Star People, Bear Medicine & Close Encounters:
What One Famous Movie Got Right About Mato Tipila
What One Famous Movie Got Right About Mato Tipila
by Bunny Sings Wolf | IndigenousHealing.io
This means something.
That is what the man says, at his kitchen table, surrounded by mashed potatoes he cannot stop sculpting into the shape of a mountain.
He does not know why. He cannot explain the compulsion. Something is calling him, and he has no language for it — only the certainty that it matters.
Audiences in 1977 found the scene strange, even comic.
He builds it again with shaving cream. Then with dirt and chicken wire in his living room, to his family's horror...
He drives toward it before he consciously knows where he is going.
"This means something," he says. "This is important."
The shape he is building — the shape that will not let him rest until he understands it — is Mato Tipila.
Today we have a word for what that man was experiencing. We do not call it obsession, or delusion, or a midlife crisis, which is how the film initially frames it.
We call it being called.
The land itself, reaching across whatever distance separates a person from their own remembering, and saying:
come.
Spielberg, in 1977, put that calling at the center of one of the most successful films ever made — and placed humanity's first peaceful contact with intelligence beyond our own at the foot of one specific formation, nine miles from where I am writing these words.
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What Spielberg Actually Used
Close Encounters did not emerge from pure imagination. Spielberg drew directly from Project Blue Book — the United States Air Force's official investigation into Unidentified Flying Objects, conducted from 1952 to 1969, eventually declassified.
J. Allen Hynek, the astronomer who served as Blue Book's scientific consultant for nearly two decades, consulted on the film. He appears in it — a brief cameo at the end, present for the moment of first contact he had spent his career investigating from a distance.
The U.S. government's own files fed directly into the story Spielberg told. And the location he chose, out of every striking landscape on Earth, to stage humanity's moment of cosmic recognition, was the formation the Lakota and more than twenty other nations have held sacred since before any of these institutions existed.
A government investigation into the unexplained. A filmmaker drawing from it. And both of them, independently, arriving at the same stone the grandmothers had been pointing toward all along.
This is worth sitting with.
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Star Stuff — And Earth Stuff
In Lakota cosmology, there is a teaching that predates all of this — held not as theory but as origin.
We come from the star nations. We are here for a brief earth walk. When that walk is complete, we return to where we came from.
This is not metaphor. It is the Lakota account of where human beings actually come from and where they actually go — encoded throughout the stories associated with Mato Tipila itself. Among them are accounts of children, often young girls, who climbed the rock and were lifted away into the sky, returned to the star nations from which all people originate. The park service calls these legends. We call them family history.
But there is a second half to that teaching, and it is the half most often left out.
David Swallow Jr., the Oglala Lakota elder and Sun Dance chief, says it plainly:
"When you leave this world, your body returns to the Earth to fertilize it again — so it could be part of the grass, part of an herb, part of a medicine, part of a tree."
We are star stuff, yes. Every atom of carbon, oxygen, calcium, and iron in your body was forged in the heart of a star that lived and died billions of years ago.
And we are earth stuff. That same star material became this planet, became the soil, became the grass, became the buffalo, became the body you are reading this with. And when you are finished with it, it goes back — not as an ending, but as a continuation. Into the grass. Into the medicine. Into the tree.
The circle does not run one direction. It never has.
Carl Sagan — who had to phrase things lightly because his era was not ready to receive them plainly — said something less quoted than "star stuff" and considerably deeper:
"We are a way for the cosmos to know itself."
Not merely made of it. A way it knows itself.
That is not a statement about chemistry. That is a statement about purpose — and it is, word for word, what the grandmothers have been saying since before there were words for it.
The universe is not a collection of objects that happen to include us.
It is a single living process that grew eyes, and hands, and grief, and song, in order to look back at itself and recognize what it is.
You are not visiting this.
You are how it happens.
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The Pine Cone and the Third Eye
There is a place in the human body where this cosmic knowing and this earthly body meet.
Deep at the center of the brain, protected by the blood-brain barrier, sits a small gland shaped almost exactly like a pine cone. Its Latin name, pinea, means precisely that. It responds to light and darkness. It regulates the rhythms that tie a human body to the turning of the earth and the passage of the seasons.
Every major tradition on earth found it and marked it.
The Egyptians rendered it as the Eye of Horus — and modern anatomical drawings of the brain's cross-section match that ancient symbol with a precision that is difficult to explain away. The Hindu and Buddhist traditions call it the third eye, the seat of inner vision. Descartes called it the seat of the soul. Pine cones appear atop staffs, on temple doors, in stone carvings, across cultures separated by oceans and millennia.
And the pine cone itself is built on the Fibonacci sequence — the same spiral proportion found in galaxies, in nautilus shells, in the arrangement of seeds in a sunflower, in the arms of the Milky Way.
