Some of David Seals ideas

[Moma_porcupine]

David Seals who is the author of the book Powwow Highway came up in a personal dispute in another thread.

http://www.newagefraud.org/smf/index.php?topic=2312.0

I am really reluctant to post information which will probably be used in an unprincipaled mud fight.

The main focus of the arguements in the above thread were whether or not it is accurate for him to claim he is Huron-Wendat or Cheyenne- Huron, and whether or not he is enrolled in the Huron-Wendat Nation or the Cheyenne Nation, and whether or not this matters. It is very obvious to everyone involved that the person making the complaints had a personal vendetta.

I'm not sure anything Seals is doing involves a position of public trust, but in at least one of his articles he does seem to be assuming a position of spiritual leadership and he is claiming to be writing about Lakota prohesies .... and he does have some odd ideas....

As Seals is also invloved in representing some important issues , I can see where it maybe in the public intrest to point out that some of his personal ideas are peculiar and may hurt some of the causes he claims to represent...

I also want to point out that because Seals is involved in some controversial issues, it is possible some of what I am quoting below was not in fact written by David Seals, and it may be someone is intentionally writting things with inaccurate information in hopes of discrediting him.

I enjoyed the movie Powwow Highway. I also read the book .

The first thing that made me wonder for a second,  was in that book.

I don't know much about Cheyenne ways, but in the book , the character Philbert does more than leave some chocolate up at Bear Butte. In the book he masterbates and leaves his semen on the ground.
I don't know if this would be seen as offensive as I don't know what Cheyenne men might normally do up there...   

Below I see where Seals ( or someone using his name ) is writting his idea of Lakota prophecies. i am not sure if this is accurate... ( my bold)

http://bellsouthpwp.net/r/i/ricerezz/native%20prophecies/black_hills_prophecies.html                       

Prophecies Of The Black Hills
                                    By David Seals
                                    Yuwitaya Lakota/Prophesy

(begins..)

The time for fulfillment of this great prophesy is now. The elders and medicine men and women of old knew it, with the spirits of their ancestors as the messengers telling us. The Indians are indeed dying, for all practical purposes. There are no medicine people left among the Cheyenne or Lakota in the Black Hills bioregion. The ceremonies have lost their power, for the pipes and arrows are no longer connected to the White Buffalo Woman and the Yellow-haired Woman who brought them, the Winyan Wakan of the Lakota and the Ehyophstah of the Cheyenne.

These are harsh truths to have to speak, but all Indians know in their hearts it is so. Even those who do sweat lodges and sundances and smoke their pipes faithfully cannot resist the temptations of America, the egotism of false shamans, the greed invited by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Hollywood, and they cannot keep their children from the materialism and irresponsibility displayed everywhere. Many have lost their language and culture.

(continues...)

All people who can see the vision of the Other World, and hear the Oracle of the sacred earth Goddess, are welcome to come and live near the Sacred Black Hills in the center of it all. And in the center of the Hills, although She is a lone sentinel off to the north a few miles, is Nowah'wus, Bear Butte. On the Spring Equinox this year, at 1:48 A.M., March 20, 1992, this cycle of sacred ceremonial renewal will continue at Bear Butte. We will be praying there. Everyone is welcome to come in their own way and pray in their own way. It will not be organized in the usual way of the old dead age, so every person must communicate alone with their spirit. The Great Powers will be there on the mountain at that time.

(con...)

My own Huron ancestor, Deganawidah, also prophesied this confederacy would be formed again, and the Iroquois are working out a hemispheric 'League of Indigenous Sovereign Nations' to bring thousands of tribes on this hemisphere together, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. In this year of the Invasion of Columbus and Christ, the half millennium of hell, as Zapotec Quetzalcoatl prophesied, will end.

(con..)

Only a few people will be on Bear Butte on this Spring Equinox, as on all Equinoxes and Solstices; but they will be the spiritual survivors of the cataclysm to come, the founders of the new Confederacy of the Black Hills. Regardless of race, age or sex, these spirits will form the new government of this bioregion in the years and decades and centuries to come.

