I AM A WIKASA WAKAN 

"I AM A MEDICAL MAN" – a wicasa wakan. Medical man this is a word that the whites invented. I wish there was a better word to say,
what "medicine man" means to us, but I can't find one and you don't, so we have to settle for it. A wicasa wakan must be with itself a lot and often.
He wants to get away from the crowd, away from the small, everyday things.

He loves to meditate, to lean against a tree or a rock and to feel how the earth moves beneath him, and how above him the weight of the wide
flaming sky. In this way, he learns to understand. He closes his eyes, and he begins to see more clearly. What you see with your eyes closed counts.
The wicasa wakan loves silence, he wraps himself in it, as if in a blanket – a silence that does not remain silent, which teaches him many things with her thunderous voice.
Such a man loves to to be in a place where he hears only the buzz of insects. He sits, face to face, and asks for help. He talks to the plants, and they answer him.
He listens to the voices of the wama kaskan – the animals. He becomes one of them. Something of all living beings flows into it, and something also flows out of him. I do not know
what and how, but it is so. I've experienced it. A medical man must belong to the earth, must be able to read nature like a white man a book.

EVERYTHING, WHAT YOU EAT, is packed in a plastic case, is cleanly cut and prepared for the pan, has no taste, and does not arouse feelings of guilt in you.
When you wear your fur or leather coats, you don't want to be reminded of how much blood and pain they have cost. If we killed a buffalo, we knew
what we did. We asked His Spirit for forgiveness, and we told him why we had to do it. We honored with a prayer the bones of those who gave us their flesh as food
we prayed that they would come back, we prayed for the lives of our brothers, the buffalo people, as well as for our own people. For us, all life is sacred.
The state of Dakota has its own pest control officials. They sit on a plane and shoot the coyotes from the air. They keep a book about
each dead coyote is entered in its notebook. The cattle and sheep farmers pay them for it. Coyotes feed on rodents, field mice and other small
Animals. Occasionally they eat a sheep that has lost its way. They are the natural waste reverbetors, they clean the land of everything that is rotten and stinks.
Whoever takes the trouble and tames them, for them they are good playmates. But if they stay alive, some people are afraid to lose a few cents – and therefore
kill them from the plane. The coyotes were in this land before the sheep came here, but they are in your way, for you cannot profit from them.
More and more animals are dying out. The animals that the Great Spirit has put into this land must continue. Only the pets, only the animals bred by humans, are allowed
at least until they are driven to the slaughterhouse. This horrible arrogance of the white man, who presumes to be more than God, more than nature!
The white man says, "I let this beast live, because it brings me money"; and he says, "That beast must die, I cannot earn anything from it, the place it needs,
I can use better. Only a dead coyote is a good coyote". The whites treat the coyotes almost as badly as they once treated us First Nations.

I HAVE THE IMPRESSION that white people are so afraid of the world they have created themselves that they no longer see, feel, smell or smell it
want to hear. To feel rain and snow on your face, to be frozen by an icy wind and to thaw again by a smoking fire, from a
to come and dive into a cold river – these experiences show you that you are alive. But you don't want to feel that anymore. You live in boxes,
lock out the summer heat and winter cold, you live in a body that has lost its smell, you hear the noise from the Hi-Fi system instead of listening to the sounds of nature,
you watch the actors on TV who are giving you experiences, you who have long since forgotten to experience something for yourself. You eat food that is
taste nothing. That's your way. He's not good.

BEFORE OUR WHITE BROTHERS CAME to make civilized people out of us, we had no prisons. That is why we did not have any criminals.
Without a prison, there can be no criminals. We didn't have locks or keys, so we didn't have any thieves. If someone was so poor that he
no horse, no tent or blanket, so he was given all this.

We were far too uncivilized to place great value on personal possessions. We were only aiming for possession swayed to pass it on. We didn't know any money, and therefore
the value of a person is not measured according to his wealth. We had no written laws, no lawyers and politicians, so we were able to
do not deceive each other. It was really bad for us before the whites came, and I can't explain how we can get along without the basicthings.
which, as we are told, are so necessary for a civilised society.

MAN, TOO, IS MADE UP OF MANY THINGS. Whatever the air, the earth, the herbs, the stones, all this is also part of our bodies. We must learn again,
to be ourselves, and to feel and discover the diversity within us. Wakan Tanka, the Great Secret, teaches animals and plants what to do.

In nature, nothing is the same. How different are the birds! Some build nests, others don't. Some animals live in holes in the ground, others in caves, others in
in bushes. Still others can do without housing at all. Even animals of the same species – two deer, two owls – behave differently.

I have looked at many plants carefully. Of the leaves of one plant, all of which grow on the same stem, none is quite like the other. All over the world, there are
there are no two leaves that are completely identical to each other. The Great Spirit wanted it that way. For all creatures on earth, he has drawn the path of life only in great size;
it shows them the direction and the destination, but lets them find their own way there. He wants them to act independently, obeying their nature and their inner forces. If Wakan Tanka wants plants, animals, even small mice and beetles to live in this way – how much more will humans, who all do the same thing, live for him.
be an abomination: people who get up at the same time, put on the same clothes bought in the department store, and use the same subway that sits in the same office,
do the same work, stare at the same clock, and, worst of all, their thoughts are similar to each other. All creatures live on
a goal. Even an ant knows this goal – not with the mind, but somehow she knows it. Only people have come so far that they no longer know
why they live. They no longer use their minds, and they have long forgotten what a secret message their body has, what their senses and dreams tell them.
They do not use the knowledge that the Great Spirit has given to each of us, they are not even aware of it, and so they stumble blindly on the street,
which leads to nowhere – on a well-paved highway, which they themselves expand, straight and straight, so that they can get to the big empty hole all the faster,
that they expect in the end to devour them."

Lame Deer , (1890-1974), was a medical man of the Dakotas, a sub-tribe of the Sioux Indians).