Re-releasing another classic masterclass

Tiokasin Ghosthorse on re-languaging regeneration

In 2020 I first heard Tiokasin Ghosthorse of the Cheyenne River Lakota speak. I was a featured speaker in the Global Resilience Summit, hosted by my friend and mentor Fleet Maull, and during the conference I had the opportunity to hear him speak for the first time.

It was revelatory.

So much so, in fact, that when Fleet asked me to participate in hosting interviews for the conference the following year, I agreed on the condition that I would be able to interview Tiokasin.

From this first conversation, which focused largely on what I will call living language, a friendship and a dialog was born. I have a single tattoo, should you care to know, of the Japanese word kotodama. Kotodama means ‘the spiritual interior of the word’. An awareness of the vibratory animacy of language has been a central part of my own spiritual development for thirty years.

Our first conversation was far-ranging, fun, and goofy. But it dwelled upon serious themes. As Wittgenstein rightly notes, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

Of the 2,500 most commonly used words in the English language, nearly two-thirds of them are nouns. What this means, practically, is that our language reinforces the notion that we live in a world of things.

What Tiokasin patiently pointed out to me, as we spoke, was that Lakota, a verb-based language, describes the motion of energies. This focus on motion dynamics of energy means that speakers of the Old Lakota language are describing a cosmos that is filled with relationships.

Not objects but relations. Not nouns but verbs.

In 2022 we were able to convince him to do something pretty unusual: namely to deliver a graduate-style short form seminar on regenerative language as an antidote to the colonial mind. This he was kind enough to do with about twenty-five of us present: it is truly a masterclass.

Here is the description we wrote at the time: We are greatly in need of new modes of relating with Mother Earth, with one another, and with ourselves, yet the limits of our language are often the limits of our world, and the perimeter of our stories circumscribes what we are able to imagine and therefore dream and create.

Many of us are trapped in prevailing modes and languages of domination. English, as a language, and the European thought paradigms from which it derives, brings worldview and thoughtforms forward that invisibly constrain our intuiting and relating with life, many of which are beneath our conscious awareness.

In this seminar with Tiokasin Ghostorse of the Cheyenne River Lakota, Peace and Earth Activist and speaker and student of the Old Lakota language, which he describes as a non-mathematical quantum mechanical language of intuition, we explore ways for kindling the indigeneity that resides within each of us, and birthing forth the language and thoughtforms required to move us out of our own way–out of narcissism, anthropocentrism, and self-interest–into a more transparent and verb-based relating.

We will retire thoughtforms and antique worldviews, co-generating a more vivid description of living energies of relating, inspired by the Lakota language and cosmology, and explore practices for implementing these new forms, ways of knowing, and ways of speaking into our life, work, and relationships.

The course includes three interviews (conversations really) that I had with Tiokasin, as well as four sessions of his teaching. It comprises about seven hours of video in total. About the course, one of our initial participants said, “This course is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It is very rare to encounter an Indigenous person who was raised with their original language and traditional culture. It is even more remarkable when that Indigenous person can explain eloquently in English how their first language—in this case, Lakota—holds within its structure the living relationships of humankind with all of nature.”

Prepare to be uplifted, astonished, and re-organized.