremony that was really beautiful well i'll tell you it's so hard to put into words what it what it was like to be there with those women and people from all over the world that came for the same thing for everything we believe in peace and love and healing and harmony it was amazing to see these thirteen women eleven i think they're the two that were able to make it but to go out there every day and  each of them had three hours basically that they talked and they did with they do in their culture they did their medicine and it was amazing how these women at their age at their evolution they were able to do these these dances and ceremonies you know and just to talk in weather that was one hundred ten degrees really really really amazing one thing that for me that was it really stood out and i call it the big sky montana it's always been called the big sky but it i would look up and i would see so many different pictures in th guy you know i saw bear upon a native american and i saw a dolphin and i saw so many things and you could look up and see that and then you'd look down and three minutes later you'd look up and you would see the same thing is this all these things were coming together and it was really beautiful i was sitting on the bleachers and i was at the top of the bleachers and then kitty corner from me about twelve feet away there was a woman sitting there and i i noticed that my shadow was protecting her from the sun and it came to me how we're all connected by this thread that we may never know that i could help someone and they would never know it and i would never know when someone here would be helping me that but that we all do we all come together there was something that was said i think it was the last  day of the closing ceremony and one of the chiefs i believe don't quote me got up and said oh my gosh what was it piece above piece below and peace in the middle and that resonated so much with me there's there's so many things i could talk about joe when i got there a week early to volunteer so we had basically four days of being there volunteer in working setting up camp for everybody this gathering was to have been a grandmother margaret's land in danger usually know for two years ahead of where each one is going to be so i believe for two years she had been preparing her land for this gathering there were six hundred registered people that's coming from not shy am land and i'd say there was at least four hundred at any one time cheyanne there so she was preparing for a thousand people and then the fires came and they had to move two weeks before the gathering she had to find another spot and so luckily they have this wonderful powell ground which i thought was very unique for us because we got to be and the energy of the powwow was now the week before the gathering started  a week and a half before the gathering started they had had a power well they had seven hundred in eighty six registered dancers huge and then we came in a week and three days after it was well actually we came in a week and a day after it was over so so there's lots of energy there they have their powell ground set up with shaded bleachers and six isn't it you think goodness is right six sweat lodges and the cheyenne people gifted us with a sunset and the sunrise sweat for three there was the there were multiple they were small sweat lodges so there were like two or three sweat lodges going each evening each sunrise so it was it was a very powerful piece of land to be on  and then i worked in registration once people started coming in so i had the extraordinary gift of being able to greet people and i got to greet a lot of cheyanne who would come in and they'd say what's going on here and i would say it's a gathering of the thirteen indigenous grandmothers and thank you for hosting us and they'd look at me like what do you mean they didn't have it but it's their land i said thank you for gifting us your land to have this on grandmother margaret invited a million and one people to come of course everybody she saw she didn't fight and she met this young man in i'm assuming he's comes from he has the wolf connection which is a wolf rescue organization and she said come with your wolves he had ne'er and i had the gift whatever to actually be the first person to greet him and had a conversation with him and he chose a great spot to park with his wolves he had never taken his wolves out of l a and and they had a great time they had an air conditioned v that the air water and they yeah he takes them for four five mile hikes every day no matter what but this was in you know it was great they always tethered and they all had their own handler there are five wolves thank you and one of the chiefs stood up during the talking in the powwow grounds and he talked about the wolves but you prefaced it with the buffaloes he said we bought a herd of buffalo twenty five years ago we fenced them in and creator very clearly told us they're not to be fenced in because they broke right through the fences but they stayed on our land when the buffalo returned the elk returned and he said it has been many many hundred years or more since we have had wolves here and now the wolves are here not in the wild but still there and so he is talking about the return of the old ways of the old life and he was talking about the walls in particular he said i went up my grandson my son and i went to see the wolves the wolves were on thirty foot leaves and they had a shade structure that they could sort of like a dead end that they could get into out of the sun and he went up in the the wall fit they went up to talk to whatever was in the shade and he had a he had tobacco any offered a prayer of ept you know with his tobacco and he put the tobacco on the ground and the wolf got up came over sniffed the tobacco and then looked at him and looked at him and looked at him and he said wolf please pray for us we need your prayers we are a pitiful people each grandmother like laura was saying would take two to three hours to do with her ceremony whatever it was that she chose to do for us the one i was each grandmother had a companion who was always there to get them water to help them move whatever and her companion was a male most of the other companions were female but her companion was a male she did not speak english and she started drumming so she started beating her drum and i heard that she was calling in all of the goddesses and all of the animals and it's a nepalese so i don't know what she's saying but it calling them and calling them and chanting and chanting and she's just really getting herself into a trance and she starts making animal noises along with it and then she just it was fascinating and as she's doing this the center for sacred studies know that when the grandmothers do their ceremonies people go places and so the center for sacred studies has a container for those people they a joe was on this team the lame in us don't really aren't aren't ministers of the center for sacred studies manned the audience and as station behind they would watch their section of the audience and when they saw someone doing odd things or whatever they just raise their hand and they would go behind that person and raise their hand and then pretty soon you would see people in white the people from star center for sacred studies would come and stand behind the person and they would make an assessment is this a spiritual thing or is it a physical thing and for each of the events that i saw it was all spiritual and they would just  just tell their neighbors to give them space let it go and not not interrupt their process there is a woman across from me and i'm going to have to put this down who for the whole forty five minutes that this this nepalese grandmother was doing her ceremony was doing this incredible trust and power of each grandmother to be able to carry us so that was a great example of what the center for sacred studies does grandmother margaret her intent was ancestral healing ancestral trauma she got a vision two years ago of recreating the ride home the right home there was the trail of tears were all the shy in were herded down to oklahoma to chief said no we're not staying here and they gathered their people and they rode home being chased murdered massacred but they did some of them did make it home she wanted to recreate that ride as a thread of healing all the way so she went on kick starter raised enough money to provide provisions and you know trucks and trailers and vans to to get everybody through that ride she rescued nine mustangs that were going to be slaughtered she got twenty three people not all were in the whole ride but they come came and went as they could and they rode as much as they possibly could the trail back home they've made detours to massacre sites to do extra healy it was filmed she got a film crew is part of this kickstarter money and filmed the whole trail home the ride home and it will be a movie i was wandering around one evening and  there was grandmother margaret gathered with the writers and we all three of us got to sit and listen to them tell their tales of the healing that happened for them not just not just