A Ghost in the Machine – Meetings with the Lakota Activist Tiokasin Ghosthorse

I first encountered Tiokasin Ghosthorse at a Hudson Valley event to commemorate Indigenous Peoples’ Day a few years ago. I remember it well because I was ready to leave until he appeared. The event involved a succession of earnest but uninspiring speakers, but when Tiokasin arrived, everything changed.

We were seated in a forest clearing, and from the moment he took the stage, the entire space seemed charged with an energy that was hard to explain. The attendees didn’t know what to make of him; this charismatic Lakota man who spoke to them in clear terms about the grave missteps of modernity.

His speech was without rancor but clear and unequivocal in its repudiation of a culture of exploitation and its defense of the Earth. As he spoke, the trees suddenly seemed more vividly alive, as if they understood that they were in the presence of an ally. At times, the effect was almost hallucinogenic.

Earlier this year, I got to know him better. It had been his habit to meet once a week for a community breakfast held at a cafe in Kingston. The breakfasts were informal, with the conversation meandering from one topic to another. But whenever Tiokasin said anything, invariably those around the table let whatever thread of conversation they were in fall away, and turned their attention towards him.

What did he talk about? He spoke to us about the Lakota language, first taught to him in its feminine form by womenfolk who whispered it in secret because, at the time of his childhood, his people were outlawed from speaking it, even at home.

The US federal government’s efforts to destroy Native languages began in the late 19th century. They were part of a widespread policy of cultural erasure, which also saw Native children sent by force to boarding schools where they were brutalized and abused and taught to disavow their heritage.

Shockingly, it took until late last year for a sitting US president to finally apologize for this century-long practice, which was summed up most succinctly by Richard Pratt, the founder of one such boarding school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, who famously referred to it as, “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”

A language at war with itself

Tiokasin, too, was on the receiving end of this sadism, taken away to boarding school at age six, where he remained until he was 14, returning to his family only during summers, though even then he was required to attend a day school. While he has no interest in occupying the role of victim, he acknowledges that his schooling was “very militaristic.”

“You felt like you were just a number,” he said. “You didn’t feel like you were a person at all. What would you think if you were a young person and told you cannot be what your parents and grandparents are, what your history is?… It was like you were dead.”

He recalled sometimes looking out beyond the school’s fence line and seeing Native parents who had camped out there, sometimes in their cars, “just to get a peek of their little ones.” He recalled, too, that when news got around that a church at one of the boarding schools on the reservation had burned to the ground, all the Lakota celebrated.

So, he learned to speak the oppressor’s language, even though it didn’t sit well with him. It seemed to him like violent language, full of antagonism, and always “at war with itself.” His mother used to tell him that speaking English “hurt her face.”

At the Kingston breakfasts, he wanted us to understand that languages were not simply methods of communication. The language you spoke governed how you saw the world. And Lakota, as he was fond of reminding us, was so different from Western languages that to understand it intimately was to enter into a completely different relationship with reality.

He told us about the American physicist David Bohm, who saw an affinity between the insights gleaned from quantum theory and native language structures, with their emphasis on interconnectedness and flux. He said that in the old version of Lakota that existed before the language was written and codified, there was no word for “want.”

“The Western mind is driven crazy by this,” he said. “They think it’s human nature that people want things. But in the old ways, there was no need to want anything. They said, ‘Poison is simply having more than what you need.'” 

Patience is a virtue

This past fall, I was at Tiokasin’s birthday celebration. We met at a venue in Stone Ridge, close to his home. We sat in a circle and shared stories and music (Tiokasin is an accomplished player of the Lakota flute). It was, he told us, only the second time in his life he had celebrated his birthday.

At some point in the event, he told a story. Tiokasin is a natural storyteller who is comfortable speaking in public. He has had plenty of practice. For the last three decades, he has hosted First Voices Radio, a one-hour weekly Indigenous peoples radio show syndicated to more than 100 radio stations in the US and Canada. He has spoken on panels and at conferences across the US and internationally for many years. In 2016, he even received a nomination for a Nobel Peace Prize.

The story he shared was about his birth. It was 1955, he said, and his mother and father were living with his paternal grandparents and elder siblings in a log cabin they had built for themselves on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation in South Dakota. When his mother’s water broke, his father was not there, having gone away hunting with his grandfather. At the time, it was illegal for Native women to give birth to children outside of government-approved hospitals. So, his mother was stranded without his father transporting her by horseback. She couldn’t call on neighbors because the cabin was on a plot of land, isolated and far from other families.

This fact, too, was a consequence of US government policy, which had brought in legislation in the late 19th century that saw reservation land parceled off into individual plots, forcing apart people who had always lived in close proximity to one another. The US government’s purpose for the legislation – known as the Dawes Act, was forced assimilation. Only those who accepted a plot of land were allowed to become US citizens. Still, many scholars now see it as part of the ongoing theft of Native lands since dividing the reservation up into plots made it easier for non-Natives to buy parts of it at low cost from individual families.

As a consequence of these policies, on a blustery day in the mid-1950s, Tiokasin’s mother was forced to waddle three miles to the nearest government hospital to ensure the child she was carrying in her womb wouldn’t be taken from her.

During the journey, he said: “My mother told me to wait. So, I did. That was my first teaching: patience is a virtue.”

Premeditated ignorance

When I first heard this story, it was hard not to feel enraged on behalf of this mother, forced to struggle, heavily pregnant, for miles because of the inhumanity of a system brutalized through bureaucracy.

