American Indians and other indigenous peoples have a long-standing confidence that they have much to teach Europeans and North Americans about the world and human relationships in the world.  They are confident in the spiritual foundations of their insights, confident that those foundations can become a source of healing and reconciliation for all Creation (48).

These words and the ones that follow are taken, with deep gratitude and respect, from A Native American Theology by Clara Sue Kidwell, Homer Noley, and George E. “Tink” Tinker (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001).

The circle is a key symbol for self-understanding in these tribes, representing the whole of the universe and our part in it. We see ourselves as co-equal participants in the circle standing neither above nor below anything else in God’s Creation. There is no hierarchy in our cultural context, even of species, because the circle has no beginning nor ending. Hence all the createds participate together, each in their own way, to preserve the wholeness of the circle.

When a group of Indians forms a circle to pray, all know that the prayers have already begun with the representation of a circle. No words have yet been spoken and in some ceremonies no words need be spoken, but the intentional physicality of our formation has already expressed our prayer and deep concern for the wholeness of all of God’s creation. There is no need to hold hands because we know it is enough to stand in the circle already joined together, inextricably bound, through the earth which lies firm beneath our feet, the earth who is, after all, the true mother of each of us and of all Creation.

The Lakota and Dakota peoples have a phrase used in all their prayers that aptly illustrates the Native American sense of the centrality of creation. The phrase, mitakuye oyasin, functions somewhat like the word “amen” in European and American Christianity. As such, it is used to end every prayer, and often it is in itself a whole prayer, being the only phrase spoken. The usual translation offered is: “For all my relations.” Yet like most native symbols, mitakuye oyasin is polyvalent in its meaning. Certainly one is praying for one’s immediate family: aunts, cousins, children, grandparents, etc. “Relations” must also be understood as fellow tribal members or even all Indian people. At the same time, the phrase includes all the nations of Two-Leggeds in the world and, in the ever-expanding circle, all the nations other than Two-Leggeds – the Four Leggeds, the Wingeds and all the Living-Moving Things of the Earth.

A translation of mitakuye oyasin would better read: “For all the above me and below me and around me things.” That is, for all my relations. (50-51).

From this point forward, at least in coming days, each post will conclude with these words: mitakuye oyasin.