The Stone That Has Been Waiting for You:
What Mato Tipila Really Means
by Bunny Sings Wolf | IndigenousHealing.io
I want to tell you the name first. Because the name is the whole teaching.
In 1875, a U.S. Army colonel's interpreter stood at the base of an extraordinary geological formation in what would become northeastern Wyoming and attempted to translate the Lakota name for the place. He got it wrong. The mistranslation — "Bad God's Tower," quickly shortened to "Devils Tower" — was recorded, repeated, and eventually made official by the federal government.
It has been wrong ever since.
The name the Lakota people have always carried for this place — the name that twenty or more Indigenous nations across the Northern Plains recognize in their own languages — is Mato Tipila. Bear's Lodge. Home of Bear.
And in the deeper teaching, the one that has been passed from elder to elder since before anyone here was recording anything: Home of Healing.
Because Bear is not merely an animal in these traditions. Bear is medicine. Bear is the original healer. And what Bear medicine points toward — in Lakota understanding, in the Celtic tradition, in the Norse cosmology, in the Andean teaching, in virtually every land-based wisdom tradition that has ever worked with the energy of Bear — is the same thing:
The healing that happens within.
What Bear Knows That the World Has Forgotten
When Bear enters the cave in late autumn, something extraordinary happens. The body temperature drops. The heart rate slows to almost nothing. The external world — its demands, its noise, its constant requirement of response — falls completely away.
And in that interior darkness, in that chosen stillness, the body heals itself.
Not from anything applied from outside. Not from any substance administered, any procedure performed, any treatment delivered. From within. From the intelligence already present in the living system — the same intelligence that built the body in the first place, that knows every cell by name, that has been oriented toward wholeness since the first breath.
The Lakota have always understood this. It is the teaching Bear has been carrying since the beginning. The great stone that rises from the Wyoming plains — that extraordinary column of rock, 40 to 50 million years old, visible for a hundred miles in every direction — is the standing reminder of that teaching.
Come within. The healing is in here.
Scientists have another name for the interior place Bear medicine points toward. It is a small pinecone-shaped gland deep in the center of the brain — protected by the blood-brain barrier, activated by darkness and stillness and the slowing of external demand. The Egyptians revered it as the Eye of Horus. The Hindu tradition calls it the third eye, the seat of inner vision. Descartes called it the seat of the soul.
The Lakota, as always, said it more simply: go within. Let Bear medicine show you the way.
The Stories the Park Service Calls Fairy Tales
If you have visited Mato Tipila as a tourist, you have likely encountered the interpretive displays the National Park Service maintains about the various Indigenous traditions associated with the site. They are presented with genuine respect — and with the unavoidable limitation of a culture that has not yet fully learned how to hear what the stories are actually saying.
The stories of bears. The stories of children — often little girls — who climb the rock and are lifted into the sky by the star nations. The claw marks that the geological record calls columnar jointing and that the stories call the scratch marks of an enormous bear.
These are not fairy tales. They are not quaint mythologies awaiting the corrective lens of Western science.
They are cosmology. They are memory. They are the Lakota understanding of what we are and where we come from — encoded in narrative form so that the children could carry it, generation after generation, even when everything else was taken.
We are star people. This is not metaphor. This is the Lakota account of human origin — that we come from the star nations, that we are on a brief earth walk, and that when we die we return to the star nations from which we came. The little girls lifted from the rock into the sky are not lost. They are home early.
Carl Sagan — who had to say it almost as a joke because the world was not yet ready to fully receive it — said: "We are all made of star stuff." The most advanced astrophysics available to humanity now confirms that every atom in every human body was forged in the heart of a collapsing star billions of years ago. We are, in the most literal scientific sense, star people on a brief earth walk.
The grandmothers knew. They put it in the stories. They built the ceremonies around the stone that points toward the sky — toward that invisible place of resonance and energy that quantum physics is only now beginning to describe in mathematics what the ancestors encoded in story.
What Six Nations Knew — And What Science Has Never Been Asked
There is a question about Mato Tipila that geology has never formally posed.
Not because the evidence doesn't exist. Because the surveys were never designed to ask it.
The official explanation — that what stands in northeastern Wyoming is a volcanic remnant, magma that cooled underground, contracted, cracked along geometric lines, and was exposed by erosion over 50 million years — is internally consistent. It has been the consensus position of the United States Geological Survey for over a century.
And yet.
