Roshi Glassman, Zen Peacemakers Join Chief Looking Horse’s Prayer for Standing Rock

Sage from Cheyenne River reservation burned today at Zen Peacemakers offices.  MONTAGUE, MASSACHUSETTS, USA. Lakota spiritual leader Chief Arvol Looking Horse, the 19th holder of the sacred white calf woman pipe who has led in Standing Rock and has met with Zen Peacemakers last summer, requested spiritual leaders around the world to join him in […]

When An Elder Speaks: Impressions from Standing Rock

In September 2016, Roshi Anne Seisen Saunders, abbot of  Sweetwater Zen Center, San Diego USA and member of the Zen Peacemaker Order, visited Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota, Turtle Island (USA), the location of the ongoing historic stand taken by many nations of Native Americans in response to construction of pipeline on reservation land. This is her […]

Standing People, Rooted People: Peacemaking Among the Indigenous Cultures of Southern Africa and Turtle Island

Drawing experiences from different corners of the world, two ZPO members, one from the United States, Roshi Grover Genro Gauntt and one from Finland, Mikko Ijäs, share their stories of being welcomed by #FirstNations and the #indigenous peoples of Turtle Island (Northern America) and Southern Africa and how their appreciation of #peacemaking was affected by encountering these rich wisdom cultures and the individuals that embodied them.

Impact Report: Auschwitz-Birkenau Bearing Witness Retreat

Since 1996 the Auschwitz retreat has been an interfaith and immersive cross-cultural gathering event for over 1500 peacebuilders from different war-torn countries such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, Palestine/Israel, Syria, Native American Nations and over 20 other countries. This 2018 impact report details some of the many positive results of the program.

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 […]

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (Author)

The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples

With growing support for movements such as the campaign to abolish Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous Peoples’ Day and the Dakota Access Pipeline protest led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States is an essential resource providing historical threads that are crucial for understanding the present. In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: “The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them.”

 

What We Do

What We Do Some of us work with immigrants from Africa and the Middle East in the UK, Switzerland, and Germany, and have assisted in refugee camps in Greece. Some of us support the efforts of Lakota elders to revitalize their language and culture, and stood with them at Standing Rock to stop the Dakota […]

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 […]