Sacred Pipe, The Original Instructions

By Turtle Heart

Tribal North American Indians are drowning in an ocean of bad information,on one hand. On the other hand they endure divisive government policies, poverty, isolation, substance abuse and indifference...two severe struggles for a fragile minority in a powerful and modern society. The author has spent his life as a teacher and student of American Indian ceremonies. Part one of a series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Turtle Heart
• Release date: Apr 9, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452324593

Turtle Heart

Ojibwe American Indian keeper of ceremonial teachings, author, poet and artist. Presently residing in Italy.

Book preview

The Original Instructions

The Sacred Pipe of the American Indian

Turtle Heart

Ojibway Artist

Spring 2010

Published by Turtle Heart at Smashwords.com

Copyright 2010, Turtle Heart, Ojibway Artist

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Learn more about this series of unique commentaries and other matters related to American Indian rituals and ceremonies at the web site of the author: http://www.aicap.org

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Sacred Pipe || The Original Instructions

The history of the ancient future.

Tribal North American Indians are drowning in an ocean of bad information, distorted information, the acted out fantasies of people without a culture of their own to teach them....on one hand. On the other hand they have divisive government policies, poverty, isolation, substance abuse and indifference, raging violence against each other...two rather severe struggles for a fragile minority in a powerful and modern society. I have spent my entire life as a student and teacher of sacred ceremonial objects and ceremonies. I offer some thoughts and ideas based upon my real and actual experience within the sacred tradition of many tribal communities and traditions. There is no clear way to explain in the English language how the object we call Sacred Pipe first came to the people of this Turtle Island. It is very ancient. The traditional keepers and sacred elders forbid it. The object known as Sacred Pipe was ancient long before the Lakota Tribal Nation migrated from the ancient Southeast to its present lands in the Plains territories. Over such a long history there is much that can be said, and much that is impossible to say.

The real truth can only be revealed or understood from within Sacred Space itself.

However, it is important for tribal people to embrace their responsibility to the world community and say what it is possible to say. It is impossible, absolutely, for one tribe to know or contain the full history of this Sacred Teaching called sacred Pipe. When people speak of the sacred and say it is only this, they are mistaken. At the very least Sacred Pipe is Eight Sacred Things. Sacred Pipe has many histories, many relatives, and many undisclosed mysteries.

Most American Indian tribal keepers of bundles prefer to remain silent on the details of their sacred rites and objects. Because so many of the people who really know keep silence, many people think the noise made by a vocal minority have some special affiliation with the truth. This is incorrect. An attentive and honest student of the sacred will understand this. It is more important than you know that someone try and change this situation. It may be to late for Sacred Pipe to truly help the world, given the many problems we will look at in this document. But Sacred Pipe is only one part in the great wheel of the sacred original instructions of the old American Indians. Those instructions are contained in the sacred bundles and their ceremonies that exist in other tribes. There are other sacred bundles in motion that are not Sacred Pipe. The number and integrity of these things is a shrinking number, yet there is a count that can be made. I am one of those keepers of the sacred and in my work, I am one of those who made the count.

The first American Indians to embrace the Sacred Pipe were almost certainly the Creek-Catabwa, and their relatives, along the lower and upper Mississippi River, such as the Ahnishinabek-Algonquian groups. There is a direct river of ceremonies, language, corn, tobacco, and stones for ceremonial pipes between these groups, along this path, dating back more than 12,000 years. The archaeological evidence clearly supports this idea. The Plains tribes, such as the Lakota, have had the teaching of sacred Pipe less than 400 years, by comparison. For reasons not quite sound, the vast majority of published information addressing Sacred Pipe are attributed to, siphoned from, exploited by or associated with the Lakota. This imbalance or myopic fascination with one small group of people in a larger universe should be suspect, but it seems rather well accepted. The truth is, it is mostly nonsense. Quietly, off in the corners of American Indian country, Sacred Pipe keeps works every day in way the modern world will never know. It is invisible.

|| Asinii-opwaagan-ag: Sacred Tobacco Morning Fire

Sacred Pipe is a very ancient life-teaching. There are more than 500 tribal communities in North America. Of this large number, only a much smaller number of tribal people in the entire world have embraced this way of life we call the Sacred Pipe. The plains tribal people (Sioux, Lakota, Brule and so forth) received Sacred Pipe around 350-450 years ago, shortly before the arrival of the Europeans. The tribes along the Mississippi River have been using Sacred Pipe for so long, the stories of how it first came into the lives of the people have been lost to general knowledge. My own culture, the Ojibway, or more properly, the Ahnishinabe, has had Sacred Pipe at the center of our Sacred Rites for thousands of generations. The oldest Sacred Pipes unearthed by archaeologists, as of this period in time, date back more than 10,000 years.

|| Sacred Pipe is not a faith-based religious object or practice

Sacred Pipe is a fundamental property and expression of what might be legally argued as a Native American Religious Practice. However religious is not a natural tribal word. To most Native Americans religion is not faith-based; it has no hierarchy, and there is no central authority. Sacred Pipe is a way of life and a type of ceremonial behavior that is based, at its best, upon the cycles of natural life. Sacred Pipe recognizes a greater reality than the me, but also accepts a mystery element in life wherein information about the sacred is to great for a single mind to hold. New information unfolds with every ceremony, with every step forward into understanding how and why you must try and communicate with the four elements and the greater mystery life beyond them. Sacred Pipe is a language used to address the four great elements, directly. There is no abstraction or mysticism implied in this idea. This not really, then, a religion…it