I see this article is also posted in the link below.

http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=125&contentid=1552&page=2

Is this an accurate reporting of Lakota prophecies or has Seals  invented this ?

David Seals appears to claim Deganawidah as an ancestor in several places...

http://books.google.ca/books?id=7HTrr5656G0C&pg=PA133&lpg=PA133&dq
=Davydd+ap+Saille&source=bl&ots=aWJx7HnRK8&sig=u2E23IEioERV8dM3CFR3
PGWSjEA&hl=en&ei=LDWXStfXE42YsgPt0pGbAg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result
&resnum=7

or

http://tinyurl.com/msgunk

A Broken Flute: The Native Experience in Books for Children
 By Doris Seale, Beverly Slapin

p 132-133

"Partial recall is a big book with a lot to say. presenting it's material in ways that will have occurred to few non-Native people.

The only odd note is David Seal's essay on Wounded Knee. 1989 by Sarah Penman. David Seals, or Seal or Davydd ap Saille. "descendent of the Huron prohet Deganawidah" and author of one of the worst books to be made into a pretty good movie, who 'lives in the Black Hills"3 chooses to attack the subjects of the photograph, and their lives rather than deal with the idea of pictures taken by outsiders.

His particular target is the central figure, of whom he says

"His macho expression, that a man like those Mary [Crow Dog} described as wife -beaters and rapists....[H]is is the typical grimace of too much pride...[T]he image of this man is an allegory of the machismo, the alcoholic, chauvinism, the rural narrow mindedness that has always weakedened the lakotas. Sitting Bull was murdered by his own drunken relatives, but today his descendants rant and rave and rave endlessly about needing new leaders like Sitting Bull . Why? So they can kill such a man or woman too?"  

"3. from information about the author Partial Recall."

Some information on Deganawida

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Peacemaker

The Great Peacemaker, sometimes referred to as Deganawida or "Dekanawida" (although as a mark of respect some Iroquois avoid referring to him by this name except in special circumstances) was, along with Hiawatha, the traditional founder of the Haudenosaunee (commonly called the Iroquois) Confederacy,

(con..)

It is reported that he was born a Huron and by some accounts it was a virgin birth.

http://www.bahai-library.org/file.php?file=buck_native_messengers#a2

B. The Deganawida cycle

Deganawida is a name said to mean, "Two water currents flowing together."(44) If tradition warrants, sometime between AD 1400(45) and AD 1600 (possibly in the year AD 1451 when the Iroquois witnessed an eclipse of the sun), Deganawida,(46) the "Heavenly Messenger,"(47) is said to have established the Great League of Peace among the warring Five Nations of the Iroquois (from east to west, the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca).

Did Deganawida have children and leave known descendants?

Seals also appears to claim his ancestor Deganawida is his editor

http://tinyurl.com/kk7yo3

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Crazy-Horse-The-Book-Screenplay-
David-Seals-Deganawidah/9781887786157-item.html?pticket=p4wzhe45cm
5wzk45bs4xchq2V8nwY%2fjqpx1mqjDewQGXAe63zMI%3d

Crazy Horse:The Book & Screenplay

Author: David Seals|See more titles by David Seals
Editor: Deganawidah|See more titles edited by Deganawidah
List Price:$24.00
irewards Member Price:$22.80

http://www.filedby.com/author/deganawidah/2072290/.

Crazy Horse : The Book and Screenplay
1996
Author: David Seals
Illustrator: Amos Bad Heart Bull
Translator: Motseyoef
Editor: Deganawidah

David Seals also appears to have written a family memoire titled Abduction at Roswell.

http://www.frontierscience.us/article119.html

ABDUCTION AT ROSWELL by David Seals

In my family, who was there, Roswell had always been an intensely personal place because that was where our parents were married in 1946 and the family began. It was where 26-year old Lt. Walter J. Seals was a pilot with the 509th Composite Bomb Group that had just come back from nuking Japan at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and he celebrated the victory by marrying a sassy nurse from Arizona named Kathleen O'Brien (whose father had fought alongside Mick Collins for Irish independence back in the 1920s).

