Among my Crow Indian people there is a beautiful and very functional tradition. When a person has no children, then all the children are their children. This means both all the children of that specific tribe, camp or clan as well as all the children of Earth, which includes every being and thing upon our Mother Earth - the four leggeds, the wingeds, the green growing ones, the stone and gem people, those who live within the earth and crawl upon her, the waters and the finned ones: all things in the Great Circle of Life. As those of you with children well know, your own children occupy a large percentage of your time, and thus it should be so that our coming generations are raised with love and care. Those of us with no children have much more time to focus on the larger circle of life; we have that responsiblity.

Choosing Childlessness
I was raised in a situation where having children was pretty difficult. We were on the reservation and didn't have much money, and there was a lot of stress and dysfunction in my family situation. One of the things which resulted was a sense of it being stressful to deal with children. But on the other side of that coin was the native cultural sense that children are always blessed and welcome. Everyone who can has them, and there is never any question about that. So, my initial reasons for not having children were very likely not even conscious and came more out of the influence of my direct family than of my culture.

I was married when I graduated from college. My husband and I spoke often about having children although we were leading a very venturesome life. At that point we were not interested in children for that reason. The primary reason we didn't choose to have children was that we felt the school systems were in such bad shape that sending a child off to school was like a prison sentence, and had little to do with true education (which from its Latin derivation means to draw forth the wisdom of the child rather than stuffing ideas in). At that time we didn't have many alternatives to traditional schooling and both he and I, although in the educational field ourselves, were very despairing.

I was working on a degree in teaching and was teaching occasionally, sometimes in reservation schools, sometimes in regular schools. I didn't do a lot of it because I found the whole system very unsatisfactory. I knew there was some other way that I could contribute which would be more useful. And to this very day it would still bother me to send a child to most of the schools we have available.

Break Up of the Family System
As my life evolved, my husband and I were divorced. I went on to work as a counselor, feeling that I could offer much more this way than teaching directly, and then on into healing work. Through my visions I was awakened to my own native spirituality. Since that time, I have been single. Not having a partner is one very simple and deep reason that I haven't considered having a child. It is very difficult to be a single parent; I've watched friends who are single parents really have a hard time of it. One of the things that I started to realize as I matured in my own thinking is that we as human beings are really clans, family, small group people. That is the way we were meant to live - the way it is easiest to live. What we have done, however, is to literally push ourselves to the extreme of isolation and separation with a sense of "This is us, and those guys are them. We're right and they're not." - that kind of divisive energy.
When I began working with my northern plains medicine teacher, she was of the old school in the sense that although she was absolutely a shining light for her own people, she had a lot of suspicion for the tribe next door (to which I belong). It was a memory that our people had been killing each other a few generations back . So her medicine was very, very specifically for her people. It wasn't for anyone else. I became her student because my dad married into her family. So it was one of those odd situations where I was family, yet the only way that she could be comfortable with me was to say, "You belong to our tribe now." In her mind she made me one of them. That was her way of being able to deal with me, and to be okay with me as an outsider. So it echos again and again, the sense of being OK with one's own small group and having very negative attitudes towards others.

What is presently the case, however, is that we've actually broken up our families, our clans, our small groups and in most cases our tribes. Everyone is scattered to the winds. All are mixed up, whether it's Asian, or Indian, or German or Scot. Whatever. We're all mixed together as an American people, and as a people all over the world. We are in this position where there are single mothers who don't have anyone around to be helpful - either close friends or extended family. There are women, even if they have a husband, sitting at home with children by themselves. So it seems to me that we have taken it to a real extreme. Although this is very difficult for all of us personally, I believe it is a gift from Spirit -that there is a positive reason for all of our movement and evolution. What I see as the reason for this isolation is that we had to break down the closed family system in order for us to understand that our next door neighbor is our sister, the old woman next door is our grandmother - each of them is part of our family. The breakdown has taken place in order for us to understand family at a much larger level. And what we are being asked to do right now is to become one family. White Buffalo Woman gave our Lakota people a sacred rite called Hunkapi, the Making of Relatives. It involves taking someone who is not your blood family to be your family. Examples might be taking a wife or husband, adopting a sister, an aunt, a father. Our present task as two-leggeds is to do a Hunkapi with all our relations in every kingdom of Earth.

