We left home in early April to pave the way for the summer recorrido (tour) that was requested by Teyuna mamos.

We did pagamento (sacred service, literally payment to Earth Mother) in Death Valley, California, Red Rock Canyon, Nevada; Prescott, Sedona and Tucson Arizona; Silver City, Madrid, Santa Fe, Ojo Caliente and Taos, New Mexico; Crestone and Colorado Springs, Colorado and Douglas,Wyoming.

Tomorrow I leave for the biggest pagamento of my life – Sun Dance, a prayer dance that was forbidden as early as the 1700’s in some places and incredibly until the 1970’s.

My Taino ancestors were the first hit by Columbus’s 1492 invasion on what is now Haiti and rendered extinct. My indigenous North American ancestors I know only as a reference in a “23 and me”.

I’m a book often judged by its cover – assumed a white women who’s trying to find herself by hanging out with people from other cultures. Here’s my newsflash – even if I was the pure cracker I look like, I’d still be you. Is it because it’s 2:20AM that I’m on a soapbox? That I want to tell the world I believe we are all one being? – that we are all connected? 

I’m glad that there are some who see through my skin to my soul and honored to be welcomed by Lakota Chief Izzy into his community to join in the beautiful selfless service that so many Sun Dancers do every year for all North Americans and for the planet Herself.

We’ll be dancing in what is called the “Yankton Reservation” on our United States of America map. Local signage claims it as the Yankton Sioux” reservation and for the record, it does exist. Someone recently said it didn’t. I couldn’t remember who, so I couldn’t locate it in a search for this post, but I did find a telltale document that illustrates how few rights the indigenous of this country still have – do you know they can’t even farm what is supposed to be their land?

I’d never been to the Dakotas until a few weeks ago. I was familiar with the devastating history of indigenous North Americans, but seeing the ugliness first hand was in a word, shocking.

May this upcoming week, the time of the Summer Solstice, Light of Lights cleanse the oppression. May we all remember that we are one race – human.

I’ll be fasting, dancing and praying for 4 days in South Dakota. I’ll dance for my ancestors, for you, for everyone I know and don’t know and for The Mother of  Us All, and I’m so grateful.