Reflection: Your Relationship to the Sky

Prompts to consider

• Lakota stellar theology gives you a specific place in the cosmos, a star gives you a spirit at birth, the Milky Way receives your spirit at death, the Black Hills are the Heart of Everything That Is. The modern scientific cosmology you likely inhabit gives you an enormous, indifferent universe of nearly incomprehensible scale. Which cosmology do you actually live inside, emotionally and ethically? And are they separable?
• Lakota knowledge-keepers hid the star knowledge 'in their hearts' for decades under pressure from assimilationist policies. What does it mean to suppress a knowledge system rather than simply suppress a belief? What kind of loss occurs when an entire way of knowing is forced underground?
• The researchers at Sinte Gleska University said their work was 'to return the skies to the Lakota youth.' Knowledge can be taken away, and returned. Think of a form of knowledge that was suppressed in your own cultural or family history. What would it mean to recover it? What would be lost in the translation back?