(con...)

By the 90s, David was ready to go back to the 40s before he was born, thanks to decades of research, ceremonies with Indians, sessions with psychics, and memories of many hours of conversations with his mother and father. He was confident he had found a realistic way to remember and reconstruct what really happened at Roswell, and, even more challenging, to see it from the point of view of the Enemies!

(con...) 

But Lieutenant Jack Seals only knew Them as irrational nightmares, he told his fiancée Kay O'Brien in New Mexico, who told her children what he said years later. Safely away from the killing fields of Nanking and Dresden, they thought, secrets were kept from each other, about his former pregnant wife, and the top-secret Bombs of mass destruction he carried in the hold of his B-29. And Kay didn't tell him her father was in the Mental Hospital in Pueblo, Colorado and had to be given a brain-destroying lobotomy operation as barbaric as anything in Auschwitz. She was afraid he'd think she was crazy too, and he was afraid his unfaithfulness and profligacy with women would jeopardize
his career and a respectable marriage to a good Catholic girl. 

(con...)

 

But there was more, a lot more, that came out in the terrible therapy sessions she had to go through in detoxification confinements at Fitzsimon's Army Hospital and Mercy Hospital in Denver. 

'They" took her and her husband and newborn baby boy - who arrived mysteriously, somehow, from some other woman?! - in the midst of dark flying battles, at night, in the town, and out in the desert.

(con...)

She told her daughter Jacque she had been very much awake when the three of them were taken into "a black place somewhere."      David couldn't believe it. No one could. In his case it was far too close to his own memories of a black energy when he was 20 years old and thought he was dying.   

(con...)

The years went by and Jack and Kay had more children, but the monsters came in their house again in Japan in 1956 and killed their firstborn daughter Kathy, a pretty blonde child of 4 years. Kay saw them take her! David heard them in the house.

(con...)
So according to this, David Seals father had a former pregnant wife, and he had expereince living in Nanking or Dresdan, and his parents were abducted with a newborn baby who mysteriously arrived , from another woman (?). This newborn baby sounds like it may have been David Seals (?)   

I'm not sure how any of this fits with the story his ancestor was Deganawidah.

David Seals also spells his name Davydd ap Saille

http://www.ipl.org/div/natam/bin/browse.pl/A461

Native American Authors Project
| David Seals , 1947-
| Huron
| Davydd ap Saille (the spelling used by the author)
| is a talented Huron novelist, publisher (Sky and Sage
| Books), freelance journalist, playwright, and documentary
| video producer.

Being curious what might come up under the name Davydd Seals i did a google search...

http://books.google.ca/books?id=xv8vNd6VgMMC&pg=PA391&lpg=PA391&
dq=Davydd+ap+Saille&source=bl&ots=_pxkcSAuDP&sig=bvOE_BEUXAhtEebU
NYWEmUs0pso&hl=en&ei=LDWXStfXE42YsgPt0pGbAg&sa=X&oi=book_result&
ct=result&resnum=10#v=onepage&q=Davydd%20ap%20Saille&f=false

or

http://tinyurl.com/m8hmlh

The politics of hallowed ground: Wounded Knee and the struggle for Indian ...
 By Mario Gonzalez

page 152

The Sioux Treaty Council is supported by David Seals, who wrote the book Powwow Highway which was eventually turned into a popular movie....

page 391

16. Seals who goes by the name Davydd ap Saille, is a producer for Thunder Nation Productions. A petition for a court ordered injunction was filed in june 1995 by the Oglala Lakota Cultural Committee and it's chairman Phillip under Baggage to prevent the making of a movie on Crazy horse by one Seals production company. ( Indian Country Today , June 23 1995)

I guess this might reffer to the book and screen play reffered to above which mentioned Deganawidah as his editor.

