Emerging and Evolving as Relatives

Jace DeCory

Learn ABOUT (deep listening, information)

1. How do the Lakota view spirituality in connection with the Black Hills?

2. In what way are rocks, plants and animals your relatives? How does that effect your relationship with them?

3. What is “smudging”?

4. What is the origin story connected with Wind Cave? Inyan Kaga?

5. What is emergence? What do you mean when you say you come from mother earth?

6. How many different stories of emergence are there?

7. How do you see the change from Pte Oyate (Buffalo Nation) to Ikce Wicasa, |kce Winyan (Common men and women) as happening? How does this fit with theories about evolution?

8. What are the sacred places in and around the Black Hills?

9. What is the significance that “everything is sacred” and things just take “different forms”?

Learn FROM (deep sharing, transformation)

1. What is my view or definition of spirituality?

2. What is my relationship with the various rocks, plants and animals I come into contact with? Do I feel a kinship in any way to them? Which ones?

3. What experiences have I had in connection with caves, caverns or being underground? How have those experiences affected me?

4. Are there ways that I have “emerged” from one place or stage into another? What are those ways?

5. Are there ways I have evolved?

6. What do I believe about various theories of evolution?

7. What places are sacred to me or to people in my family?

8. If I see something or someone as sacred, how does it change the ways I relate to that person or thing?

9. How might seeing others as sacred but just taking “other forms” help me to develop deeper understandings of myself and the world around me?