As above, so below. As in nature, so in you.
This is what Bear medicine has always pointed toward. The cave. The darkness. The stillness in which the interior does its work.
Bear does not go outward for healing. Bear goes in — and emerges renewed.
Mato Tipila is Bear's Lodge. Home of that teaching. Standing at the center of He Sapa, the Heart of Everything That Is, pointing skyward — toward the stars we came from — while its roots hold the earth we return to.
Going within and reaching toward the stars were never two journeys.
They were always ONE.
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Disclosure and the Seventh Generation
In recent years, something unprecedented has happened in the halls of the United States Congress.
For the first time in modern history, government officials have testified, on the record, that Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena are real, are being tracked, and are not fully understood. What was once the province of late-night radio has become a matter of formal congressional hearing.
This is happening now. In this generation. The same generation Crazy Horse described — the seventh from his own, when all the colors of mankind would gather under the Sacred Tree of Life and the whole earth would become ONE circle again.
Is this coincidence?
The Lakota would say there is no such thing. There is only the ONE circle completing itself — pieces that have always belonged together becoming visible to each other at the moment they are needed.
A film, drawn from declassified government investigation, choosing the sacred stone as the site of humanity's peaceful first contact.
A star nations teaching, held by the people of that stone for longer than memory reaches, describing exactly that kind of contact — not as invasion, not as conquest, but as recognition.
Friendship. (The translation of our name for ourselves - Lakota - means "friend")
The reuniting of relatives who had simply been perceiving themselves as apart for a very long time.
And now, in this generation, the official acknowledgment that the question is no longer if, but what, and why now.
You do not have to accept any particular explanation for what is being tracked in our skies. You only have to notice the pattern.
The grandmothers were pointing at something. The government's own investigators stumbled into something. A filmmaker, working from both, told a story about recognition rather than fear — and set it at the foot of the one formation that has been calling people home for fifty million years. That is the "work" of the Tree of Life within each heart.
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Three Worlds, One Circle
In 2013, an Oglala Lakota elder sat down in front of a camera and began by explaining something about himself that took me years to fully appreciate.
"I live in two worlds — actually three. And I live in all of them at the same time."
The first, he says, is the one you can see: modern clothes, modern manner, camouflaged into contemporary society so he looks like a modern man.
The second is harder to hear said out loud — he lives as a prisoner of war on a reservation he names by its camp number.
And the third is the one he came to talk about:
he lives as a spiritual person.
Three worlds. Simultaneously. No contradiction.
I suspect you know something about this.
Most people I meet are living in at least two — the self that shows up for work and pays the bills and knows how to be normal, and the one that wakes at three in the morning knowing something it cannot say at the dinner table. Some are carrying a third: an inheritance, a history, a grief that belongs to more than one generation that may still need healing to most effectively add it's resonating wholeness into ONEness.
We are taught that this is a problem to be resolved. That we must choose one and let the others go.
The elder does not resolve it. He simply lives all three, at once, and calls that whole.
What he says next reorganized something in me.
He explains that Mitakuye Oyasin includes the tree, the earth, the sky, the air, the water. The four-leggeds and the things that crawl, the two-leggeds and the things that fly. Everything the Creator made — and each with a purpose here.
Then he presses on it harder than most people are ready for. We cannot go back with a fly spray and spray the cockroach, he says. You must be able to justify why you want to kill an insect. Why you want to take down a tree. What does it say to you?
That is not sentimentality. That is what the phrase actually costs when you mean it.
And on the question of who this is for, he is unambiguous:
"Creator made a red man and a black man and a yellow man and a white man. Four mans he made. He didn't make a Catholic and an Episcopal. This world was made in the beginning a spiritual world, not a religious world."
Every colonizing project on this continent has depended on the opposite claim — that some traditions are religion and others are superstition, that some peoples were made and others merely appeared. An elder in a folding chair, speaking plainly into a camera, dismantles the whole architecture in two sentences.
Then he turns and points at the viewer.
"We are the Seventh Generation. The seventh generation of mixed bloods. That's who we are. There's only a few Originals... You too.
All of you here are Seventh Generation. The future is here. Present. Right here."
Sit with that for a moment.
The prophecy is not describing a pure-blooded remnant preserved in isolation.
It is describing exactly what actually happened — a people whose bloodlines and languages and grandmothers were scattered across a continent, marrying out, hiding their names, raising children who would not learn the songs or their lineage.
That is the seventh generation. The mixed ones. The ones who had to search for their own history. The ones who are only now, in this decade, turning around and asking the elders what was lost.
I know something about this.
My grandmother was sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania — the first federally funded off-reservation boarding school in the United States, and the model that hundreds of others across this country and Canada were built to copy. Its founder said the quiet part out loud in a sentence that became policy: kill the Indian, save the man.
