- My name is John Eagle Shield, Sr.

I'm a member of Standing Rock Sioux Tribe or Standing Rock Lakota Nation, I guess the new term is gonna be.

- I'm Arlouine Gay Kingman, and I'm from the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation and I am the executive director, current, of Great Plains Tribal Chairman's Association.

- My name is Beverly, Stabber is my maiden name, and my married name is Warne.

And I was born in 1939 in Pine Ridge, South Dakota.

And I've been a nurse for 60 years and I'm still working and I still have not burned out, so I guess I won't.

- My English name is Faith Spotted Eagle and my Dakota name is Tunkan Inajin Win, which means standing stone.

And I am named after my great-great-grandmother who was descended from the Bdewakantunwan.

I am the Elder Council for the American Indian Science and Engineering Society.

And I have a minor in Biology, and I reside on the Yankton Ihanktonwan Reservation.

For many years, 20 years, I was an Urban Indian and then I needed to come home, so, I'm home.

- Hi, Jerome Kills Small.

(Jerome speaking in Lakota) My name is Jerome Kills Small.

My spirit Lakota name is Red Breasted Robin and I am happy to be here.

(Duane speaking in Lakota) - Hollow Horn Bear is not really my name.

That name belonged to a great-great-grandfather.

I am striving humbly to carry my great-grandfather's name, Hollow Horn Bear, Maó Héa in Lakota.

But in our customs and our traditions that we still have today, the name that was given to me by my family is Takuwakuwa.

Takuwakuwa, I will pursue something bigger, I'll go after the bigger one.

- I had my basic education, partially, at Pine Ridge boarding school and then Rapid City school system in the '40s and '50s.

And then when I graduated from high school, I went to nursing school at St. John's McNamara School of Nursing in Rapid City.

And I graduated in '62, so that means this summer, I hit my 60 year anniversary of being a nurse.

And I've worked all those years and so I have experiences that I wouldn't trade for anything.

- I graduated Northern State and went to teach right away in 1963 on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

And I taught elementary school.

And so, Oglala Community School on Pine Ridge is where I began my teaching.

And then later I transferred to Cheyenne River to Eagle Butte and taught there and then went on to Minneapolis to teach there and several years later, in the urban area.

- I was born in July 22nd, 1948, here at '48s at the old white hospital.

And I grew up in Little Eagle and I remember, oh, starting 1954, '55, I can remember back that far.

And I had to be five or six, but I remember a lot from Little Eagle.

I was raised by my grandmother and that's where I got a lot of my information amongst the Hunkpapa, there are I think seven different bands within the Hunkpapa, and I come from, or my family comes from the Wakan band of the Hunkpapa and of lately, we take it very seriously and we'd like to maintain our traditions and do our prayers and our ceremonies and try and keep that going.

So that's how I got here.

- And so I was raised by a grandmother and so I did not speak English growing up with her till I was five years old.

And I went to a country school for a couple of years while I learned English and then ended up... And my father was always present and he was a very strong figure in my life.

And he knew the old ways.

My dad absolutely refused to let me go to boarding school because he saw what happened to my family all the way back to Carlisle.

And so he was very astute.

He said, "There's no way you're gonna be hurt by those people in those schools."

So he made me go to a public school, which I hated.

I hated every person there, but he said, "You're gonna have to learn how to put up with them, anyway," so I did.

I graduated and the first place I went to actually was Black Hill State College.

And I was so naive, I didn't know they still sent your grades home.

So I was telling this big old fib to my dad, that school was going good and I was doing good.

He was getting my grades and I was failing.

And he didn't say anything to me 'cause he figured, "She'll tell me.

It's her responsibility to tell."

And so finally they put me on academic probation and pushed me out and said, "Go home until you figure out what you wanna do."

- In '54, when at the time the president, Dwight Eisenhower, he had legalized backed alcohol to the sale on Native Americans, then that was a devastating time period for our people, particularly when you're mixing it with uprooting families off of their homeland and placing them into cities and saying, "Make a go at it."

But with alcohol so readily available in the big cities there and my father fell into it.

And when my mother, she left about there and brought us kids back.

My grandparents were at the radio station in Valentine, Nebraska, my grandmother said, but one phrase to my mother, and she couldn't answer, my grandmother says, (speaking in Lakota) She says, "These boys belong to me.

I'm taking them and I will raise them.

