Buffalo Star People
The Mission of Buffalo Star People is to provide strategic, transformational education and other initiatives to promote healing and cultural life-ways of the Očhéthi Šakówin that are physically, spiritually, emotionally and ecologically healthy.
Founding Principles
- Strategic education has the power to transform and heal lives.
- Traditional transference of cultural ways is holistic in nature. It addresses body, mind, emotional and spiritual educational needs that promote sustainable well-being and health.
- Sustainable health and well-being require an educational transformation approach when the natural transference of cultural ways has been interrupted by trauma.
- Rebirth of healthy, cultural identity elevates the individual, family, community and nation to higher levels of unity necessary to overcome historical trauma and current adversity, and focus on building a shared future with a seventh generation approach.
Initiatives
1 - Re-indigenizing
Sustainable living practices that reflect mitakuye oyasin including: sustainable building; building traditional food ecosystems; land stewardship. Through land-based cultural knowledge and practices, Buffalo Star People is helping individuals and communities re-indigenize by implementing sustainable natural building practices, creating traditional food ecosystems and healing with the land that reflect mitakuye oyasin. For the Očhéthi Šakówin to fully engage in sovereignty, these practices must be at the forefront and are solutions to address climate change. Using immersion education to teach these practices, participants will learn how to build their own homes, feed themselves from the ecosystems they create, and teach others, thereby building capacity in our communities.
2 - Grassroots capacity building
This includes: education and support to heal from trauma; hands-on educational opportunities.
For over two decades, Buffalo Star People has developed a healing circle approach to the generations of trauma that continues to rob all our relatives of the basic skills and resources to engage fully in our land-based cultural practices. The healing circles, developed in Buffalo Star People's infancy, has helped our relatives heal, to enrich their lives through spirituality, art, taking care of the land, healthy habits, developing emotional and economic skills, language, ways of mutual support, and for some, training to take on roles of mentors and healers. All this continues to grow to help our relatives recover health and spirit holistically to benefit themselves, families and the Oyate.
3 - Cultural Repository to Unify the Očhéthi Šakówin
The Očhéthi Šakówin Cultural Repository is a project that Elders and community members have envisioned as a crucial component in cultural preservation and education and returning cultural knowledge into common practice for all of our people including future generations. People of the Očhéthi Šakówin must be at the center of defining and leading the efforts to revitalize our culture and putting into practice our cultural knowledge, particularly taking control of our food ways. The repository can unite the Oyate around the return of our cultural wisdom and accomplishments that were stolen, sold, and resold globally, for our people to discern for ourselves who we were and are as the People and reclaim our sovereign right to interpret and narrate our own stories, especially around food and sustainable living. With guidance from our Elders, we can preserve the knowledge of our endangered plant relatives that carry the stories of traditional foods and medicines. Through counter-storytelling, we can change the destructive colonial narrative and contribute to a narrative about resiliency, how our ancestors are survivors, and how we, as people of the Očhéthi Šakówin, are still here.
Mitakuye Oyasin, “All our relations”, reminds us to be the best family member to all living things, including humans.