Extended Family
Personally, it has been disturbing to me to think of having a child without the support of an extended family. When I go home to my reservation and home to folks to who are still much more family oriented, it's so wonderful because Grandpa is always there happily taking care of the little ones for a working mother. Grandpa usually seems to be the one who has those little tiny ones with him. Once they get a little past diapers then they're always with Grandpa. He's with them and it gives his life meaning, joy and continuity. Or if a sister or cousin isn't working, she works with the kids and takes care of them.

It is also very special that children themselves are taught to take care of each other. Anyone who's born after you, whether it's two minutes or two years or ten years, is in your charge - you're responsible for taking care of them. Around many of the native families you'll see stair-stacking of children all taking care of each other. The older children are there watching out for the younger ones, down and down until you see a little two year old packing around a tiny one year old. This creates a chain of loving responsibility and caring, a natural connection. A group of children out playing is much more innocent and safe, much more cared for. They're not just running wild, they're all taking care of each other. The bigger ones would have the sense to go get help if it was needed. They can spend time in and around the village or the town because they are taking care of each other.

And because everyone really understands that all the children belong to everyone, each person is a peripheral babysitter: if you see a child doing something dangerous you don't say, "Well that's so and so's kid, and I shouldn't interfere." You parent them. Possesiveness about children is so widespread in the wider society that people don't dare say anything. I'm very different about that. If a child is in my house and they're mis-behaving, I discipline them. I don't actually care what their parents say. If the parents say anything, I say, "Well I think you ought to learn to handle them better, or teach your child respect," or whatever. But a lot of people are very uncomfortable with that, they're very possesive. It's their child and they can do what they want with that child and no one else should do anything with that child. It's even part of our insurance laws. A little kid could get hurt, and if you even touch him or pick him up to help, there's a possibility of law suits. We've gone to a bizarre extreme.

So it's been really difficult for me to think of having a child without an extended family, because that is such a natural, wonderful sharing. And to me it's so difficult to think of having a child with me as the only influence on it. I think the child needs to see a wide variety of possibilities of behavior and living and life - so that their aunts and uncles and grand-pas and neighbors and everyone has influence in the native way. In some tribes it is even set up so the father is just a really good friend to the child, while the uncles are the disciplinarians. There are many, many different ways of having those relationships so that they can be wonderful, clear, deep and joyful.

Being with extended family or support communities means, of course, that there are many people to do the different tasks. It isn't all up to one person. I have chosen to be out in the world, on the road much of the time, not living with a family or clan group, and as of yet haven't set up or found a community where I want to live. So it feels very unnatural for me at this point to think of having a child. Maybe it's just because I'm used to being on my own and totally free to do what I want. To think of being responsible for the care of a child 24 hours a day makes me feel a little crazy. Most people have gotten numb and habituated to the fact that that's the way it is. They've forgotten to even want an extended family, a group or a community that is more caring. We just get habituated to the way it is. It's like polluted air. A lot of people in the world just don't know anything different. I really think the wave of the future is a move into smaller communities, a small town kind of energy. Such a living situation can be less closed and parochial than it was in the old days, and yet allow the feeling of group, family, neighbors, clan, people who care about each other and are responsible for each other within an area.

All My Relations
I try to reconcile this vision of clans, family, small groups with the desire to not fall back into exclusiveness. Communities are trying to gather, are experimenting and trying to live that kind of life. There are people from many avenues, many cultures; there are many differences in them and thus it's much more difficult to get into one set pattern and think everyone else isn't OK.

My hope is that first of all we're evolving as a human conciousness, all of us. I really do believe that there's an energy or a vibration coming in and moving us. With our world growing so small through mass communication and other technologies, it is becoming quite difficult to deny that we are one family. It is simply the basic, basic, basic spiritual law - the spiritual truth. One of the ways our native people express this is that "when the world was created, the only law given by Creator was that you should be in good relationship with each and every thing, in all deeds." It's that idea of Mitdakoyasin, "All My Relations." We've forgotten that again and again.