At some point, I asked him if he ever felt anger about the crimes done to the Lakota. Tiokasin Ghosthorse told me that when he was young, he experienced anger, but with time, he realized that when anger overtook him, he lost groundedness.

“It came to me that it was like boiling water,“ he said. “When the water is boiling, you can’t see your reflection in it, but when it calms, you can. So, you always want to be aware of yourself in any situation because that’s your intelligence, that’s your intuition.”

Away from the Kingston meet-ups, my conversations with Tiokasin took place at the home he shares with his partner of two decades, Jadina Lilien, a visual artist. On my way there one day, I stopped to get gas and noticed a Jeep Cherokee pulled up alongside me.

Looking at the car, I thought about all those other staples of American life that have casually appropriated Native words and references for their branding. It occurred to me that only a culture in a state of profound amnesia about its crimes can allow itself the affront of stealing the names of those it has annihilated in the gaudy pursuit of capitalism. I shared my thoughts with Tiokasin when I saw him.

“It’s almost like a premeditated ignorance, where it’s schooled into them to forget and dismiss anything living like Native people,“ he said. “It speaks of them not knowing who they are.”

“They think it’s honoring, and we know that that’s false because that is not how we honor life.”

I asked him what it was like for him to live among this dissociative behavior every day.

“I get up and have to speak a foreign language,“ he said. “That’s a nuisance, but it is not my agony. Just like the mascot issues, the appropriation; it’s a nuisance, but it’s not my agony.”

The agony to which he referred is the weight of guilt that America carries for what it has done and continues to do: the land treaties it still refuses to honor, the bleak reality of reservation life, where lifespans are shockingly low, and murder and addiction rates shockingly high; and the ongoing ecological catastrophe that US-led capitalism has unleashed on Mother Earth.

There were ten thousand Black Elks

He talked at some point about the book Black Elk Speaks, a memoir of a Lakota medicine man written in the 1930s by the American poet and writer John Neihardt. He asked me rhetorically why it was that Neihardt singled out this particular Native man.

“There were ten thousand Black Elks. So why this one?”

He then wondered aloud if it might have been Black Elk’s earlier conversion to Catholicism that had made him more palatable as a subject worthy of elevation by the white man.

Tiokasin, too, had experienced the dubious merit of being singled out in this way at different times in his life. As a child, he was the one member of his family put through the boarding school system, and as a teen, he was flown to Europe to represent Lakota at a United Nations meeting in Switzerland. The story of how he ended up on the radio is the crudest, most shocking example of this, when a man literally shouted at him in the street, “Hey, you’re an Indian! Would you come up and read these words about Columbus?”

The man was from a local radio station in Olympia, Washington, where Tiokasin lived at the time. It was on or around Native Peoples’ Day in 1992, and despite the offensiveness of the approach, he accepted it on the spot. But he did not say yes to appease the ignorant radio employee.

The call to do it had come a few days earlier when Tiokasin had walked with nearly 200,000 Native people in San Francisco for a historic gathering celebrating the ongoing survival of Indigenous people in the Americas, 500 years after the devastation unleashed on them following the landing of Columbus.

It’s your turn to speak   

Tiokasin said: “It was late afternoon, and an old Native man, probably from Mexico, wearing a little white hat and white clothes came up to me and said, with an accent: ‘It’s your turn to speak.‘ That’s all he said, and then he walked away. It was like he passed the torch.”

His appearance on the radio eventually led to his own show, View from the Shore, which KAOS Olympiastill broadcasts today. In the three decades since, he has been a singular voice for Indigenous people in America and abroad and for the Earth-centered worldviews that they hold in common.

As we watch, despairingly from the sidelines, as the Western-made model of consumer capitalism leads us over a cliff, these Indigenous worldviews, which the Western mind has for so long dismissed, look increasingly relevant, not to mention sane.

“The way I feel about it, all these things are happening because we forgot how to take care of Earth,” said Tiokasin.

And how do we learn to remember? “It starts with us,” he said. “In Lakota, we don’t have a word for a human being. The closest I can come to it is Wicasa [pronounced Wicha-sha]. ‘Wicha‘ means ‘star,’ and ‘Sha‘ means ‘gift.’ You can interpret it as ‘star beings.”

“Wicasa involves a connotation of relatedness, universal and cosmological. Everything that is seen and known is what makes you. It’s not about an identity. There is no word for human being because who you are is an evolution of how you treat life.”

To hear about the Lakota’s conception of humanness is to get a tantalizing glimpse into a whole new universe of understanding. Besides Lakota, there are more than 4,000 Indigenous languages in the world, many at risk of extinction, and the things they could teach us about how to live and relate might change the course of human history for the better.

But to learn those lessons, we (the Western world) must sit at the feet of those like Tiokasin, who we have oppressed and abused, and we must listen. Not because it seems fashionable or out of some false humility. But because it is not impossible that, our futures depend on it.

He once told me: “They say that the victors get to write the history, but Earth has a history and age that just wipes out all that [recorded history]. If we remain true to that version of time and stay part of that continuum, then everything they write about us is meaningless.”

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During the time that this article was researched and written, Tiokasin has been dealing with some serious health issues. To learn more and find ways to help, visit this GoFundMe page.

You can learn more about Tiokasin’s work via his website | Facebook 

The illustrations and photos in this article are by the visual artist Jadina Lilien and are reproduced here with her kind permission. 

Connect with Jadina Lilien via website | Facebook | Instagram