Tiospaye

"Relation."  If there was one word, one idea that I could use to describe what principles guide the traditional Lakota worldview, it would be "relation."

Each morning, after working the radio station and praying with the 3rd graders of Sapa Un Academy and my housemates, I return home in order to practice and study the Lakota language.  Anyone who can remember my days of Latin at Fordham can let out a hearty chuckle, because they will remember that my language study single-handedly destroyed hopes of the Dean's list for the first 2 years of my college career.

I am happy to say, however, that I have found real joy and passion in my study of the Lakota language.      Part of this has to do with the fact that, as I study the language, I am unable to avoid (as if I would want to anyway), the philosophical worldview that drives the language itself.  It has been a challenge, not only because it is a new discipline and thing to learn, but because it requires me to completely open my mind and heart to a new way of thinking.

I'm not just talking about ordering subjects before verbs, or expressing different gender endings.  As it was explained to me by new Lakota friends and by the author of the book I use - there is a difference between speaking English in Lakota, and speaking Lakota.  In other words, to truly speak Lakota, you need to understand the worldview it developed out of, the cultural assumptions, the spiritual tenets - otherwise, you are just using Lakota words to express a Western worldview, with all of it's assumptions and baggage.  This was why, when the United States government sought to acculturate and rub out the Lakota ways of life, targeting and forbidding the use of the Lakota language was something they focused on, often through viscous beatings.

In my study thus far, I have come to understand that the idea of "relation" is absolutely key to grasping the Lakota worldview.  Everything is expressed in term of relation - greetings are not simply a "good morning" (which has been translate as 'hihanni waste', meaning 'something good has happened this morning'), but rather an addressing of a person in the proper relative term.  This was one of the very first lessons I have learned, as understanding and respecting relations to others is important.  

Something that struck me as so strikingly different from my own American culture was the types of terms used to greet one another.  Typically, when addressing someone, even a stranger, they are given one of the following terms: tanhanshi, hankashi, sic'esi, cepansi (all of which have diacritics I have not been able to locate on the computer yet).  Each of these terms has been translated as "cousin," and is used depending on whether the speaker is male or female and whether the person being spoken to is male or female.  

"Cousin," however, does not really do these terms justice.  In my experience, while my own cousins are very close to me, they are clearly a part of another family unit, not a part of my immediate "nuclear family."  In Lakota, however, this is not the case.  For me as a male, to call someone tanhanshi or hankashi is almost the equivalent of calling them a brother or sister.  It is to recognize someone as family and give them that status and the respect that necessarily comes with it.  It requires that we treat them in a certain way, that we welcome them in and take care of them to the best of our ability.  In this way, no one in the Lakota culture was to be understood as outside of the group.  Connected with this is the Lakota system of tiospaye, which at a simple and basic level means the the care and responsibility we as Americans believe should be present in the nuclear family must extend also to what we would considered extended family.  In much the same way, the Lakota prayer-phrase, "mitakuye oyasin," which can be roughly translated to mean "all of my relations," expresses strongly the sense that we are related to all people, which in the Lakota tradition, includes the earth, the four-leggeds and winged creatures, the spirits, the plants and starts - everything that is has emanated from Creator and therefore is our relative and demands the respect and honor that comes with being family.

All of this is to say that I have been thinking. Uh oh is right.  I have been thinking about this notion of family, especially in regards to my Catholics roots and Jesus.  I have been reading a lot of spiritual-social justice oriented books and they have been inspiring and challenging.  Inspiring me to say that hope for something different is possible, and challenging me to declare definitively whether I care about that something different enough to make my own life the model.  To let these seeds planted in my heart by God grow and grow until they have exploded out and helped to plant these seeds in the hearts of others.  No matter how hard, how dangerous, how difficult it may be.

See, cause the God I believe expects nothing less from me.  The God I know IS demanding, IS terrifying - not because God is a bad or negative thing, but because the love that I have experienced from this God, the faith and trust placed in my by this God, has stirred up visions of something better - for all of us.  My God is too big to limit it to only certain people.  This God commands me to get on the rooftops and shout to all the people that they are beautiful and loved.  They were made for that very purpose, and so was I - to reflect the tremendousness of the God from which we come.

See, me and Jesus have never been best friends - he has never been much more than something like a unicorn to me, something so mythologized and devalued that I couldn't even understand what it meant to speak his.  But the Jesus I am discovering, here on the Rosebud, in the second poorest county in the United States - he gives me vision.  He says another world is possible, and this is what you might want to try in bringing it about.  Order your life according to what the least of those among us need - stand in solidarity with the poorest of the poor, those shunned and rejected by society, banished to the fringes of "civilization."  By voluntarily placing myself there, maybe more people will begin to ask if that is a true way to peace.  He challenges me to see everyone as family, just like the Lakota people here - the body of Christ, perhaps, is what i see lived out in the idea of tiospaye - that each of of us are integral parts of that body, and that each of use a truly "brothers and sisters" as Paul says, demanding the dignity and respect of that title.  To look at everyone and everything with the great love that God looks at me. 

JVC has been a dangerous place for me, because it is allowing me to think.  It is allowing me to expand my heart and my mind, and it is causing me to imagine and dream bigger and bigger with this God I am encountering.  

And it is a awe-ful and terrifying thing.