Read a transcript of the speech that Tom Blue Wolf delivered in the URI Climate Crisis Conversation on September 24, 2020:
I’d like to address the spiritual connections with the Mother.
It’s a broad conversation amongst the Indigenous People, where I gather, that we are not separate from nature: we are nature. And the general consensus among Indigenous leaders that I’ve met is that Mother is very ill right now. We feel she is in the fourth stage of an auto-immune deficiency. We look at the human beings as the Mother’s immune system. We are the last bastion of defense against whatever’s going on, and we’re also the immune system against what’s going on. And right now folks are attacking each other, just like the cells in the body. So She has all the symptoms of an auto-immune deficiency. She has convulsions. She’s dehydrated. She has chills. She has fever.
So we don’t refer to it as climate change. We are referring to it as the condition of an auto-immune deficiency. Any person would be the same way.
We also introduce the reality that all the pharmaceuticals that are ingested by the people and other animals all wind up back in her precipitation cycle. So not only is she ill, but she’s on every pharmaceutical that’s been produced. So it’s amazing that She has any idea of the comings and goings. And so her temperature is changing. We notice animals showing up late for dinner, or showing up early, before the food is there. The fish, and the oceans, and all the rivers are suffering because it’s all one thing.
I was reminded by BeVenda Sangoma, N’Oria in Zimbabwe, that we’re all in this together. We’re all riding on the same rock. And we’re following this dwarf star through interstellar space at unprecedented speeds. People say you can’t step in the river the same place twice, when in fact you can’t breathe in and out the same place twice! We’re moving so fast that people sometimes are at the effect of this motion and it seems to be speeding up. When we take into account that time is measure by how much radiation enters a molecule over a particular duration, it all becomes kind of experiential. So, at the end of the day, it’s our spiritual responsibility to conduct ceremonies and ritual and rites of passages to raise the vibration. We believe that, at the core everything, are vibrations and energy and frequencies. We need to raise the frequency!
Some were looking at the frequency of the COVID-19 virus, and found that it vibrates at a frequency of somewhere between 5.7 and 20.5. We looked at the frequencies of various emotions. The only frequencies that humans produce that are in that same range are hatred and fear and anger, and all those baser emotions. So we need to raise the vibration so that people walk around with forgiveness and mercy and compassion and joy and love and enlightenment in their consciousness. All the animals are already there; it’s the humans that seem to be lagging behind in this mission.
Our people – I’m from the Muskogee Nation – the forest-keepers, we are.
We are the peaceful people who care for the forest and we know that what we say at the prayers and ceremonies and rituals can raise the vibration and be a part of this great healing that is going on. Humans just forgot. We’re going through this period of forgetting and that’s why I’m so excited by this conversation* and hearing about what everyone is doing It’s very evident that we are remembering now. We’re part of this great remembering where we come together and realize that we’re all in this together and that if any of us are hurting, we’re all hurting. And if any baby doesn’t have a place to sleep, no baby has a place to sleep. If anybody’s in prison, everybody’s in prison.
So, it’s just one thing and that’s a very difficult concept for most people who have these delusional ideologies about who they are (Anything other than a human is ridiculous!). We believe that in the beginning, when the Creator put us here, we were shepherds, we were stewards we were caregivers. We took care of the place; that was the mission. We were the ones who animals (the other animals) looked to – the 4-legged people, the tree people, the flying ones, the fish, they all looked to us as the care givers. The ones who tend the garden. But somewhere along the way, we forgot. We started getting into these delusional ideologies about, “I’m a Republican,” “I’m a Democrat,” “I’m a Christian,” “I’m a Muslim,” “I’m a This,” “I’m a That,” and they seem to have forgotten this human aspect of what it means to be a human being.
Our thrust of the last while is to instil into the hearts of all of those have the inclination to emerge, to go into that place and to exercise this compassion, this love, this concern, this forgiveness, this mercy, this oneness. In our language, we don’t have a word for other. If I say, “It’s just me and you,” and somebody says, “What about all the others?” We say, “On this planet, it’s just us.” It’s we. It’s our. There is no I, me or mine within this concept of all being in this together. So it’s very much a spiritual process.
We know that the Earth conceives. We are in effect, walking through creation.
Something’s being born every breath we take. There’s life being born all around us. And we’re part of a universal process. Everything is alive. All the stars we can see, can see us. And they’re sending us light all the time. It’s not just coming from that dwarf star; it’s coming from all the stars. And our elders tell us the light carries the energy and it carries information about loving the Creator and loving one another. All the 4-leggeds, all the tree people, all the water people. Everything on this planet is alive and well and has a mission to perform. And we do too. I travel to many Indigenous places to do ceremonies and to keep this ghost dance alive. We’re all the healers to help each other find the medium within which we can express that healing process to its fullest extent. That’s what I believe is happening with these (Cooperation) Circles, with these communities and with URI and all the folks involved with it. No matter how we articulate it or the poetry we use, I believe the goal is to bring us all together, into one theme. so that we can protect our Mother and figure out a way to sustain ourselves and to keep this dream alive.
I’ve learned so much from the honeybees I protect. We have about 600 hives right now. I learn so much from them. They sing to the flowers and the flowers open up and give them pollen. And then they take this pollen back to their hive and within this pollen there’s the dream of life yet to come. Everything is captured in these seeds, like an acorn dreams of being an oak tree. Each grain of pollen carries 30,000 processes of flowers! It’s such an amazing process and I’m so enriched by these honeybees, who sing and dance their way through life. And they’re only here for a short period of time. But it’s not each one of them. It’s the lineage. The bee says, “If I don’t do it, my baby will. And if my baby don’t do it, their baby will,” and so it keeps this process alive. They have more DNA than any other food source on the planet, except for possibly seaweed. Seaweed carries the memory. Bee pollen carries that imagination. So I believe if we remember who we are and where we came from, and can imagine a beautiful future for all of our babies, that there’s a process that has the possibility of bringing us a continuation of this incredible dream that we’re all involved with. And I want to thank you (URI) for putting this together because it’s a beautiful thing. I’ve just really enjoyed this conversation and listening to my family talk in this way. Thank you.
*environmentally-focused CCs at URI