Yet we are in a beautiful process of evolving. My teachers talk about self-realization, which is to be comfortable with your self, your feelings, your intention, your talents, your abilities, to be yourself in a very simple way although that seems very difficult for us. That's the first level of evolvement. The second level is what might be called God Realization. And that's the idea of "Mitdakoyasin, All My Relations" - to deeply know our relationship to everything. I think true enlightenment is to actually have the experience of being one with everything and be able to carry that in your life. So I think that's where we're headed, toward a recognition of oneness. That will surely make a difference in how we relate to each other and all the children.

In the old days I think one didn't very conciously choose not to have children. Marriage was a standard way of being and children were an obvious part of that. However, if for some reason you couldn't have children, or didn't, or your children were lost in some way, then among my people you became parent to all the children. That way seems very profound to me, and it's something that we certainly don't practice very much in the wider culture. Yet this would be very useful to people of today. I see so many young women want to settle down, maybe have children. They say, "Well, I don't have any children, boo-hoo, and on and on," and feel a great loss. I say to them, "Does your sister have children, does your neighbor have children, does your best girlfriend have children?" And they say, " Yes." My reply then is, "Well, how many days a week do you take them? How often do you take care of them? How often do you take them places? How often do you share with them? How often do you enjoy and share the children that are already there? How often do you make yourself available to them? How often do you extend your love for children out to the children present with you now?" And often the answer is, "Well, never."

I'm not even sure why they don't become involved with the beautiful children already in the world. I think it has to do with the proprietary picture about people and their children. Yet that's easy to break through, especially if you're a good friend. I know nothing more wonderful than to say to my girlfriends, once a month at least, "Why don't you send the kids over for the weekend?" What a relief, especially if that mother or that couple doesn't ever have anyone to take care of their children, unless, of course, they pay for babysitting. For a lot of children, especially if they like their friend or their aunt or whatever, it's an exciting adventure to come visit, to stay and be in a different environment. And what a wonderful gift to the couple or the single parent to have two days free! I don't know why people don't do it. There's something odd. And I think part of it is the strange sense that parents are parents, and those who are not, are not. And those who are not don't have any idea of what it's like to have those children around all the time. They don't have a sense of the stress of it, and how difficult it is sometimes.

A girlfriend of mine has a little daughter. She works and is on the road and sometimes asks people to take her child for 2 or 3 or 4 days. She's a native and isn't living in a native community. She was just blown away when a person who plans to take care of the child for four days said, "Well, I wonder if there's anyone else who could take her for part of a day, because I'm going to need a break." I know there's some of that experience in me, because if you're not used to having children around at all, it can seem like a lot to have an active little person in your space. So there's this strange separation where we don't even know what it's like to have a child around if we don't have "our own" children. Sometimes it's because we're not really mingling with people who have children. Things just sort of separate out. In the wider culture you always take the kids to the babysitter; you never take them with you. So they're either in your personal family or they're at a babysitter. At social events or at gatherings, there isn't that sense of children being a part of life.

So one of the really profound things for people who don't have children and who want them is to get some good experience by making themselves available to the children around them. Also, those who consciously choose not to have children, whatever their reasons may be, need to have an understanding that the children are a gift from spirit and a gift from mother earth to all of us. They're the continuation of our family on earth, and as such we all have a responsibility to them. I feel that if I had chosen, especially in the last ten years, to have my own child, then I would have not been out there working in the way I have in the world for all the children. If I had one child to take care of and put in school , etc., I would have been tied in one place and that one focus. There's an enormous amount of energy and attention that goes into raising a child, and I would have wanted to give myself fully to it. Had I chosen to have a child, then for quite a few of those years anyway, the opportunity would have been eliminated for me to be out, to be teaching, to be helping move us toward awakening in the world. I did a 25 day fast a couple years back when I felt a strong call to have this child that psychics say is hanging around waiting. I cleared myself as much as possible, and asked Mother Earth what she needed right then: me out teaching, or me to mother a child. She encouraged me to continue my teaching in the crucial situation in which we find ourselves on Earth, and suggested that later in my life I will have ample opportunity to interact with children.

