Sun Bear - Black Dawn, Bright Day: Indian Prophecies for the Millennium that Reveal the Fate of the Earth

S UN B EAR , founder of the Bear Tribe, is a sacred teacher of Chippewa descent. W ABUN W IND , a ceremonialist and teacher, is his medicine helper. Together they authored The Medicine Wheel, The Path of Power, and Dancing with the Wheel.

Cover design by Kevin Moehlenkamp

A Touchstone Book
Published by Simon & Schuster
New York

Thank you for purchasing this Touchstone eBook.

Sign up for our newsletter and receive special offers, access to bonus content, and info on the latest new releases and other great eBooks from Touchstone and Simon & Schuster.

or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

TOUCHSTONE
Simon & Schuster Building
Rockefeller Center
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 1992 by Sun Bear and Wabun Wind

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

First Touchstone Edition, 1992

TOUCHSTONE and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sun Bear (Chippewa Indian)

Black dawn, bright day : Indian prophecies for the millennium that reveal the fate of the earths environment / Sun Bear, Wabun Wind.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-671-75900-0

A Sun Bear book.

1. Prophecies (Occultism) 2. Human ecologyMiscellanea. I. Wind, Wabun, 1945- II. Title.
BF1791.S86 1992
133.3dc20

91-27128
CIP

ISBN-13: 978-1-4391-4692-7 (ebook)

This book is dedicated to the Great Spirit and the Earth Mother, to all the people of the Bear Tribe Medicine Society who labor on behalf of my vision, and, with special thanks and love, to Jaya Bear.

I want to thank the many people all around the world who have supplied me with information for this book. I particularly acknowledge my Spirit sources who have given me the visions and have helped me find the pattern in the past that shows the future.

Special thanks to Matt Ryan, who gathered a lot of the Earth changes information for me, both in his capacity as editor of Wildfire magazine and out of his own deep interest in the Earth. Thanks to Dr. James DeMeo, and his excellent publication, Pulse Of The Planet. I also want to give a general thanks to all my apprentices, students, and friends who sent in information.

A number of people helped Wabun and me with various stages of preparing this book. With Dawn Songfeather Davies competent help we were able to complete the manuscript much more quickly than our schedules would have otherwise allowed. Thanks to Kim Lawrence, Chuck Engler and Jim Gavitt for help with early typing and corrections.

Rick Yandrick of Eastern Informational Systems in Doylestown, Pennslyvania, began the work on the Earth changes maps. George Monacelli of Bear Tribe Publishing expanded and completed the maps that appear in . Many thanks to them. Thanks to our editors at Goldmann Verlag in Germany for originally contacting us about this book, and for helping it transform from I Believe to Black Dawn/Bright Day. Thanks to Jerry Chasen for helping with the contract work. And special thanks to Sherry Lancaster, Christine Alexanian and Matt Ryan in their capacity as editors at Bear Tribe Publishing.

Thanks to Kim Lawrence and George Monacelli for the design of the book, and to Scott Guynup for the beautiful cover art and design.

Wabun thanks the people who helped her work on this book while she was in Peru, and gives special thanks to Thomas and Kyla Wind for their love and support.

To understand the nature of the things that are happening now upon the Earth Mother, we first have to understand different concepts of relating to the Earth. The Native people of Turtle Island, the North American Indians, relate to the Earth as the mother of all living creation. Native people also believe all creatures minerals, plants, animals, spirits have the same right to life as humans do.

Native people try to blend with nature, rather than conquer it. The Native philosophy teaches that you never take anything from the Earth without first making your prayers. Before you go out on a hunt you always make prayers and ceremonies of thanksgiving. Before you take the life of an animal you say, I have to take your life, little brother, little sister, so that I may continue my own. Even as I take your life this time, the time will come when I will give my life back to the Earth. I too will become part of the cycle of life. My body will give new life for the plants, animals and insects to feed on. From my sacred sacrifice a new life will come up again.

Whenever we take a plant, we never take the first one we come to. We regard that one as a grandfather plant. We make an offering there. We say, Grandfather, we come to your plant people in order to have food or to have medicine for our healing. We make a gift to you and we pray that your species will always be on the Earth. Then we take from the other plants of that species nearby the grandfather. But we take only what we need.

This is our sacred way. It insures there will always be plenty of every thing for generations to come. It is a Native philosophy found across the Earth that you never kill anything you dont eat; you dont waste anything. This is part of our religion, part of living in balance and harmony upon the Earth.

This is what the ghostdancers sing in their dance songs all giving, all receiving, all part of the sacred way. And the healing of the Earth happens in this way. If you watch nature, you see how each part of creation feeds on the other. When the leaves go back to the soil, they provide food for the Earth and for the other plants that are there. The rabbits eat from the grasses and the plants, and in turn, some of the larger four-leggeds come and eat the rabbits. Its all a covenant, an agreement among all living things. Theres a balance and harmony this way.

For thousands of years, Native people have said, This is our Earth Mother. You cant take from her all the time, you have to give back to her. You cant just take, take, take. You have to say your prayers and only take what you need. You must keep in harmony and balance with the Earth.

We feel that all living creation around us is intelligent and that every thing has a right to be here as much as people do. We think of the Earth Mother as being an intelligent, living being.

Today, we need to think that way again; we need to learn from the Native traditions. For perhaps as long as twenty thousand years, the Native people lived so harmoniously on Turtle Island that the first Europeans who arrived here were able to describe it as a beautiful, unspoiled wilderness, a virtual paradise. But in the short period of four hundred and fifty years since the Europeans arrived, this continent has become riddled with ecological disasters and pollution from sea to shining sea. Look hard at what has happened in that very short time span, then ask yourself Why?

When the Europeans first came to this land, we Natives went out and showed them how to plant crops. We would plant corn, beans and squash and put the remains of a fish in the dirt with the seeds. We kept telling the Europeans, You have to feed the Earth. But they said, Well, thats just a savage custom. They didnt understand what we were saying.

It wasnt until the New England States had eroded away that the Europeans became even a little bit aware of what we had been trying to tell them. Yet when the great Dust Bowl of the 1930s occurred, the one that wiped out thousands of acres of land, the dominant society still called the Indians the savages. But we Indians disagreed. We called those who had destroyed the land the wheat savages because, year after year, they had planted wheat until they had destroyed the Earth in certain areas to the point where the land wasnt capable of producing anything.