24/04/2026
Earth Day – April 22, is always a special day, it is also the day my mother Florence Whiteman, the last fully initiated warrior woman of the Cheyenne People made her transition 25 years ago. So I want to commemorate her and all she taught me, including to love Mother Earth unconditionally. I believe this love saw her and our people through some of our darkest times. This summer would have marked the 100th anniversary of my Mother’s birth, that means that she was born just 50 years after the Battle of the Little Bighorn and raised by many of the medicine people and leaders who had been there and survived the genocidal campaigns against our peoples that the United States (US) wrongfully referred to as the Indian Wars. This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn and the way our Cheyenne people talk about it is that our Ancestors took a stand for our Indigenous Ways of life and that since Custer went against our ceremonies the outcome was already written in stone. My mother said that what our medicine people said in ceremonies Always, always comes true! And they had told him after he massacred innocent Cheyenne and Arapaho children, women and men at Wash*ta in 1868, that if he ever again went against the Cheyenne People, he would be like the ashes he emptied out of the peace pipe.
This is why for this year’s 150th anniversary of the Little Bighorn on June 25, I will host a Peace Gathering in the days leading up on my land, which is when my ancestors went into ceremonies from the Solstice on June 21 for 4 days. At the meeting we will share some of our ancestral teachings that are based on love and peace. They are the best counter-remedy to the intergenerational effects of genocide that we as Indigenous Peoples, including our children and grandchildren, still suffer from today. It started with genocidal campaigns that for many Indigenous Peoples around the world are still ongoing and it was perpetuated by the Indian Boarding or Residential Schools which so deliberately and brutally shifted our children’s thinking from Indigenous circular right hemisphere of the brain connected ways of being that see all things and beings as interrelated to Western linear left hemisphere of the brain dominated ways of thinking that separate us from our environment. This thinking is also problem focused, whereas as Indigenous thinkers we usually want to look for solutions and connection that are also carried in our Indigenous languages teachings. We announced the Peace Gathering in our joint statemen with the Northern Arapaho at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.
On Monday the UN Secretary General reaffirmed that we as Indigenous Peoples carry the solutions to the world’s crisis. I agree the world needs our teachings now more than ever. 4 years ago, on the anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, I made a call to End Genocide and said that war cannot end war, only love can end war. Look at what has happened in the world since and while many world leaders are finally recognizing that we have huge problems, like our grassroots people have pointed out for a long time, they do not have any solutions. As Indigenous Peoples we do have solutions and I have been using my ancestral teachings and lifetime of experience to develop an Indigenous teaching model that has proven effective in countering the intergenerational effects of genocide. It involves working with our animal relatives and the land, as mirrors of what has happened to us as Indigenous Peoples and reconnecting to our original instructions.
In my Cheyenne way I have three Mothers my mother Florence, Mother Earth and our Mother the Creator who gave birth to the universe and I owe them all my love and life.
I love you and there is nothing you can do about it!
Heove Ve'keso (Yellow Bird) traditional Northern Cheyenne Chief Phillip Whiteman Jr. as