The Rainbow Bridge
I like to say to people that I work for Mother Earth, and I subcontract myself to everyone else. I experience Earth as mother, as alive, as incre-dibly beautiful and abundant, and that we have become alienated from her in many ways. I'm from a native background in that sense, and carry the messages of loving our Mother Earth and being one family upon her. And if, in fact, Earth is mother, which it seems to me very obviously she is, then certainly I and all of the two-leggeds, all the humans on Earth are onewe're all children of Mother Earth and Father Spiritand so are the trees, and so are the birds, and so are the deer, and so is the water, and so are the crystals, and so is everything.

I'm working toward and hoping to awaken people to this under-standing. It's ecology; it's the deeper ecology that connects us in incredible power. When we're all aligned, there's enormous power. When we're separate and fighting and tearing and cutting and destroying, there isn't, there is only force. We're starting to see that we're literally poisoning ourselves, and cutting off our breath and our air. I want to help awaken people to the full relationship we have with all things around us and with each other.

I've been called a "child of the rainbow" - I'm of mixed blood. I have several kinds of Indian blood and several kinds of European blood. So I feel like I was born literally into a body that is the representation of the connection of everything, that we are one family. I've been told that in order for us to bridge over into the new time which is imminent , we need to build a bridge of light, of bridge of rainbow light. It is important for us to remember that a rainbow is not just three colors or four colors; it isn't eliminating any one color and saying it's not OK or they're not OK. It must literally be a bridge of all the colors, all peoples, all things. Everything has to be included.

So we're creating a bridge of light, a rainbow bridge into a new time. My work is about this at every different level you can imagine - of understanding and bringing in light, and acknowledging the light and life that lives in everything. The Great Spirit lives in everythingme and everyone else, and we must learn to acknowledge this light . So that's my work in a lot of ways. I do individual healing, shamanic work, outdoor questing, and ceremony, but it's all focused on learning to be fully human and learning to be truly children of Earth, and that means having a sense of connectedness with everything around us. A really powerful metaphor is the circle, and in the re-emergence of native ways that circle has come into much more prominence and usefulness. As each of us actively step into our own circle (or hoop, as Black Elk called it) - as we come to dance and sing and pray together - we can extend these circles our consciousness to include the Great Circle of Life.

Circle of Life
One of the things I've been doing is a cycle of four pledged ceremonies in which we dance in a Mother Circle. We dance in Montana and have a certain focus, plus putting information out all across the world and inviting people to do their own circle at that same time - in consciousness we literally are one circle. It's the basic idea of critical mass - that more and more and more of us understand that we are connected over time and distance, and that we can focus our attention on one thing and really effect powerful change.

One of the fun learning experiences we have with some of the teen-agers here who run around with their shoe untied or kind of sloppy is that when we get to dancing in a circle, pretty soon somebody is stepping on those shoelaces. We stop the circle and let them tie their shoes, and I make a point of saying that if our shoelaces are untied, it's going to stop the whole circleor whatever happens to any one of us really happens to the whole circle. That's a part of White Buffalo Woman's laws - her reminder that since we are all related, anything I do effects everyone else, and anything I do to anyone else effects me as well. So I've been doing a lot with those circles and ceremonies - teaching about the circle, about the family, about the earth.

One of the things I'm doing right now is spending a little more time at home, really exploring my own experience as part of a family, and releasing some of the dysfunctional patterns I got as a child. I see many people doing thatbreaking the chains. One of the ceremonies I did was called "Breaking the Chain." We moved toward breaking the chain of generational dysfunctions, like alcoholism, violence, abuse - all of those things we find in many (almost every) American family. We looked at how we can live our lives so that we break the chain - so we don't pass the dysfunction on to our children, or people around us. Perhaps some of the impulse for me to not have children was to break that pattern, to break the chain.

