Well, ‘badass’ is the number one word that people say to me.
‘Oh, that’s badass, you’re bad ass man, that’s bad ass.’
It’s like, alright, badass.
I’m not really sure what a badass is, you know.
I think they mean ‘willing to endure’,
tough as nails kind of thing,
but instead it comes out ‘badass’.
Whatever, badass, OK.
When they gave me my doctorate
I still didn’t have my speech
but it was time for me to get up and make it.
So I started with a song because
if you start with a prayer
then all the right things will follow.
There’s nothing I love more than my homelands
which I live far from.
I was in the hills and I saw a coyote just wandering.
And it looked so forlorn.
And it felt like me and my homelands...
searching for my tribe, searching for my people.
And it just seemed so sad.
So when I think about that and I sing that song,
I can feel the wind in southern California...
you know, the Santa Anas come in
and it’s like someone’s turned on a heater with a large fan.
And you’re standing in the middle of all of your sacred plants,
all of the medicine plants and the food plants.
And the world just walks by you and they don’t take notice.
By ‘the world’ I mean the ants, the deer, the skunks, the coyotes.
They don’t take notice, they just...
you know, you’re just part of the scene.
So it just makes me feel like I’m home.
I was talking to an elder and we were talking about people
and what they know about themselves and their cultures.
And this old man said that people today are like detached seaweed.
I think I was told this about 60 years ago
and it’s still every day in my head that
I don’t want to be detached seaweed.
And I don’t want others to be detached seaweed.
I’d say the majority of people are lost.
Because you’re supposed to be an independent.
Just the thought of it - ‘Go west young man and do good things’ -
it’s all about the individual succeeding.
And then the idea of success, that makes people lonely.
But it just separates us.
And of course they never fill that thing that you need
which is community and one another and relationships.
And a relationship with the planet.
A relationship with space.
A relationship with all things.
What makes us lost is we’ve lost each other.
We have been dismembered for so long
that it’s time to re-member.
We need to come together
in order for those memories that we’re looking for.
Because they’re village memories
and you don’t get them individually.
We have to remember in order to put ourselves back together again.
This was put on by Keone Nunes
and it goes all the way to about here.
And in Hawaiian it’s called makapo.
And the word literally means blind.
But spiritually it means ‘one who can see what others cannot’.
I think what I see in other people
is this bright and shiny unadulterated light.
And all my friends and family tell me, ‘you need some filters’.
‘It’s not all light’.
But that’s what I see.
Even in people I really don’t like, I still see that light.
Some people can only see ugly.
And maybe because I’ve looked through an eye hole in my camera
since I was 8 and a half or 9 years old
but I just see everything as beautiful... everything...
if you’ve got the right lighting.
Everything is beautiful... people are beautiful, plants...
everything is beautiful.
Death is beautiful, life is beautiful.
Beauty is always right there, sitting right next to ugly.
And that’s what I’ve always seen.
That’s what I love about people.
Like many, many natives in the Americas
we consider ourselves star people.
In my opinion, our journey is the star journey.
Yeah, all of it.
The thing that I hold onto with the sciences
is that they say that we are comprised of
some 90 something percent star dust.
We’re comprised of the same things that are found in space.
We are basically space...
little water bags, flesh water bags.
But the stuff that we are made of
you can go out and find it anywhere in space.
So how can we be disconnected, how can we not be a part
if we’re comprised of this?
It’s a lot of ignoring of reality.
I do believe that we’re all one family.
At the Cosmic Serpent Conference, this scientist kept saying,
‘Oh you indigneous people hurt my head.’
So I asked him, ‘Well what planet are you from?’
He said ‘Earth’. I said ‘Well, so am I’.
‘Doesn’t that make us both indigenous to Earth?’
And he said ‘Yeah’.
I said, ‘We have our differences but we are all the same people’.
‘Now, I don’t want to have your religion. You don‘t want to have mine.’
And that’s not what ‘all being one’ is to me.
‘Being one’ is that underneath we are all one.
My child hurts it’s foot,
child cries, I cry, we fix it up.
And if that happens on the other side of the planet
I don’t think that anyone is going to act any differently.
They are going to care for that child.
How is that not being the same?
It’s not like we act bizarrely in the same instances.
We act exactly the same.
I don’t have to dance your dance,
I don’t have to sing your song,
in order to be you, and be a part.
Everybody is needed in that web of life.
If we look at the path, we do not see the sky.
We are earth people on a spiritual journey to the stars.
Our earth walk is to look within, to know who we are,
to see that we are connected to all things.
That there is no separation... only in the mind.