You can raise the girls."

And my mother couldn't answer.

So my grandparents, they took me and my little brother and they raised us all the way till '61 when grandpa passed.

- Lakota intimacy was born in a single room dwelling.

And even the log homes were single room because you see one another every day, especially during a snow storm, sometimes you're in there for 30 days together.

So we have no swear words and we don't raise our voice because grandma and grandpa might be sleeping, or a little baby might be sleeping.

Sometimes we have grandma, grandpa, auntie, uncle, all the little cousins in one huge teepee, log homes too.

- I have two sons and they have given me six grandchildren, and I have eight great-grandchildren.

And we've been brought up to have a strong family background with our language and culture.

And I'm very, very proud of my sons and the families that they've raised.

And they're the joy there in my heart.

(Arlouine laughs) The family is everything.

And in our family, we've tried to adhere to our Lakota values and our spiritualism.

We practice our ceremonies and they're very important, and we know why.

It's who we are as Indian people, and that keeps us strong for whatever comes our way, whatever adversities or anything.

- When I was in school as a small boy and they asked me to read, so I read, "See, Puff, run.

Run, Puff, run."

and "See, Spot, jump.

Jump, Spot, jump."

Dick and Jane, Sally and Puff, mother and father.

And so those were the characters in the book, "Dick and Jane."

It was a reading book.

And so one day I must have had my face in a questioning look.

And Mrs. Albert said, "What's wrong, Jerome?"

So I said, "In our book, there's mother, father, Dick and Jane, Sally, Puff and Spot."

I said, "Where are the grandpas and grandmas and the uncles?

Where's the cousins?

They're just these people.

Like, they're all by themselves lonely.

There should be cheer and happiness and laughter."

I mean, I didn't say all that.

I just said, "Where's mother and..." I mean, "Where's grandma and grandpa, uncle and auntie and the cousins?"

And so she said, "That's in the next grade."

(Jerome laughs) - But I remember a lot from Little Eagle and like all the communities, Little Eagle isn't the way it is now.

People lived up and down the river.

People lived around the loop, as they say, in Little Eagle.

up river, up the Grand River, up Little Oak Creek.

And we didn't have the turmoil that we have today, right?

Today, I guess my biggest concern is that everybody lives so close together, there's always conflict.

But back then, when there was a meeting or a gathering, it was an occasion to get together and just visit, catch up on family, friends and relatives.

And that's kind of what I would like to see happen again here.

- I was raised by a grandmother that I mentioned to you from Crow Creek, and she was 104 when she died.

And so that means that she was born in 1876 and she actually, when she was dying, I was having my first child and she wanted me to let her know when baby was coming so she could let go of this earthly place so she could pass him as she went into the spirit world.

And that indeed happened.

And so I feel blessed that my, in a way, in spiritual way, my son met his great-grandmother.

And so that's really just carrying on the teachings that I got in my home, which at the time when I was growing up, it felt like the great mystery.

And I didn't know anybody else had... A lot of people didn't have the same kinda experiences that I had that were truly magical and miraculously.

But I thought everybody lived like that.

And as I grew up, I realized that it wasn't like that with everybody.

There was a lot of loss.

- The language was there, the language was there.

I hardly heard my mother speaking English with me.

Other elders, my grandparents, always speaking Lakota.

I can recall being surrounded by it almost all my childhood days I think it began.

I want to share something.

There's something I really feel strongly about this, something about midwives, because I was born at home and my mother used to always remind me all the time about the grandmother who brought me into the world, how in Lakota she uttered a prayer into my mouth when she took the mucus out and it put it first breath into my mouth.

So I reflect back on that a lot.

This might be the first time I'm talking about it, but I've always felt that that prayer, that little utterance that she gave me, has guided me in my life because it being in the essence of spirituality that she uttered that prayer and gave me life with that prayer in a sense is whatever the prayer was, it's something that I feel I have been following.

- That's one of the differences that I appreciate even more as I get older, is the way we pray is beautiful, becomes part of what's happening at that moment.

And not just words that's been memorized for a lifetime, not that they're bad, but after a while they lose their meaning.

And those days, the idea of assimilation went in every direction, not just in our culture, but our religion as well.

But they were all rote, they were prayers, but they were rote, just the same old words.

After a while, those words don't mean anything.

- In my career history, when I was trying to decide what to do, like all high school students do, my passion was working with people rather than machines or something.

