As our voices join together bring this night of celebration
Let our hearts join together light the hymn star of creation
We gather together
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, and Diana.
I'm love.
The 13 grandmothers were created within the container of the Center for Sacred Studies.
Joe T 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 a variety 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 13 Grandmothers is 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 Maitre breathwork certification training.
I don't really know what that is, but it's obviously some kind of breathwork.
In the fall of 2003, the Center for Sacred Studies sent out an invitation to 16 grandmothers of the 1613 answer.
They all had stories of how they were connected before they were connected.
But grandmother Rita Blumenstein, who's a 75 year old Yupik traditional healer, was guided by her great grandmother in 1942 when she was nine years old.
Her great grandmother gave her 13 stones and 13 feathers, eagle plumes, and told her she would be part of a council of 13.
And to save these precious relics for that time, at their first gathering of the 13 grandmothers in 2004,
the day after declaring themselves as an alliance, grandmother Rita passed these 13 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 13 Indigenous Grandmothers, numerous elders around the world who are gathering their own councils or renewing their ancient rituals of leadership have approached us.
The Center for Sacred Studies. In this era, we are witnessing a re-emergence 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 carrying the suffering world out of its misery.
The International Council of 13 Grandmothers is only one voice in this unity.
And I'm just going to read a little bit from their alliance statement. In October 13, 2004, they all signed this alliance.
We are 13 Indigenous Grandmothers coming here from the Amazon rainforest, the Alaskan tundra of North America,
the great forest of the American Northwest, the vast plains of North America, the highlands of Central America, the Black Hills of South Dakota,
the mountains of Oksaka, the desert of the American Southwest, the mountains of Tibet and Nepal, and from the rainforest 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 the 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 future.
We join with all those who honor the 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 13 grandmothers is healing and peace.
Each six, every six months approximately, the 13 grandmothers gather in a new homeland.
They gathered in Montana at Grandmother Margaret's land.
Well, it wasn't, it was supposed to be at her 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 ancestral 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'd heard about the 13 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 Heart and I went, forget this, I'm going.
And so I sat in the theater and 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 in 2012 is where the next big gathering for them was going to be.
And she said there would be the 13 teepees there. And I said, I'll be there.
And everybody else said, we'll be there. And 2012 came and there we were.
And that's our story of how we got there. And it was the journey's been pretty amazing.
We were all there. We weren't all in the same place at the same time, but we all experienced 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 a thunderstorm came by.
Oh, it was lightning and thunder and the wind picked up.
We had a fairly large structure halfway constructed and Susan was hanging on to one of the corners of it.
I was hanging on the other and it was going up in the air.
And finally we got the fabric off of it and everything settled down.
That was an introduction. We got our camp set up.
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 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 that buffalo is very important.
Somebody said he's got the buffalo in his pickup truck. So I went out with four or five other people.
And there was a buffalo and said, yeah, got an hour ago.
And then he told about how 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 this occasion.
And one did. He said one came out this morning. It's a two-year-old bull.
And he said the hard part was getting it in the pickup truck by myself. I couldn't believe he did that.
Anyway, 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 the higher order.
But I had conversations with Cheyenne men that were different for 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 retouch for themselves.
And there was a calmness and a confidence and just an emptiness almost in the strength.
Don't see it very often. Guys in our culture are, you know, well, we won't go there right now.
That's another story. But I sure related to the Cheyenne men.
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 day where they were teaching different techniques of making hand tools and things like that.
And at the, I don't know what direction it was, but they had the buffalo skin, the hide, stretched.
So they did. Yes. So basically they killed, 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 part of the ceremony that was really beautiful.
Well, I'll tell you, it's so hard to put into words 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 13 women, 11, I think the two that weren't 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 what 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 dances and ceremonies.
You know, and just to talk in weather that was 110 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 I would look up and I would see so many different pictures in the sky.
You know, I saw a bear paw and 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 as 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 12 feet away there was a woman sitting there.
And 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 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?
Peace above, peace below, and peace in the middle.
And that resonated so much with me.
There's so many things I could talk about.
Joe and I got there a week early to volunteer.
