A Native American Bearing Witness Retreat with the Zen Peacemaker Order
This summer I attended a week-long "bearing witness" retreat in the Black Hills of (what is today called) Montana and Wyoming. I started taking an interest in The Zen Peacemaker Order after visiting the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi camps this past winter. Confronted with their incomprehensibility, I was curious about an interfaith group that leads weeklong stays at the camps where they hold ceremonies, meditations, prayers, share personal histories, and "bear witness." I read about moving encounters between the descendants of both Nazi guards and camp victims on these retreats.
I looked to see if these still took place. The Zen Peacemaker Order continues to lead groups each year to the concentration camps. They also organize expeditions to Rwanda, Alabama to bear witness to American slavery, and for many years, "street retreats" where participants live unhoused and with no money in New York and other cites. Since 2015 the group has organized Native American Bearing Witness retreats. Seeing that there was one coming up, I registered.
Manny Iron Hawk
Renee Iron Hawk
Wendell Yellow Bull
Grover Genro Gauntt
What ensued was sad, beautiful, fascinating, educational, and personally stirring in ways that continue to unravel. Since it was a program conceived by Zen Buddhists, known for their rigorous silent retreats, I came in expecting something similar, with many daily hours of seated meditation and ritual. But as I learned, this was to be more about listening, absorbing, learning, sharing, and befriending. To shape this process, The Peacemaker Order teaches three guiding principles:
Not knowing, bearing witness, and taking action.
Not knowing is meant to clear the mind's preconceptions, open the heart, and make uncluttered space for contact with the incomprehensible, or even the unforgivable. Bearing witness is the invitation to enter deeply, make intimate contact with the experience, and stand to face what is hardest to see. And taking action (I also heard taking loving action) is to respond skillfully, compassionately, and effectively.
Our home base on the retreat was a lodge motel far out in the undulating Black Hills region. People come here to hunt and ride ATVs across the majestic landscape. For Lakota Indians it is their ancestral land and a place of great spiritual significance.
After a round of meditation each morning, most of our days were spent outdoors, often seated in a large circle of about 30 people. A group of Zen teachers coordinated our movements but our hosts were three Lakota leaders, Manny Iron Hawk, Renee Iron Hawk, and Wendell Yellow Bull, along with two adult daughters of the Iron Hawk family. They had driven from their home in the region of the Cheyenne River in northern South Dakota near the Standing Rock reservation.
Wendell has served many roles in Tribal life, including as Oglala Lakota County Commissioner, supervisor of the Tribal Ambulance Services, and Chief of Police. Manny and Renee have also spent many years in public service and activism, including a recent successful campaign to return looted Lakota items that had been on display in a Western Massachusetts museum (as covered in a recent Washington Post article). Manny's great-great-grandfather was Ghost Horse, a Lakota warrior killed in the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890.
We held our conversation circles in the shade of beautiful trees by a lake and at the sites we visited, spending long enough in each place to feel its unique personality. Twice our sessions were gently interrupted by the arrival of a moose.
Our Lakota hosts taught about their peoples' history in the ancestral lands of the Black Hills, about their traditions and beliefs, the many devastating conflicts with settlers and the U.S. government and its military, and about the great leader chiefs, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Spotted Elk, Red Cloud, and others. We made a procession to a mountaintop medicine wheel where we held a ceremony and offered prayer ties we'd made, multi-colored fabric bundles of tobacco. We drove through the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation, bumping over dirt roads to a sacred rock formation etched with generations of ancient carvings, a place where visions had helped guide Crazy Horse in the leadership of his people. And we converged at the site of the Battle of the Rosebud where General Custer and his troops were outmaneuvered by Lakota warriors in 1876.
The weeklong "plunge" (as the regulars sometimes call the retreats) often had a levity to it, with people sharing personal stories over meals and long drives between sites. But there was no question we were there to grieve, pay respects, and reflect on our own places in the hemisphere's history.
To bear witness is to not look away from the darkness. Here it meant trying to have open eyes, mind, and heart to one of the great crimes of modern times and the devastation that perpetuates. Europeans arrived on a continent that was inhabited by a constellation of complex and well established indigenous societies. What followed was centuries of betrayal, displacement, infection, extermination, and devastation of the Native people. Today, American Indians are consistently among the poorest, sickest, and most marginalized of our citizens.
To stand witness to so many injustices, so much cruelty, such pain, a ceremonial or spiritual container may be the only way. As in any act of grieving we are aided by traditions that can guide us in the land of the unknown. For our Lakota teachers, it was clear they walk the history of their pain and struggle on a spiritual path. While Buddhism seemed still a bit new and mysterious to them, the contemplative tools of Zen, and the common spiritual ground that was set, allowed a group of strangers to gradually build dialog and connection.
This spiritual common ground was one of the things that most moved me. I hadn't gone in thinking of it as an "interfaith" retreat, but I found myself warming to the word. I enjoyed learning about each person's beliefs and practices and what they brought to the process. Our Native teachers showed us how their ancestral beliefs and traditions guided their lives, but also talked about their relationship to Christianity and love for Jesus. One of the Zen teachers was also an Episcopal minister in her home congregation. And my motel roommate was an elder in the Chicago Unitarian Universalist church where he led a Buddhist meditation group. The Zen teachers had set aside the Japanese-style robes they'd be wearing on a formal retreat, but brought the strength of their rigorous training and teaching skills in more subtle ways.
It felt so strong and richly human for us all to embark on such a delegation, held together by a common wish to confront the battered but holy landscape of our history.
As I write this it's been several months since the retreat. I observe how the journey has added depth to a number of areas in my life. My daily meditations have found inspiration in the Lakota's bond with the Earth and all its living relations. In the part of my job where I work with marginalized Black communities and young men, the principles of not knowing, bearing witness, and taking action have been applicable tools for doing work in traumatized communities. In the part of my job where I work on environmental issues, I find a revived reverence for the Earth's majesty and might.
And then there was a turn that took me entirely by surprise. Shortly after coming back home, I began studies in a sustainability-focused business school program which includes an intensive, 9 month team project with an external business or organization. I was amazed to see on the list of candidates Red Cloud Renewable. I'm now in the early weeks of a project with a Lakota not-for-profit, headed by the direct descendants of the venerated Chief Red Cloud, establishing green energy and housing programs on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation. From the outset it was made clear that an understanding of the history and cultural context, and an emotional sensitivity to communities in question, would be essential to being of genuine service. I'm very thankful for inadvertently enrolling in a week of pre-training that I can put to the test in the field of taking loving action.
Lakota and Zen teachers (the clown nose is an homage to Bernie Glassman, founder of The Peacemaker Order and a lover of the clowning arts).
Zen Peacemakers in meditation
All photos were taken by me. The four portraits and the moose were taken on a Rolleiflex camera with Kodak Tri-X 120mm film.