The flat summit — level in the way a cut surface is level, not in the rounded way a cooling magma dome naturally produces. The columns running vertically parallel from base to summit with a geometric regularity unusual even among formations produced by the same mechanism. The same fundamental profile — flat top, near-vertical walls, isolated position on open terrain — repeated across dozens of formations throughout the American West, and the world, each attributed to separate geological events, each producing the same shape.
A recent geological inquiry posed a question that mainstream science has never formally asked:
what if the surveys were not designed to look for what is actually there?
Six Indigenous nations whose territories surrounded this formation did not name it after a geological event. The Lakota called it Mato Tipila — Bear's Lodge, a living place, a sacred dwelling. The Kiowa called it Tso Aa — Rock Tree. The Crow, the Cheyenne, the Arapaho, the Shoshone — each carried their own name for this formation.
And not one of those names referenced cooling magma or differential erosion.
Every name referenced a living thing.
Colonel Richard Irving Dodge's 1875 military survey named it Devil's Tower — erasing six living names in a single administrative stroke. Six nations had looked at the same formation across centuries and described something alive. One survey looked and described a devil.
I am not asking you to conclude anything.
I am asking you to notice that the people who lived closest to this formation for the longest time — whose relationship with this land predates any geological survey by thousands of years — consistently described it in the language of life rather than the language of geology.
And I want to offer one more thought, from a much older tradition than geology.
In the Biblical understanding, a tree that has been cut down is not a tree destroyed. Its stump holds the memory of everything it was. And within that stump, if the conditions are right, if the roots still hold — a new shoot grows.
The Lakota people — whose land was taken, whose ceremonies were outlawed, whose children were sent to schools designed to make them forget who they were — are not a people destroyed. The roots held. The memory held. The ceremonies continued underground, the way roots continue even when what stands above them has been taken.
And in the human body — your body — there is also a tree. Roots in the earth of your physical foundation. A trunk of breath and heartbeat. Branches of thought and feeling reaching toward what is sacred. Every healing tradition on earth has known this. Every wisdom system worth its name has pointed toward it.
Whether Mato Tipila is, in some form science has not yet been formally asked to measure, the remains of something that once grew here — or whether it is exactly what the textbooks say — does not change what it has always been in the understanding of the nations who have gathered at its base.
A place where life is honored. Where the sacred is felt. Where something in the human nervous system, regardless of what the mind believes about geology, grows quiet and recognizes something it cannot name.
This is why 1,400 people are being called to circle this formation on Summer Solstice 2028. Not to prove a geological hypothesis. Not to make a political statement.
But to stand at the base of the oldest, most debated, most sacred formation on this continent — and remember, together, what a tree actually is.
The one that grows in you.
A Hilltop, a Song, and the Land Saying Yes
In May of 2020, when the world was holding its breath and essential workers were running on fumes and love, three musicians climbed a backyard hilltop in the California foothills and did what musicians do when there are no other words left:
They sang.
One had been supporting a partner pulling overtime in a hospital emergency room. One was a performing artist whose tour had been cancelled, who had quietly taken a job at the U.S. Post Office and was finishing a week of twelve-hour shifts. And one — me — had driven eighteen hours from nine miles away from Mato Tipila to run groceries and offer whatever a body can offer when someone just needs another set of hands.
Just before the long drive home, I said: I found something. A song. You have to hear it.
A song written but never commercially recorded by the late John Denver. A song about healing time on Mother Earth.
We changed into two matching tops Becky found in her closet - make-shift performance clothes — just to honor it — and climbed that hill. We hadn't practiced. We were running on fumes. Becky forgot a word. We giggled. The violinist told us to shake off the ants. And then a bird showed up, right on cue, and harmonized with us from the trees in all the right places, unrehearsed and unbothered and perfect.
"Let the mountains speak, let the rivers run, as the world awakes to a rising sun... in this brand new day, in our own rebirth, in this healing time on our Mother Earth..."
We kept the bloopers. We kept the giggles. We kept the bird. Because healing does not wait for perfection. And neither do we.
That song, on that hill, with those exhausted and beautiful humans, is the same teaching as Mato Tipila. The land speaking. The healing available in any moment of genuine stillness, genuine presence, genuine willingness to let the mountains speak and the rivers run.
You do not have to come to Wyoming to feel it. But if you ever do — if you ever find yourself nine miles from that ancient formation, watching it rise from the plains in the late afternoon light — you will feel your body do something you may not have felt in a very long time.
It will recognize where it is. And it will begin, quietly and without being asked, to remember what it always already knew.
Come within.
The healing is in here.
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.
Mitakuye Oyasin.
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