| Cannon Ball, North Dakota

Two Cheyenne River Lakota elders were hosts and active participants in the Native American-Zen Peacemakers Bearing Witness Retreat 2023 Wolakota Makasintomni Awachekiyapi Praying for Sacred Harmony and Worldwide Peace.
Manny Iron Hawk (Titunwan Okowozu) and Renee Iron Hawk (Tituwan Oohenumpa) of Red Scaffold, South Dakota, welcomed a total of about 30 retreat participants from all over the United States and from Europe. The event was held from Sunday, July 9 through Saturday, July 15, 2023, at the Medicine Wheel in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming and at the site of the Battle of the Rosebud in Montana near Sheridan, Wyoming.
The Iron Hawks have been affiliated with Zen Peacemakers (zenpeacemakers.org) since 2015. Within the organization they are revered and appreciated as Lakota elders. Their two adult daughters, Claudia Iron Hawk and Michon Shaving, also attended this year’s Zen-Native American retreat.
Since 1996, Zen Peacemakers has been conducting bearing witness retreats in Auschwitz, Rwanda, and Native American history locations where deep human trauma occurred and healing is endlessly needed. The intention of all retreats (sometimes called “plunges”) is to contribute to the on-going healing of intergenerational wounds. Bearing Witness Retreats are open to all, multi-faith, and multinational in character.
In 2022, the Iron Hawks attended the Bearing Witness Retreat at the World War II Holocaust death camp in Auschwitz, Poland. Read about their experience at Auschwitz at www.nativesunnews.today/articles/lakota-elders-bear-witness-at-holocaust-death-camp-in-poland/
This is the sixth year the Iron Hawks have been actively involved and/or hosting the Zen-Native American Retreat. According to the organization’s website, “Mitakuye Oyasin — all my relations –– is an essential Lakota understanding, and Zen Peacemakers is honored to continue deepening our relationship with the Lakota and other Native tribes…. Though formal programs began recently, they’re the fruit of an 18-year relationship between Lakota individuals and Zen Peacemaker members.”
When a Lakota delegation from South Dakota traveled to Barre, Massachusetts, in November 2022 to receive sacred belongings being repatriated back to the tribes, a group of Zen Peacemakers local to the Barre area helped pay travel expenses and attended the ceremony.
The specific intent of the Zen-Native American retreat is to bear witness to the traumas and tragedies of Indigenous people in North America. In advance of this year’s plunge, the organization published this statement on its website, “Our Lakota friends, with their deep reserves of humility, faith, and endurance, will show the way. We will meet them with deep listening, respect, and the intention to plant new seeds of caring, trust, and wellbeing for all our relations.”
To facilitate healing, participants at all Bearing Witness retreats rely on the Three Tenets of the Zen Peacemakers, which include: Not Knowing – letting go of fixed ideas about ourselves, others, and the universe; Bearing Witness – to both the joy and the suffering of the world; and Taking Action that arises from Not-Knowing and Bearing Witness.
According to Renee Iron Hawk, “Bearing witness means we look at something and we don’t look away. We listen. …” According to the Zen Peacemakers, the three tenets are a powerful way to live one’s life and respond to the needs of the world.
Each retreat is designed to support participants with Council practice, meditation periods, prayer sessions, and the presence of senior Spirit Holders who are available when needed.
Renee continued, “The Zens are very generous of heart. …Heart knowledge exudes from the Zen Peacemakers. They give their undivided attention and the speaker feels validated. The message is ‘I believe you.’ Then the trauma no longer holds you in its clutches. You are no longer a victim and have no need to blame.
“Each retreat is a spiritual journey. Every plunge is Spirit-driven. …Each event creates ‘wolakota’ – creating hope, balance, peace and harmony. …Change comes about by everyday average people that want to make the world a better place for our children and grandchildren and even seven generations forward…to honor seven generations before us.”
Manny Iron Hawk added, “The plunge is always a positive experience. They always listen to us. All people have their stories and at some point, stories need to be shared for life lessons.”
Renee said the group bonded together in a way that she had never seen before. They all made prayer ties together and took them to the Bighorn Medicine Wheel near the summit of Medicine Mountain in north-central Wyoming. It is both a place of sacred ceremony and scientific inquiry.
The Bighorn Medicine Wheel structure is 82 feet in diameter and made of local white limestone. It includes 28 spokes extending from the center to the rim, and a series of seven stone circles (cairns) – six at or near the rim and a larger (12 foot in diameter) cairn in the center. Artifacts and other archaeological evidence clearly indicate that Native Americans have visited the site for nearly 7,000 years.
The Crow people have stated that the Big Horn Wheel, which rests within their homeland, was already present when they came into the area. Oral history from several indigenous nations sets the Wheel as already existing long before colonial occupation, having been built by “ancient ancestors.”
Researchers have identified as many as 150 medicine wheels in North America. The Bighorn Medicine Wheel is the best known, largest, and most well studied and preserved. Various tribes, including the Arapaho, Bannock, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Crow, Kootenai Salish, Lakota, Plains Cree, Shoshone, and other tribes go to Bighorn to offer thanks, pray for healing, and other tribal ceremonies.
After several days at the Bighorn Medicine Wheel, the retreat moved to the site of the Battle of the Rosebud in Montana where Native Americans fought fiercely to defend their traditional land.
On June 17, 1876, near the headwaters of Rosebud Creek, Brigadier General George Crook was unprepared for an organized attack of over a thousand Lakota and Cheyenne warriors. The eight-hour engagement between Crook’s calvary and the Native American warriors was one of the largest battles of the Indian wars. Crook’s troops, who had come north from Wyoming looking for the villages of Chief Sitting Bull, were stopped in their advance.
Crook’s troops withdrew from the war zone to resupply. Eight days later, they were not available to support Colonel George Custer and his troops at Little Bighorn. The Lakota and Northern Cheyenne warriors overtook Custer and his soldiers at Little Bighorn. The total annihilation of Custer’s troops ultimately led to a vicious counterattack and to the Lakota’s losing the sacred Black Hills to the colonizers.
For generations before the battle, many peoples used the Rosebud Valley for hunting and gathering, including a cliff site used as a “buffalo jump” still marked with petroglyphs. Remote, quiet, and undeveloped, the battle site remains much the same as it was during the time of the battle in the 1870’s.
Near the battlefield, the retreatants visited another meaningful site on the west bank of Rosebud Creek called Deer Medicine Rocks, steeped in mysticism and historic significance. In early June, 1876, this was the location of Chief Sitting Bull’s visionary sun dance which prophesied a Native victory at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
The limestone surfaces at the base of the formation have numerous rock art panels, mysterious ancient images of tepees, grizzly bears, horses, elk, bighorn sheep, warriors and more. Some say that the images were put there from the inside out by spirits. Among the other images is Chief Sitting Bull’s unmistakable signature, a picture of a buffalo sitting down.
The Zen Peacemakers website says, “Each consecutive year (of bearing witness retreats) builds on the relationships we develop with our hosts. And our program participants have individually continued their relationships through communications and actions, such as a nation-wide clothes drive, social-justice collaborations, their presence at Standing Rock camp in Winter 2016, a members-led Bearing Witness retreat in Minnesota, building a year-round hot-house in Pine Ridge, and in many other forms.”
The Zen Peacemakers are discussing the possibility of a community service project at the Cheyenne River Reservation. For more information, visit zenpeacemakers.org/programs/native-american-retreat/