So, look. We did this interview conversation with the very amazing (and infinitely patient) Tiokasin Ghosthorse. Tiokasin is an elder of the Cheyenne River Lakota Nation of South Dakota, an international speaker on Peace, and issues facing Indigenous peoples and the Mother Earth perspective. He’s a master of the ancient red cedar Lakota flute (which is goose-bump-stunning to listen to – we didn’t get him to play in this conversation but maybe next time?!) and is the founder of First Voices Radio in the US and Canada.
He is also a guest faculty member at Yale University’s School of Divinity, Ecology and Forestry focusing on the cosmology, diversity and perspectives on the relational/egalitarian vs. rational/hierarchal thinking processes of Western society. Which was what we were particularly interested in. Although frankly, as you’ll see, he’s a joy to listen to on any subject you care to bring up. I learned loads about the etymology of English words and how it affects our thinking during our short time with him.
Now unfortunately our being somewhat technoramuses (technoramii?) in the doing interviews world and me having massive thumbs meant that I accidentally stopped filming for about 5 minutes and managed to not record a beautiful segment about how the eradication of the bison from the grasslands of South Dakota had a profound effect on the water table and other really amazing stuff. For which I profoundly apologise. I’ll do better next time I promise but to do so I could use help and input from those of you of movie-making and uploading expertise. Cos I also filmed it on a phone which did it in HD and so its like the fattest file imaginable – running to about 9GB in all. So Vimeo laughed in our faces when we tried to upload it there. Anyway thanks to Carolyn Jane Davies who’s given me some highly detailed advice on how to compress it in future but other conversations about this from a technical point of view will be very welcome.
In the meantime I managed to upload it to Archive.Org which is actually a pretty cool site and it now seems to be streaming pretty well on there. So have a look if you like, and enjoy. Big big thanks to Tiokasin for his time and thoughtfulness and general air of calm and oneness with the everything. All the good stuff in here is down to him. The not so good technical aspects are down to me. Or at least my big thumbs.