Every single morning, I wake up in these hills, nine miles from the formation my brother never stopped fighting for, and I make coffee. I step outside. I look toward Mato Tipila.

And I want to tell you something that our bravest elders have always been willing to be laughed at for saying — something that the scientists, for all their instruments and peer-reviewed journals, have never been able to agree on or fully explain, because to this day no two of them can settle on what this enigmatic formation actually is or how it actually came to be.

Look at it with your own eyes, without the filter of any official explanation. Let yourself see what it looks like.

Not metaphorically. Not poetically. Like the remains of something vast and ancient that once reached toward the sky with a strength and a rootedness that the modern world has almost no category for — and that was, in some way our ancestors understood and our science cannot yet measure, cut down. Interrupted. Left standing in its own remains, still reaching, still speaking to those willing to hear it, still holding in its columnar, sky-pointing form the memory of what a Tree of Life actually looks like when it grows from the heart of the earth rather than the imagination of a theologian.

The Lakota elders who have carried this teaching — quietly, in the face of ridicule from every direction, scientific and otherwise — call it a healing place. The memory of the Tree of Life that Crazy Horse saw in his vision. The standing reminder that what was chopped down within each human heart that forgot the ways of relationship is not gone — only interrupted. Still rooted. Still reaching. Still waiting for the day when enough humans remember what they are and return to benefit from and circle it in the way it has always deserved.

That is what my brother Richard spent his life fighting for. Not a legal boundary. Not a financial settlement. The restoration of the relationship between the human heart and its own deepest root — the tree within us, mirrored in the tree before us, calling us home to what we always were, living, rooted, beings indigenous to soil, air, water and the fire energy of life.

I am a descendant of Chief John Grass — Mato Watapke — one of the great leaders of the Oceti Sakowin and contemporary to Crazy Horse. My family history is woven through Standing Rock, where some of the hardest years of Lakota history were lived. And my late brother, Chief Richard Deo Grass, spent the better part of his life carrying what most people could not — the full weight of what was promised, what was broken, and what it costs a people to keep refusing to pretend otherwise.

It was Richard the people called when the U.S. government arrived with briefcases full of legal documents and an offer to purchase the Black Hills.

His answer became iconic — and still puzzles those who approach it with a colonized, materialistic worldview. He sent them back to Washington with words that have never been walked back, never been softened, and never been for sale: "The Black Hills are not for sale."

That was not the beginning of his work. It was one moment in a lifetime of it. Richard marched to Little Bighorn — the place we call Greasy Grass, where our people won the battle and lost everything that followed — to hold Congress accountable to yet another unkept promise: a memorial that had been approved and then quietly never built. His persistence, his voice, his refusal to be quietly turned away — the memorial was finally completed three years later. (read the story of this in more detail in my previous blog post here).

He worked with pro-bono international lawyers to produce a document called Reclaiming the Black Hills — a meticulously researched legal paper citing every relevant international law precedent for how an unbiased international court could, justly and truthfully, honor the 1868 treaty as written. That document has lived on our Lakota Dakota Nakota Nation website for twenty years. It is there now, available for anyone willing to read it.

In those twenty years, millions and millions of dollars have been spent by legal groups and organizations pursuing litigations that the international lawyers who Richard worked with predicted, early on, could not ultimately succeed — not primarily because the law was unclear, but because of the second, deeper wound that breaks my heart to name:

Not because they are not good people. Not because they do not love He Sapa. But because the trauma of what was done to us runs so deep, and the systems put in place to "help" us have so consistently served those who administer them rather than those they claim to serve, that the unity required to stand before any international court as ONE people — one voice, one nation, one sovereign government — has not yet been gathered.

Richard worked his entire life to gather it. He was the last appointed Treaty Chief of the Great Lakota, Dakota, Nakota Nation — the Traditional and Spiritual International Government re-established at Bear Butte on July 14, 1991, by the traditional spiritual Oceti Sakowin who had searched him out as the descendant of the dynastic line of Grand Chiefs. He represented our Oyate at the United Nations. He left no authorized successors — not because the work was finished, but because the disunity that was his deepest sorrow made succession, in the traditional spiritual sense, impossible.

