Indigenous Spiritual Geographies: Rosalie Little Thunder and “What Does It Mean to Be a Good Relative?”

From long experience with each other, Indigenous Peoples know their Lands—and the beings, energies, and relationships with whom they share their universe—as related. They exist within a relational, storied matrix, spoken and heard, felt and lived in words and through silences, sung, prayed, and envisioned within their own cycles, and remembered in the spiritual geographies of their Lands. This piece reflects on embodied Indigenous intergenerational knowledge relations as lived through the spiritual activism of Lakota Elder Rosalie Little Thunder and articulated in her perennial question, “What does it mean to be a good relative?” Her Lakota ethical practice centered around this question—and it was a question she asked of the rest of the world, so that they might imagine a different way of being, a possibility of waking up the human beings in this time of massive human destruction of all life, the life systems of Earth. Rosalie’s question is a wakeup call that frames human survival from within a Lakota perspective of the world, asking the world’s human beings what it means to be a good relative. This perception of relationality holds the possibility for radically re-imagining different possibilities, transformative shifts in consciousness, and different futurities.