The New Human
My partner and I vision creating together a retreat center, and having children there, whether they would be adopted children, or children who just came in for a short time. We are moving toward more actively working with children. Consequently I want my own family patterns to be a lot more in harmony, so that my day to day interactions with these children and with other people are modeling something clear and powerful, rather than dysfunctional.

The children are the new generation, and I have a really strong sense that this is a completely new people coming - this is a new kind of human being. One of my dedications is to make a space where children have an opportunity to show us this new human being and to teach us, to make that space as clear as I can. There are so many possibilities of extraordinary ability and other things that children are showing us through simple physical things where they're developing very rapidly. I feel they have so much to offer. So much, in a sense, magical. An ability to create their own world. I feel that's so important for the teenagers. A friend of mine in Santa Fe who has been working a lot with children says that eleven out of twelve children that she works with for just a short time, mostly 12 to 15 year old kids, can literally make it rain any time they want to. I really feel that we all possess these extraordinary abilities that the Great Masters have told us that we were to develop now. We need to let them come forth. Let the children teach us.

Sometimes when I look at the drought situation in the world, and at other things, it seems to me that if we can move toward looking at, working with, and learning from these children, we will learn some things that we very much need to be doing right now. Since we, as humans, have done the damage to the water cycles, perhaps we can find some really powerful and positive ways to step in and help the rains and the trees come back. Teenagers are often feeling totally alienated, lost; they don't know whether the world's going to blow up in five minutes, they don't have any way of contributing because there's been no way that they have learned to work or share or give. I think those children would be so thrilled be able to create rain for a drought country, to do things that are quite extra-ordinary and that would absolutely show something very powerful to the adults. I really think that children are where we need to be headed, and that they have so much to teach us right now. Everyone can benefit by having some sort of meaningful contact with kids.

Maybe some of the distortions that are coming out now among teenagers are actually signs of the increasing power and sensitivity that they have. It hasn't been channeled and appreciated and respected, so it comes out in very bizarre forms. I'm of the old school - having been brought up on a ranch, I believe that children need to have chores. They need to have things to do. They need to have ways to contribute so that they actually have a feeling of being a meaningful, contributing part of their environment and their life, to feel that they have power and that they have ability in their world. So many children now aren't even asked to take out the garbage. There's no sense of really doing, giving, sharing. The kids have not been given any way to contribute, and I think that giving them a way to contribute would be one of the powerful ways to tap that amazing ability that I'm quite sure they have. We probably all have it, but in some of us it's atrophied or never developed very much. And in these new people, these young ones coming in, there's such a remarkable opportunity to explore this ability, to open it up. Like when there's someone who can do something like bend spoons, a lot of kids go "Oh yeah," and bend spoons without a second thought!

I think that we're the same. If we're around a bunch of kids doing something, we think, "Well, we ought to be able to do that if kids can do it." I think they will be our teachers in that way, so that we will learn some new and different ways. There are some interesting things going on in that lightI've been involved with some folks who are connecting Russian and American schoolchildren. Teenagers, specifically, and these kids are so amazingthey just want to know each other, and they feel like family. They're just interested in relating as human beings and connecting. They already feel connected, and they're interested in each other's cultures, and on and on. It feels like, in many ways, people are starting to get smart, and the children are leading in the connection between our peoples.

There's tremendous need for expanded dimensions in parenting. When somebody talks about parenting, they don't even consider many of these things. A school at home was having a chapter on parapsychology in their psychology books. They invited a friend of mine who's very psychic. So she spoke with them, and she said that when she finished her little half hour talk, it was amazing because the teenage boys were saying "What can we do? Can we get together? Can we work on this stuff?" I have the sense there is an enormous group of kids wanting to do something. Anyone who has that ability could teach it. It's just like in the old days, among the native tribes; whoever knew how to do something, taught everyone. Parenting can be a way of teaching and sharing, so that everyone begins to share what they have and to work with the kids. It becomes much more meaningful than the way we are doing it now.

