For those anxiously awaiting the fourth series of Wisdom of the Elders Radio Program featuring indigenous perspective on environmental and climate issues from Alaska and the Northwest, intern Rick Keffer (Apache) provides a past radio segment you might enjoy from the collection of three series that Wisdom has produced since 2002.

This Elder Wisdom segment features Pulitzer Prize winning author and poet, N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa) from Southwestern Oklahoma, known for its soaring mountains and rippling streams. Momaday describes his experience of the sacred through the physical world around him. From Momaday:

“To encounter the sacred is to be alive at the deepest center of human existence. Sacred places are the truest definitions of the earth. They stand for the earth immediately and forever. They are its flags and its shields.

If you would know the earth for what it really is, learn it through its sacred places. At Devil’s Tower or Canyon de Chelly or the Cahokia Mounds, you touch the pulse of the living planet. You feel its breath upon you. You become one with a spirit that pervades geologic time, that indeed confounds time and space.

When I stand on the edge of Monument Valley and behold the great red and blue and purple monoliths floating away in the distance, I have the certain sense that I see beyond time. There the earth lies in eternity.”

You can listen to this 10-minute audio and many other segments at: https://wisdomoftheelders.org/program-101-elder-wisdom/