Q&A Session for Native American Bearing Witness Retreat 2023

In preparation for this in-person retreat, ZPI Executive Director Geoff O’Keeffe will hold a Question and Answer session. This retreat which will take place July 9-15, 2023 is part of a seven-year program during which we have visited several sites sacred to our Native American elders, and have been invited to share their history and culture. Our […]
Healing the Scars of History

Healing the Scars of History BY LINDSAY KYTE| FEBRUARY 9, 2023 Retreats are being held at Auschwitz, a former plantation, and a site where Indigenous people were massacred. Lindsay Kyte reports on how retreatants are finding freedom from their ancestral pain. Approximately a million people died at the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz II-Birkenau. It was the […]
Native Americans fight for items looted from bodies at Wounded Knee

Peace offerings of tobacco ties adorn the fence at the Wounded Knee Memorial on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota on Oct. 20, 2014. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post) By Dana Hedgpeth July 17, 2022 Getting them returned from an obscure museum outside Boston hasn’t been easy for the descendants of those slain during the 1890 […]
Zen Peacemakers Conversation with Lakota Elder, Violet Catches

Please join our Peacemaker community for a warm and personal visit with our dear friend, Violet Catches from South Dakota. Violet shares stories and talk about her work preserving Native American languages.
Reflections on the Native American Plunge 2021

Seven participants in this year’s Native American Plunge form a panel and share their personal impressions and insights as they reflect back on their experience on sacred land. The sharing and discussion will be moderated by one of the seven panelists and ZPI Executive Director Geoff Shoun O’Keeffe. Panelists: Geoff O’Keeffe, Ginger Fung, Jitsujo Gauthier, […]
Q&A Session for Native American Bearing Witness Retreat 2022

A Q&A Session for Native American Bearing Witness Retreat 2022 Wolakota Makasintomni Awachekiyapi Praying for Sacred Harmony and Worldwide Peace Zen Peacemakers International has been conducting retreats following the principles of Not Knowing, Bearing Witness, and Taking Action in Auschwitz, Rwanda, and the Black Hills since 1996. This program is a continuation of this rich […]
Connection Sustains Us and Forgiveness as Peacemaking: w/ Renee and Manny Iron Hawk

In this episode of the Beyond Listening Podcast, First Nations Leaders Renee and Manny Iron Hawk share stories around reconciliation, healing identity issues, and cycles of conflict. They speak to the significance of righting the wrongs of violence, and acknowledging the genocide, historical trauma, and false narratives about indigenous people for healing nation-to-nation relations. From […]
Tiokasin Ghosthorse: 2016 Zen Peacemakers Bearing Witness Retreat at Cheyenne River Reservation

Tiokasin Ghosthorse plays the flute at Simply Smiles, Cheyenne River Reservation during the Zen Peacemakers Bearing Witness Retreat in August 2016. During this time, Zen Peacemakers met the people of La Plant and Eagle Butte, visited the local youth center and International Society for the Protection of Mustangs & Burros, as well as worked with […]
Five Days Together on Sacred Land

by Geoff O’Keeffe To the east lie the Black Hills, to the west, the Bighorn Mountains. Between is a vast prairie: grasslands, sagebrush, lightly forested in places, sometimes lush, most often bone dry. The rivers are iconic, the stuff of legends: Yellowstone, Powder, North Platte, Bighorn. On this side of the Divide, all rivers flow […]
A Reflection from the 2020 Native American Virtual Retreat

ZPI encourages reflections from retreat participants, staff, members & others touched by our work and doing similar work from around the world, as part of the practice of bearing witness. Angell Deer, a participant in this year’s Native American Virtual Retreat, reflects on the bearing witness to the trauma of the stories told by the […]