Children Parenting Us
I do have a certain wonderful sense of the children parenting us. It's almost like a new human coming in - a more evolved, advanced human coming in through these children who will school us "old children," who will awaken us. In parenting, we're usually thought of as the more envolved one and we're usually helping evolve the young children; yet I have a sense of this interesting turn-around where, if we can allow it, these children can parent us into new possibilities. I do believe that we are moving into a new sense of being human, and that these new people coming in are going to be very different. A friend of mine said that we (the older generation) are what he calles "proto-mutants," and the children behind us will literally be "mutants" - that they will be totally different than their grandparents. They will be a new human being. We've been "homo-sapiens," and I would like to think of the new ones as "homo-harmonius" or something just as wonderful. There will be a recognized difference; there will be a jump. The rainbow bridge is moving us into a whole new level. It will be one of harmony and oneness. I do believe that is our opportunity on Earth right now - to become one family. And certainly working with the children and parenting is one way to do that. One of the things I've thought that would be great is for every family across the earth to open their doors and let the children roam freely. After high school, we could let them travel internationally - let them move, allow them to shift and change and be and experience everything around the whole world that they want to experience by having an open door wherever they are, so that all the children become our children. For a certain amount of time, they would freely move to get that experience of connection, and then they might come back, or go wherever they decide to, and settle into a life that is very clearly connected with people all around the earth.

Grandmother Lodge
It's exciting. I think we're getting all kinds of boosts from Spirit and from Mother Earth to move us that way. We can be active in that process of caring about and parenting everyone around us. I think it's going to move us forward into a much more beautiful life than we've had. One of the things that happens when a woman moves through menopause and into what we call the Grandmother Lodge, is that she does the same kind of thing as someone with no children. In a sense she's finished with her children. She's finished with her child rearing. She's finished with her specific personal family. So when she moves into the Grandmother Lodge, she moves into an experience of being in charge, being responsible of all the children of earth. That's her charge as a grandmother. The Grandmother Society looks around to see that everyone is cared for and nurtured, not just their children or not even just the children of our family or our clan or our small group, but the children of all the Earth.

I have taught for a long time about Moon Time and Moon Lodge -women's ways concerning using the menstrual as a visioning cycle. What I'm starting to understand now is that the next level for me is to teach the "grandmothers," teach those who have gone past their moon time, past menopause. It's really important for them to look at and be willing to use their lives in the service of all children and give meaning to those later years. There's so much power in those later years, and that's all been dissipated through the way we look at women"over-the-hill"all that kind of crazy stuff. One of the things I'm doing right now is initiating women into this Grandmother Lodge and into the understanding of using their power and their wisdom and their understanding to really stand up for the children of all things. I feel like there's this wonderful, natural groupand certainly the grandfathers too, but my teaching is more for the women...who are deeply connected to the children of all things. If all of our women past menopause around the world could have their total focus be peacefulness and relationship and taking care of the young of all things, then something very powerful would happen.

Many, many of us are a rainbow mix. Many of us carry many, many different cultures and backgrounds within ourselves. Sometimes we tend to feel isolated. We don't feel a part of things. What we're starting to understand is that all of us are a family who are of mixed blood, and who are intercultural children. Instead of feeling isolated, we can begin to understand that we are a new family, and break through the sense of isolation - really understand ourselves as the rainbow.

I was talking to one of my benefactors about some of the elders who look at my blue eyes and have definite questions about who I am, and he said "You need to remember that ,whether or not they can look in your eyes right now through their small personal selves and see it, they have been praying for you for generations." The old ones are begining to recognize that these rainbow children, these children that will bridge across and create harmony, a larger harmony, are the ones that have really been prayed for. I had an experience with my medicine teacher, the one I spoke of where my father married into the family. I saw that she understood that her medicine - her way of being just for her people, just for who she knew, just for her tribe-was a dying way. She knew that at some level she was burying that with her when she went, and that she really understood deeply something that she couldn't have even articulated about me and that rainbow medicine - that I am a person not just concerned with one tribe, but a person who was sharing and hoping to awaken all the hoops.

And for all of us who have no children as well, may we transform our experience of childlessness and create a joyful parenting for all our relations. Mitdakoyasin!

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