So we had basically four days of being there, volunteering, working, setting up camp for everybody.
The gathering was to have been at Grandmother Margaret's land.
And they usually know for two years ahead of where each one's going to be.
So I believe for two years she had been preparing her land for this gathering.
There were 600 registered people.
That's us coming from not Cheyenne land.
And I'd say there was at least 400 at any one time Cheyenne there.
So she was preparing for 1,000 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 powwow ground, which I thought was very unique for us
because we got to be in the energy of the powwows.
Now the week before the gathering started, well, a week and a half before the gathering started,
they had had a powwow.
They had 786 registered dancers.
Huge.
And 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 there's lots of energy there.
They have their powwow ground set up with shaded bleachers and six, isn't it, thank goodness
it's right, six sweat lodges.
And the Cheyenne people gifted us with a sunset and a sunrise sweat for three days.
Each day there were two sweat lodges?
There were multiple, there were small sweat lodges.
So there were like two or three sweat lodges going each evening, each sunrise.
So 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 Cheyenne who would come in and they'd say, what's going on here?
And I would say, it's a gathering of the 13 indigenous grandmothers and thank you for
hosting us.
And they'd look at me like, what do you mean?
They didn't even, 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'd invite.
And she met this young man in, I'm assuming California, because that's where he comes
from.
He has the Wolf Connection, which is a wolf rescue organization.
And she said, come with your wolves.
And I had the gift, whatever, to actually be the first person to greet him.
And I had a conversation with him and he chose a great spot to park with his wolves.
He had never taken his wolves out of LA.
And they had a great time.
They had an air conditioned RV that iced water.
He takes them for four or five mile hikes every day, no matter what.
But this was great.
They're 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 he prefaced it with the buffaloes.
He said, we bought a herd of buffalo 25 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, hundreds of 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 was talking about the return of the old ways, the old life.
And he was talking about the wolves in particular.
He said, I went up, my grandson, my son and I went to see the wolves.
The wolves were on 30 foot leads and they had a shade structure that they could sort
of like a den that they could get into out of the sun.
And he went up and the wolf that they went up to talk to, whatever, was in the shade.
And he had tobacco and he offered a prayer 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 Lorna was saying, would take two to three hours to do her ceremony,
whatever it was that she chose to do for us.
The one I was most moved by was the Nepalese grandmother, Amma Bambal, B-A-M-B-O, who is
a shaman.
And 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 in Nepalese, so I don't know what she's saying, but she's calling them and calling
them and chanting and chanting.
She's just really getting herself into a trance.
And she starts making animal noises along with it.
And then she just falls over backwards and drops her drum.
Her companion picks up the drum and starts drumming and starts yelling at her or shouting
at her or telling her to come to keep going.
Or I don't know what he was telling her because it was in Nepalese, but it was fascinating.
And as she's doing this, the Center for Sacred Studies knows that when the grandmothers do
their ceremonies, people go places.
And so the Center for Sacred Studies has a container for those people.
Joe was on this team.
The laymen, us, aren't ministers of the Center for Sacred Studies, manned the audience and
as station behind, and they would watch their section of the audience.
And when they saw someone doing odd things or whatever, they just raised 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 the 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 tell their neighbors, just give them space.
Let it go.
And not interrupt their process.
There's a woman across from me, and I'm going to have to put this down, who for the whole
45 minutes that this Nepalese grandmother was doing her ceremony, was doing this.
45 minutes.
And I can't do it for two minutes.
So it's extraordinary energy that is running through the crowd from that one grandmother.
It's 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 healing ancestral trauma.
She got a vision two years ago of recreating the ride home.
The ride home, there was the Trail of Tears where all the Cheyenne were herded down to
Oklahoma.
Two chiefs 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 Kickstarter, raised enough money to provide provisions and trucks and
trailers and vans to get everybody through that ride.
She rescued nine Mustangs that were going to be slaughtered.
She got 23 people.
Not all were in the whole ride, but they came and went as they could.
And they rode as much as they possibly could the trail back home.
They made detours to massacre sites to do extra healing.
It was filmed.
She got a film crew as 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 the ride, but for them.
We are the sons and daughters of the unlimited light.