And so I went into education.

So I've been in education for many years, been principal, superintendent and college president and...

But education, I found is something that is in everything.

I mean, now as I work with Congress and my work, we have to educate Congress as we work on sovereignty and our rights as tribal people.

And would constantly educating people on what is sovereignty, what are our treaties?

Why are we... We have a special relationship with the United States government.

We're not another race of people, we have a political relationship.

So it's constant education, whether it's formal like you're teaching in school or whether you're working in your careers.

So I've taken on some challenges and been able to, I guess do some achievement.

But education has always been my first love.

And like I said, education is in everything we do.

So I continue to educate.

- My love for nursing, evidently was early on because my mom told me when we were living in way out in The Boondocks in Anderson district with our maternal grandparents in that extended family as a setting, she said, "When somebody was sick," she said, "you would just go sit by them."

Even as a kid, I didn't do anything, just sat.

And so she told me this when I wanted to go to nursing school and she said, "This is what you were meant to do."

So that made me feel good, made me feel like I was doing the right thing.

- And when I was 12 years old, I was sitting along the river with my dad in the community that the Corps of Engineers destroyed.

It's called environmental racism now, but they put a dam in every... Every dam along the Missouri River mainstem is in a Native community, like Fort Yates, Fort Peck, Fort Randall, Fort Thompson.

So they put it deliberately in Indian communities that were thriving after the Indian wars, and they destroyed our communities.

And so we became homeless and they moved us to Lake Andes.

And I remember my dad sitting along the river with me one day and he was looking out at the river where the old community used to be.

And he said, "You know what, my girl, someday you're gonna have to do something about this."

And I told him, I said, "I'm only 12 years old, what am I gonna do?"

And he said, "You're gonna figure it out."

He said, "I know you're gonna figure it out."

And so I tucked that away in my mind and I thought, "Okay, I gotta figure out what I'm gonna do."

- By this time I was in middle school, getting through with middle school, going into the high school.

And so I was well embedded with the language, but I really wasn't using it, really wasn't using it until just with a few, if I go to some family's home or meet another one of the kids that spoke the language at school, we would speak it out of the range of the nuns and the priest.

But it existed.

And so I guess it was there until after '70.

And then when uncle started sharing stories about in the '70s and I didn't join up until the '90s when a lot of my life story about coming outta high school and Vietnam War going on, everything.

There's no work, no, I don't feel the boarding schools really academically prepared us to succeed in higher education.

And so a lot of us didn't go on.

I had the opportunity, but instead I followed a friend who was being drafted.

If he didn't enlist, we went in on a buddy buddy program and ended up going to Vietnam and coming home and realizing Indian American uprising and hearing a lot of harsh language.

But there really wasn't that much Lakota in that anger.

Now that I think about it, the anger over AIM, "The AIM Song," there's no words to it because many of the people that came out of the boarding school era at that time, they didn't know the language.

And I thought a lot more people knew the language at that time, but sadly they didn't.

Then realizing, trying to start my family and working and then finding I needed help.

This spiritual medicine man who helped me until he went home.

And Uncle Albert pulled me in at the university in 1990.

Then I realized that they were gonna be teaching the language and he said, "You need to help me with that.

You grew up with it, you know the language."

So I learned the methodologies and it felt good.

It felt good, "This is something we could do."

So I got started with him, team teaching, and the history and culture aspect of it.

- So visitors will come here.

Sometimes there's a fellowship of Christians come and they wanna go to the sweat lodge, and so maybe they want a different door for spirituality.

And I would agree.

So I went in there and I used my tobacco mixture.

Usually I use the families that live here, usually I use their pipe and I used their tobacco, but this day I used my own.

And they stay for about four days, they help us, sometimes they paint our benches at our amphitheater, paint that stage or waterproof it.

They do different things coming here to help us.

And so when they come, they want to learn the trade office, they wanna learn about our culture.

And so two days later after my ceremony in the lodge, a woman came to me and she shook my hand.

And said, "I wanna shake your hand."

And I shook her hand already when they arrived, but she come over and shook my hand.

She said, "When I went in that lodge with you since then, I don't have headaches anymore."

So I said, "Well, it isn't me."

(Jerome laughs) I have to be tell the truth.

I don't make believe, right?

(speaking in Lakota) it's not a good thing.

It's not a good thing to make believe.

