DAY 11 : MAY 23
Touch The Earth
The old people came literally to love the soil and they sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being close to a mothering power.
It was good for the skin to touch the earth, and the old people liked to remove their moccasins and walk with bare feet on the sacred earth... The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing, and healing.
This is why the old Indian still sits upon the earth instead of propping himself up and away from its live giving forces. For him, to sit or lie upon the ground is to be able to think more deeply and to feel more keenly; he can see more clearly into the mysteries of life and come closer in kinship to other lives about him.
~ Chief Luther Standing Bear - Oglala Sioux
Chief Luther Standing Bear wrote the book, ‘My People the Sioux’, first published in 1928, as an autobiographical account of his tribe and tribesmen. It remains a landmark in Indian literature, among the first books about Indians written from the Indian point of view by an Indian.
Born in the 1860s, the son of a Lakota chief, Standing Bear was in the first class at Carlisle Indian School, witnessed the Ghost Dance uprising from the Pine Ridge Reservation, toured Europe with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, and devoted his later years to the Indian rights movement of the 1920s and 1930s.
Click below to learn more and purchase ‘My People the Sioux’ from the publisher: