Q:  The first question I'd like to ask is how can we help the Earth to heal? And the second question is, how can we help the Earth's people to heal?

Chief Tue Bear:  Well, the first part about healing Earth Mother is that we have to give her reverence and honor for allowing us to be in her space.  We must also realize that we are her caretakers.  We are the landlords of the Earth, and we are responsible for the things that she grows. We need to take care of the animals and what Earth Mother has put here for us, and it is good to understand about life itself.  Many people say this is a tree [pointing up]. Sure that's a tree. That's a ''Standing Person.'' But it's also the history of life, of everything that lives on this planet. Trees, the Standing People, are rooted in their Grandmother, the Earth, and they stand with their boughs up, bringing the polarities together. When it rains, the leaves turn over to Grandfather, the Sky. If you look at them, the leaves will actually turn themselves upside-down for the nourishment that he shares. Then they turn over again.

The Standing People produce the oxygen we breathe. They keep the air cleansed for us.  Then, when it turns to autumn, the leaves drop off. The tree goes to sleep. All the negative energy, all the imbalance, goes down in the tree into the roots and it stays there. Then Grandfather brings a blanket of snow to cover, to give that Standing Person a chance to rest. The snow melts. The blanket that kept everything warm and pure is refreshing, it gets into the roots and up comes the sap, the life of the tree. Then out come the new leaves. The old is dissipated and the new is reborn.

We as humans are like these trees. We change with the seasons. We die to the old and are reborn again to the new.

Q:  So human life goes through a seasonal shift also, just like the trees?

Chief Tue Bear:  Exactly. Many people call it growing pains.

Ocie Wolffe:  I feel there is a lot we can do to heal Earth Mother. We can do it in very simple ways. We can recycle. We can approach the communities that don't recycle and request that programs be put into place. At some point we are going to run out of land for landfills, and we're going to be living right on top of all the garbage that we're making.

Every day when I'm at work, where I have access to the Internet, I go to the hunger sites. By clicking on a button on certain hunger sites, I can donate food to needy people. Then I go to a rainforest site and click on a button, and the people who sponsor these sites donate money for every click and it goes to buy acres of rainforest.

We need to make choices about what we want to purchase as consumers, and go for things that are not made of our sacred redwood trees, things that are made from recycled paper. We can push our governments to develop renewable resources of solar power and wind energy. There's a lot we can do on an individual basis. Instead of buying tupperware, we can save our spaghetti sauce jars and utilize those for storage.

There are so many things that we as Americans take for granted that other people do not.  We have to be more conscious of how we spend our money and what we're really buying with that money. Are we buying a future for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren or are we wasting that money?

An interesting story I'd like to tell you is that friends of ours used to go to Sundance, but the place where they used to Sundance closed down so they decided that they would have a dance on their own land. They were talking about what kind of dance it should be. So often you hear of people who, when they are Sundancing, utilize the energy from our Grandmother, the Moon. It came to this woman in her dreamtime that this time they should do a dance for the Earth. On one of the days when they were dancing, all the people who were in the circle dancing looked down at the ground and earthworms came up and began wiggling and then descended back down into the ground.

It is important to honor not only what is in our celestial field, but also the Earth that we walk upon every single day. This is something we can do in ceremonies or prayer.  One way is to offer up Spirit Plates, which is a plate that we put food upon that comes off of our table, food that we would eat. When we make a Spirit Plate, we offer it to Creator and to Grandmother Earth and to the four directions. We invite all the spirits to come who are hungry so they can share with us the joy, the essence, of this food that we are going to eat for ourselves. And we always pray in gratitude for the plants and the animals and all these things that have been living that have given their lives for our nourishment. We cannot get nourishment from the sun like the trees do or from the Earth and the grass like the Buffalo do. We depend on others to give us nutrients to maintain our own life. There is much that we can do. We may feel that it does not make a difference, but it does.

I once attended a ceremony for someone who crossed over into Spirit, and we were releasing his ashes. I had gotten a little croissant for breakfast, and I could only eat part of it. So I went to the ceremony and while we were sitting in the circle, I took a little piece of what was left and offered it to the four directions. I felt this man had been very hungry for a while before his passing, so I left it there in the circle and took the rest of the biscuit and went out into the woods and offered it up to creation and to the Earth Mother and to the Spirits who were there. As I looked around in the trees, I saw all these little wavy patches of energy. The spirits were there. They were watching us, and they were waiting for me to set that down so they could go and have a nibble of this little biscuit.

We can nurture the Earth Mother. We can nurture ourselves. We can nurture the spirits. We can call on the spirits to help us make wise decisions for the future. We can't do it alone. Creator may be a little busy sometimes, but He does hear our prayers. Sometimes it just takes a little while for them to get through.

I know that the Ancestors, the Grandfathers and Grandmothers, are there waiting for us. All we have to do is call upon them, and they will grant their assistance to us as best they can.

Q:  So, how do we heal the Earth people?

Ocie Wolffe:  Seek out the elders who carry the ways, the knowledge, the traditions with them. Sit and listen to them. Learn the ways. Then when you have learned the ways, take them to the people. Share with them. I was here last year, and I told them that I do not have a teacher in the physical. So my Unshi, my grandmother, gave me the words to speak. One of the things my Unshi said was that we have to honor the elders, because when they are gone, all their knowledge is lost. Very few of us can tap directly into Spirit and receive knowledge through the Spirit the way the old ones can. The old ones have the knowledge. They have been living this knowledge their entire lives. We need to learn this knowledge, not just learn it but live it as well. And by living this way, we can be an example to others.

We have to get our consciences out of the Black Road and into the Red Road. They say that the Black Road and the Red Road intersect. The Black Road is the way of egocentricism. It is, ''Hurray for me and to hell with everybody else.'' It is self-preserving. The Red Road is the road of service, the road of selflessness. The community comes before the individual.

In the old days, the warriors would go and hunt the buffalo, and the women would butcher the buffalo, but the food was distributed equally among all people. And it was the job of the warriors to carry the elders and the children and to make sure the women had the things they needed, because the women were sacred. They are the carriers of life. We have yet to find a man who can bear a life. So we have to realize the power of the woman. We have to realize the responsibility of the warriors to protect the women and the children and the old ones.

There is so much we have to learn and remember, and there's a lot we can do. But we can't just go in like gangbusters and try to change the world. Because it's going to have to go through consciousness, from Spirit through the consciousness into our hearts. Once it is in our hearts, then we can make the difference.

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