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.

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.”

 

Grieving and Praising Together: Lakota Tiokasin Ghosthorse and Roshi Eve Marko on Mystery and Caring for all Relations

Roshi Eve Marko reflects on the wisdom and teachings of Lakota Tiokasin Ghosthorse in relation to Standing Rock, honoring Mother Earth, and the profound mystery of life. Tiokasin Ghosthorse is a Lakota Sundancer from Cheyenne River Reservation; he hosts First Voices Radio, a program that appears on some 70 local public radio stations in this country, and travels all over the world presenting Native consciousness and values.

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 […]

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 […]

Native American Bearing Witness Retreat

Native AmericanZen PeacemakersBearing Witness Retreat July 7 -13, 2024 Zen Peacemakers 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 legacy and part of our dedication to growing in connection with the […]

A Gift of Not Knowing

Peter Pierson, a writer and a participant in the Native American Bearing Witness Plunge in 2019, offers us a reflective writing piece that shares a bit about how the practice of “Not Know” remained with him throughout his return home, long after the retreat had come to an end.