His correspondence, his documents, the nation's official seal, the legal work, the letters, the decades of behind-the-scenes effort to hold the United States accountable to its own treaties — all of it was bequeathed to me, his sister, to publish and carry forward. You can find it at www.LakotaDakotaNakotaNation.org — a website all but forgotten by the very Oyate it was built to serve, each faction now going its own way, some claiming the name of the Oceti Sakowin while self-appointing leadership that our spiritual traditional elders would not recognize.

I say this not to shame anyone. I say it because Balance — the first of Nature's 4 Steps — asks for honesty about what is actually true. And what is true is this: the most powerful legal case ever assembled for the return of the Black Hills sits on a website that most of our own people have never read. The most authentic record of what our traditional spiritual leadership actually accomplished sits largely unseen, while louder voices — with larger budgets and fewer scruples — dominate the narrative.

This is the grief that doesn't resolve. And it isn't supposed to — not yet. Some grief is not a stepping stone to something else. Some grief simply is, permanently, and learning to carry it without being consumed by it, without erasing it either, is itself part of what healing means.

Richard's words are still there. The document is still there. The website is still there.

And somewhere in the seven generations Crazy Horse saw coming — in the hearts already turning toward this circle, in the blogs being written and the songs being shared and the 1,400 Resonance Walkers already forming — the unity Richard spent his life reaching for is still forming too.

Not through any institution. Not through any press release.

Through the quiet, persistent, grief-carrying, hope-holding work of people willing to tell the truth and keep walking anyway.

And yet.

Every single morning, alongside that grief, there is also this: the light on the stone. The way Mato Tipila looks different depending on the season, the weather, the time of day — sometimes golden, sometimes nearly invisible in fog, sometimes so sharp against a blue sky that it looks like it was cut out and placed there an hour ago.

There is the sound of this place — which is mostly silence, but a silence so full it has its own texture. There is the way the Black Hills smell after rain. There is Ted, working on someone's truck in town, the kind of steady presence that has nothing to do with history and everything to do with simply being a good neighbor, day after day, for years.

There is Solo, my cat, sitting beside the keyboard while I write this, utterly unconcerned with any of it, present in exactly the way animals are always present — which is to say, completely.

Grief and grace are not opposites here. They are not even separate. They are the same morning, the same coffee, the same view of the same stone that has held both of these things — every grief and every grace this land has ever known — for fifty million years without once needing them to resolve into something simpler.

If I had to summarize what living in He Sapa for ten years has taught me about Nature's 4 Steps, it would be this:

This is what it feels like to live in the Heart of Everything. Not resolved. Not simple. But — somehow, impossibly, every single morning — whole.

Something happens to people when they visit Mato Tipila — even people who arrive knowing almost nothing about its history, its name, its meaning.

I have watched tourists, fresh off the highway, cameras in hand, ready for a quick photo stop on the way to somewhere else — grow quiet. Not because anyone told them to. Something in the place does it. The same something, I think, that called Richard Dreyfuss's character in the Close  Encounters film to keep sculpting that shape he couldn't name.

This is the land doing what land does, when it has been cared for in right relationship for long enough: it teaches, simply by being itself, without needing a single word.  THAT's resonance.

I think this is what "Land Back" ultimately offers — not just to Native people, but to everyone. The chance to be in a place that can do that. That can quiet a person who didn't know they needed quieting. That can hold grief and grace in the same breath, and teach — without lecturing — what it actually looks and feels like to live that way.

In the final post of this series, I want to talk about what each of us — wherever we live, whatever our history — can actually do. Not grand gestures. 

Small, real, daily things. Because right relationship with land doesn't start with policy.

It starts with how we wake up in the morning, and what we choose to notice.