So I told her, "It's probably my pipe tobacco," because I have the outer bark of the chokecherry, and that's got tannin in there and it's got medicines in there and it helps with headache and it's good to tan with the hides.

Takes away the smell of the hide when you're cleaning it and scraping it.

And so some things we use as ingredients to be able to make things better in our lives.

And one of them is getting rid of the headaches.

But usually we don't tell about that.

We don't tell about what we're using.

We don't overload information in one setting.

Some things we just hold to ourselves, if they feel better, fine.

But this woman was blaming me for healing her, and I don't wanna hear that, otherwise, my phone be ringing off the hook.

"Oh, he's a healer."

I don't wanna hear that.

I just wanna be a storyteller and I wanna tell stories about the plants.

I wanna tell stories about the incenses and nostalgia, things that help the body.

I think that's my duty, I claim it as my duty but I get asked to pray for people and name their children and wipe their tears.

Those are all rituals.

And so those are prayer rituals and that's what I do.

I use prayer rituals in my ceremonies and it keeps me safe.

It keeps me safe and honest.

And I love it better that way because I'm accepted as a ordinary little old singer and storyteller.

And that's where I wanna keep it.

But I help in prayers and that's where I wanna keep it.

- I was at a meeting a couple weeks ago down in Ogalala country and I asked the same thing, "How many of you have had the opportunity for animals to talk to you?"

Birds, insects.

And if you told somebody from IHS, they would think you're psychotic or something schizophrenic.

But that's the way we were.

That's the way we are.

And that's the part that our youth are missing.

They don't know the language.

And we're not the only ones.

There are other tribes that have the same problem.

Our youth don't know the language.

And even if they were teaching them, they have no one at home to practice with 'cause their parents don't know.

And for those places that have the Lakota language, its numbers, its colors, its animals, plants, there's no conversation.

And along with that is where you get your values and your morals.

And our youth just don't have that.

So we're missing a lot that should already be here.

And that's part of our concern.

How do we provide that to our youth?

How are we going to give them the benefit of our knowledge so they can become leaders?

- The biggest thing was that I went to a school in public school where they thought, they told us that Indians didn't do very well in education.

My math teacher, even though I loved chemistry and physics and math, he told me that a lot of Indians didn't make it in those fields.

And so he put me in general.

I said, "No, I wanna be in them, I like 'em."

And he said, "No, you have to go to general math."

And I begged my dad to make him let me take chemistry.

So I did.

I still love chemistry and so I made it.

But when I went to college, I bombed out in the courses like organic chemistry 'cause I really wanted to be a biologist, but they, I think they impeded me.

And so I had an opportunity to go to Washington, DC and they said that my grades before I got crazy were pretty good and I had high whatever.

And so they recruited me to go to American University in Washington, DC.

So I went there and I worked in Senator McGovern's office.

I was an intern.

That was pretty interesting.

And I think that kind of got me to my senses where I thought, "Okay, this is what they do.

This is how they have control over us."

And so I gotta figure this out.

How could I have influence?

And American University was such an amazing experience because it's like, there were so many people of color that it wasn't like what I grew up in with the public school.

And I felt like I was free.

Every day, I'd go down to DuPont Circle and grab my sign and protest against the war because that's what everybody was doing.

And I met so many different people.

And then from there, I decided I gotta straighten out my academic career.

- So when I was teaching in Minneapolis and there was a lot of problems within the city, our children were getting pushed out of school.

It was not a good environment for them.

There was a lot of prejudice and people didn't understand our Indian students or where they came from.

And so the American Indian movement was just starting at that time, it was 1969.

And so along with a lot of people in the urban area, they decided to start their own school.

And so we begin working on it.

I was teaching full-time in the Minneapolis public schools, but I helped work on the curriculum and develop it and helped wade through some of the white tape to get the school accredited.

And then my husband was the first principal, so we started the Survival School on Franklin Avenue.

And Franklin Avenue is where a lot of the Indians lived, and it's kind of the heart of the Indian community.

And so we started the AIM Survival School there.

And it was wonderful.

- I had gone to a couple of workshops where they talked about immersion, and I had been given that a thought.

And I says, "That's the way that I was raised."

It seemed like there was more to it in the immersion, but you just can't do a one hour class totally in Lakota.

It's gotta be almost an all day.

It's gotta be total immersion.

Once the kid arrives, the student arrives at the school, then it's gonna be throughout the entire day.