Young children were taken from their families, by force. Their hair was cut. Their languages were beaten out of them. Their names were replaced.
Many did not come home. Some are only now coming home — in this decade, through the long and tearful work of nations recovering their children from unmarked graves and carrying them back to their own ground for proper burial, generations late.
My grandmother survived it. And then she made certain no record of her Lakota ancestry survived her.
She did not drift away from her identity. She engineered her exit.
At graduation she left directly for China with a group of fellow missionaries — including the white preacher she would marry there.
A new country. A new name. A new story with no Lakota in it.
She let the trail go cold on purpose.
But she did not cover everything.
My mother went to her grave without ever telling me directly. She could not say it out loud — that silence had been handed to her, and she kept it the way she had been taught to keep it.
But she put a name on my birth certificate.
My father chose Bunny. My mother made certain that Bernice stood there beside it, in the legal record, in ink, where no one could remove it. And she told me, again and again while I was growing up, what it meant.
Bernice: she brings victory.
I did not understand what she was doing. I thought she just liked the name.
She was leaving a marker on the trail. Not enough to endanger anyone. Just enough that someone, someday, might look down and notice the ground had been walked before.
It took a lifetime to unseal what my grandmother sealed. But I no longer read that seal as a wound. I read it as a promise kept across four generations by a woman who never got to see whether it worked — and passed quietly along by a daughter who could not say it, so she wrote it down instead.
Wopila, Grandmother. It worked.
Wopila, Mother. I found it.
And here is what David Swallow's teaching does with all of it: that scattering was not the failure of the prophecy.
That scattering is the prophecy — all the colors of mankind gathering under one tree, because
the colors had already been gathered into single bodies, single families,
single confused and searching hearts, generations before anyone was ready to say so out loud.
If you have ever felt you did not belong fully to any of the worlds you were born into — you may not be an exception to this teaching.
You may be the evidence for it.
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What This Means for Healing
If the separation between earth and cosmos is, as the ancestors taught and as physics increasingly suggests, an illusion — then healing is not only an inside job.
HEALING is a homecoming.
Not just to the stars. To the grass, the herb, the medicine, the tree, the ancestors who saw you coming and did all they could to preserve a place and a name for you seven generations forward. To the body that is borrowed earth and will be returned. To the relatives above and the relatives below and the relatives standing next to you who you have not yet recognized.
This is what Mato Tipila has been holding for fifty million years. Not only a teaching about healing the self — a teaching about healing the separation itself. Between inner and outer. Between earth and sky. Between the people who are here now and the relatives, however we understand them, who are not absent but simply elsewhere in the same continuous fabric.
There is a phrase for all of it. It is not a poetic closing. It is the most accurate description of reality any human tradition has ever offered.
Mitakuye Oyasin
And look at what the elder is wearing while he says it.
A white buffalo. A medicine wheel. And the words: ALL RELATIONS PRAYING.
He recorded that in 2013. Long before 1,400 people were being called to circle Mato Tipila on Summer Solstice 2028. Long before the gathering had a name, a date, or a single confirmed walker.
The shirt was already saying it.
You are not only from here.
And you are not alone.
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An Invitation
You do not need to travel to Wyoming to feel what Mato Tipila has been holding. You do not need to resolve, for yourself, exactly what UAPs are, or exactly how literally to take any of these teachings. The invitation is much simpler than that.
It is the invitation Richard Dreyfuss's character felt at his kitchen table, sculpting something he could not name, called by something he could not explain.
Something in you already knows this stone.
Something in you already knows this teaching.
The recognition does not require new information.
It requires only stillness —
the kind of stillness Bear teaches in the cave,
the kind of stillness that lets what was always already known rise back to the surface.
remember
Come carry Mato Tipila within you, wherever you are — walking the Circle the Walk of Peace Path in ONE-ness with all life.
The stone has been doing this work far longer than any of us have been asking the question. It knows exactly what it is doing.
And when 1,400 Life-honoring Resonance Walkers gather in person to circle it together on Summer Solstice 2028 — live-streamed to the world — you do not have to wonder whether you belong in that circle.
You were part of it before you arrived.
You are part of it now.
Bunny Sings Wolf is a Dream Song Carrier, Stone Medicine practitioner, and Ambassador for the Lakota Dakota Nakota Nation, descended from Chief John Grass. She lives nine miles from Mato Tipila (Devils Tower) in Hulett, Wyoming, and is the
founder of
— a free global healing community walking Nature's 4 Steps together toward the Circle the Walk of Peace Path, Summer Solstice 2028.
All are welcome. The circle is always open.
Mitakuye Oyasin.
Learn more about the Circle here: Circle the Walk of Peace Path with your global human family in 2028
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