from The Creative Process: TIOKASIN GHOSTHORSE, interviewed by Mia Funk and Melannie Munoz

This interview is republished in The Dreaming Machine courtesy of The Creative Process and Mia Funk. The original interview can be found at this link

Tiokasin Ghosthorse is a member of the Cheyenne River Lakota Nation of South Dakota and has a long history with Indigenous activism and advocacy. Tiokasin is the Founder, Host and Executive Producer of “First Voices Radio” (formerly “First Voices Indigenous Radio”) for the last 31 years in New York City and Seattle/Olympia, Washington. In 2016, he received a Nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize from the International Institute of Peace Studies and Global Philosophy. Other recent recognitions include: Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Fellowship in Music (2016), National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship Nominee (2017), Indigenous Music Award Nominee for Best Instrumental Album (2019) and National Native American Hall of Fame Nominee (2018, 2019). He also was recently nominated for “Nominee for the 2020 Americans for the Arts Johnson Fellowship for Artists Transforming Communities”. He is the Founder of Akantu Intelligence.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

How can we learn to speak the language of the Earth and cultivate our intuitive intelligence?

TIOKASIN GHOSTHORSE

We have not adapted to Earth. She needs us to do that. Instead, we’ve tried to adapt Earth to our needs. Which is always an extraction, take away. Earth doesn’t exist because of technology. Earth will always be here.

If we say Mitakuye Oyasin, we don’t really mean all my relations. It’s like, no, we’re talking about what you can formulate into E = mc2 and beyond. It’s beyond what you see. And that energy you don’t see with these eyes, which only see a certain range of color and light refraction is what we are also understanding. Our body is, people would say the brain is…there is no disconnection. And so are we fully understanding or do we have a full spectrum perspective of what tools of the Earth really mean? Like a bird we think has no intelligence. It just flies here and flies there, right? But we also understand that that bird is also using the tools as the tools of the Earth correctly or properly when…what does that mean?

Now, if you go deeper into Indigenous peoples, you can see the modernity and then so-called primitive people. You don’t need to be in contact, in relationship, and in communication, have a language with all other life-technology taking us away from Earth because we feel like we’re elite to anything having to do with Earth. That’s why we want to go to a dead planet called Mars. So they’re about controlling, getting you and all of us away from being magic…is how to use tools of the Earth properly. Not, you know, we should not abuse water, the air, the land, the food, anything. So when it comes to animacy, I think it’s a Western term also, and so we get away from the Western terms. We start seeing that, oh, we are becoming Earth as we’re born into this physical dimension. We are becoming Earth. And then as we are living during this time, we’re alive. We are becoming Earth. And when we are finished with this body, we are becoming Earth.

I tried to go through the history that I know of and the studies that I have researched from where educational processes started. And usually, when I say young, we’re talking college age or more. And so I find I just finished a semester at Union Theological Seminary in New York and graduate and postgrad students, they either were angry or sad or just, you know, in shock that they have never heard through the whole semester, after years of study, that they’ve never heard the Native history as we know it. We’ve always been overrun with Western historical domination as they see it, that they came here for benevolence, they were brought a civilization, they brought us cars and tech, you know, all these things. It was the ships that came while we stood on the shore, watching the ships come, welcoming, abundance, giving. And then they came and they took what we offered, but they took more. And that’s where we’re at. And now we’re seeing a whole abandonment of spirit and put into the ideas of a dogmatic soul. So when I approach these peoples in these educational institutions often come with those two perspectives, knowing that Native people also are forgetting our own perspective and mimicking the Western educational process.

Again, I’ll go with cultural etymology of this language English. And the word education where does it come from? Well, it comes from scholars and whatever, but the etymology of the word education, what does it mean? It means to adduce or seduce. And there’s different evolutions of the word, and in one dictionary I saw before 1940 says, of course, to adduce or seduce, but it also says “to draw out or lead away from” – and get this – “to lead away from spirit.” And what has it done? Replaced, draw out, or lead away from spirit. So what that’s done is replace it with information and knowledge. And that’s control by domination. Here’s how: So schools started out in the Catholic churches, because the monks, they drew the monks away when they were boys to read and script and to keep this educational process moving. So they were away from nature and only of men’s minds. And so this is how it’s been proceeding since then. So it’s a controlled education where you’re instructed mechanically to get the right answer. Where in Native is that we are shown the possibilities, and we’re able to choose freely about what we’re shown. We’re never told to do this or say that or we were shown because it was a living and is a living language. Learning is a living, it’s not a stagnant informational data bank. So this is how education is to me, and how I view it and how I try to explain it to college age, grad, and post grad.

So we get to a certain stage in Western society, I’d never call it a culture, but a society trying to figure out its birth and how to become mature. Whatever it’s doing it has slowed down natural relationships. It took us out of the land, put us into factories, put us into institutions where you can learn a trade. It kept giving you jobs that had nothing to do with Earth. And so if you’re living, you’re working in this box called a factory, and the farmers out there are becoming less and less. Even the farming, the ideas of farming are foreign. And I think that when the technical language came out, we dropped another natural umbilical cord to and with Earth. And so we severed that relationship. So you can see this gradual severing of relationships to Earth with Earth, that now we have to have retreats to learn empathy again. We do all these Westernized versions of piecing ourselves back together and as Indigenous folks where we’re getting that way now, but a lot of traditional people don’t need that. We don’t need environmental movements. You know, Wild Earth is a foreign concept. There are a lot of words that organizations use to rationalize why we need to teach how to be human beings. So you see technology, the Industrial Machine Age taught us this language of disconnection, taught us things like plug-in, get connected. You know, all these words that came along to fill that information that could be controlled by authority now in the Western process. John Gatto, who won the New York State Teacher of the Year award in 2008, upon his retirement, specifically said, “It takes 12 years to learn how to become reflexive to authority.” And who is the authority? Who is controlling information? Who’s controlling education? Who’s controlling knowledge? And now they want to control Wisdom, and all wisdom means is common sense.