Imagine my astonishment when I then read a biography of Sitting Bull, and learned that (1) he considered himself a community healer more than an individual healer, and (2) he was killed by a cop. The drum is decorated with crow feathers, from a journey in which it was explained to me that they are symbolic: the Crow people were traditional enemies of the Lakota people—Sitting Bull’s people—and the symbolism of crow feathers on the Sitting Bull Brigade drum is that Love conquers all.
I found myself doing some soul-searching about including this vision here, since my smidgen of Native ancestry is no more Hunkpapa Lakota than it is Cherokee, but it feels way more disrespectful to Whoever or Whatever sends visions, and to Sitting Bull himself, to omit it just because someone might yell “Appropriation!” Please feel free to join the Sitting Bull Brigade, always remembering, of course, that we’re not trying to claim Sitting Bull’s spiritual energy for ourselves, we’re attuning our energy to his as we do the healing work in his honor. The organization, if we can call it that, is totally nonhierarchical and small-“d” democratic. Or you might want to start your very own nonhierarchical and small-“d” democratic healing brigade under any name you like.
We may as well also mention in passing that Sitting Bull accumulated wealth for the sole purpose of giving it away, which is another good reason to attune to his spirit. This was a cultural thing, too, and one we might all feel free to borrow.
Sandra Ingerman is the kind of teacher who has tended to bring the rain wherever she’s gone, and she has told a story about giving a workshop in Alaska (if I remember rightly), when it stopped raining and she went outside at night and was overwhelmed by the myriad of stars, and called everyone around to come and see. And then she reflected that although we may have become accustomed to thinking that only a few people in our world can be stars, no one calls everyone to come and look at a night sky with just a few stars, we call everyone to come and see the whole radiant sky completely filled with stars. All of which is to remind us, when we’re working in a group, that we are all already stars, and none of us is shining any less brightly when all the other stars are shining brightly, too. There are people you may never have heard of quoted in this book, and haven’t they made valuable contributions? We are all called upon to shine.
You can bring this work to any group you already belong to—religious, social, political. In all cases, fellowship when we really practice it with our whole selves works the same way as all other healing modalities: it’s the Love that does the healing.
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