We started this immersion school last January.

So one of the most important things in this immersion school is creating a relationship with these children, identifying in Lakota who this child is, (speaking in Lakota) come here grandchild.

And you say, (speaking in Lakota) and so you start teaching them that what (speaking in Lakota) is, we're gonna start to use some to wean them off of the English language.

We're gonna use some and explain to them, "This is what we're going to start to do till one day you're not gonna need that English language.

We're gonna start to put this Lakota, everything there in Lakota."

So that relationship when they wanna identify something (speaking in Lakota) when they see me, it's Kaka Duane, Kaka Ronnie.

- So that's how I started my career in nursing.

I still enjoy it, obviously after 60 years.

My current job is with student nurses, all Lakota basically, maybe one or two other tribal, but they're all Lakota nursing students.

And I currently mentor 14 of the major students.

They're in their major now.

And that is such a enjoyable time to mentor these young women.

And we do have some men coming in pretty soon, so that's different to have Lakota men coming into nursing, but currently it's mostly women.

But the beautiful thing for me to hear is that they all wanna give back.

There's a feeling of wanting to make a change.

And that is part of the joy of what I do, is listening to these young women who have a passion for making change.

They're all future change agents because they see what's happening to our communities.

They see what's happening to our children.

75% of our children drop out of school K-12 in Rapid City.

We have to turn that around.

And part of that is to heal the people first so that the families can heal their own units, including the children.

- I realized that things changed in the 20 years that I was an urban Indian to when I came home and I realized that people were angrier, meaner and more violent.

And I thought, "You know what?

I'm gonna call this something."

Oh, wait, I remember I woke up one morning at Rosewood and the sun was coming up and I thought, "What could I call this?"

Because everybody is so pissed off and it's beyond anger.

So I named it red rage.

And so I developed a healing model of red rage, and I have been doing it since 1994 maybe, and I still do it.

- The children would come and we'd start in the morning with the drum and songs and then do their education, their curriculum and I think it's the way schools should be when you pay attention to the whole child.

- I really wanna make sure that we have some bonafide leaders that again, have a firm foundation of Lakota language, values, morals, disposition, know their history.

- When we think of tribal leadership, it goes back to earlier when I talked about what we instill in our students and our language and culture and our spiritualism.

It's our virtues or our values.

- Parts of what I teach is who they are as Lakota people and our values and how if they make their decisions, life decisions based on our Lakota values, their decisions will be correct.

Utilizing those values either in your personal decisions or professional, because they're very closely related to what you do in life.

So every part of it is teaching something to each student with each session of mentoring.

And so they go through all their courses and once they finish that, I ask about their clinical experience.

And that is my love of nursing has always been at the bedside, taking care of somebody.

And so I like to hear how they're feeling about it and possibly give them another clue of approaching a patient holistically.

When I say holistically, I mean, our way of thinking, physical, mental, emotional and spiritual.

As you remember that there's a spiritual side to your caring for each individual.

Many of them are fearful for their lives ending.

That's pretty deep and that's a huge responsibility for you to even think about and you're the caregiver.

You can ease that, you can ease it by what you say and the way you are caring about the person.

You can't pretend because it won't work.

- The importance of Lakota is the word itself.

It means allies.

So if you read in your textbook that Lakota were savages or cutthroats, don't believe it, because we're really allies of everybody.

We were so welcoming and kind and courteous, but if you mess with these societies, you're doing the wrong thing because we don't retaliate unless we're approached in a demeaning and forceful, aggressive way.

You don't do that to somebody who's friendly.

- I think our job is to teach like you do and you teach what a Lakota is and what we know and what we do and how we lived.

It's not old and unusable today.

It's relevant, even more relevant today than ever to teach that so that people know and have self-confidence and self-worth, especially our students.

- I guess if there's anything else I would share again, is to just reinforce, know who you are, respect your culture and your language and your spiritualism because that's who we are.

And it has kept us strong, our people strong for centuries, and we've got to instill that in our children.

So our values and our virtues of who we are as Indian people will remain forever strong.

- There's a little cultural flame that is burning inside of these children and that we need to feed this flame.

We need to feed this flame with who they are, their culture, their language, everything that's about them and their people.

Until that little flame is once again a burning inferno inside of them and they can stand up and say, (speaking in Lakota) "I'm Lakota and I am proud."