Just the book is mentioned below, and seems to be mentioned in a couple New Age lists, so I guess it isn't straight history .

http://openlibrary.org/b/OL793565M/Crazy-Horse

Contributions:     Saille, Davydd ap., Bear Butte Council.
By statement:    according to Davydd ap Saille.
Series:    The seven council fires of Sweet Medicine ;, act 6
Language:    English
Pagination:    p. cm.
ISBN 10:    1887786155
LCCN:    95026187
Dewey:    978/.0049752, B
LC:    BF1999 .W224213 1994
Subject:    Crazy Horse, ca. 1842-1877.
New Age movement.

http://www.amazon.com/Seventh-Generation-Images-Lakota-Today/dp/1576870316

David Seals, a Huron-Wendat, was born in Denver, Colorado in 1947, was a member of the American Indian Movement, and is founder of the Bear Butte Council. Seals is the author of The Seven Council Fires of Sweet Medicine: Seven Acts in Five Volumes of Indigenous Mythology (Sky and Sage, 1997), Crazy Horse: The Book and Screenplay (Sky and Sage, 1996), Sweet Medicine (Crown, 1994), and Powwow Highway (Sky and Sage, 1983/Plume, 1990, also a motion picture). He lives in South Dakota's Black Hills.

http://www.penguin.ca/nf/Author/AuthorPage/0,,1000029297,00.html

David Seals
David Seals, born in Denver in 1947, was a member of the American Indian movement, and is founder of the Bear Butte Council. He has worked as a reporter and a professional actor. He lives in South Dakota.

David Seals founded the Bear Butte Council?

I see in a letter which is said to be written by Richard Grass, which was posted online by someone named David. There is a list of names at the bottom , which appears to be members of the Bear Butte Council... In this list I see the name of David Seals

http://www.mail-archive.com/nativenews@mlists.net/msg05297.html

NATIVE_NEWS: The 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty - it's the Law!

ishgooda
Sun, 12 Dec 1999 14:08:16 -0800

Posted by [EMAIL PROTECTED] :

Subject: The 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty - it's the Law!
  Date: 09 Dec 1999 19:31:57 GMT
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Libyad817)
Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com
Newsgroups: alt.native


[A fullblood Lakota elder, Richard Grass, asked me to post this letter. The letter includes a number of signatures of elders and warriors from the 1991 Bear Butte Council.  I believe Ishgooda was building a map-site with details of these treaty Lands, which stretch from the Nakota-Stoney territory in Alberta to the Arkansas River in Colorado of the Arapaho Nation, east-to-west from the Mississippi/Missouri River to
the Rocky Mountains.  David]

( entire letter is not copied and pasted here )
Richard Grass

The Bear Butte Council (Mato Paha Okolokiciye) is an ancient counsel of the many Allies of the holy Black Hills (H'e Sapa) bioregion, in what has been illegally occupied and desecrated by the 'United States of America' and 'Canada'.

(con...)

Submitted, Respectfully,
Richard Grass
Descendent Treaty Chief

[signatures to same, July 14, 1991

Bear Butte

      John W. Long
      Archie Fire
      Arvol Looking Horse,
      Bill Tall Bull
      Richard Grass
      Rema White Cheek
      Joseph A. Walker
      Reginald Bird Horse
      Pete Fills The Pipe Sr.
      Huron Red Dog
      Rodney Lee Randall
      Heidi Lee Randall
      Robert Grey Eagle
      Gilly Running
      Anthony Running
      Cecelia Parker
      Tony Black Feather
      Philip Sounding Sides
      Merle Whistler
      Two Crows
      Dave Yakima Chief
      Bernard Peoples
      Garfield Grassrope
      YasuLuta Red Hail
      Irvin Red Fox
       Mark Soldier Chief
      David Seals
       Ken Wallowing Bull
       Elva Stand in Timber
       Adeline Whitewolf
       Lee Lonebear
       Joe Bear
       Alfred Strange Owl

Here a David Sallie appears as a spokes person for the Bear Butte Council which is refferred to as a spiritual council...

http//news.google.com/newspapers?nid=932&dat=19940620&id=qHkLAAA
AIBAJ&sjid=hVMDAAAAIBAJ&pg=3870,2864755

Kingman Daily Miner - Jun 20, 1994

A spiritual group the Bear Butte Council, also opposes plans for a visit to Bear Butte, a sacred mountain to the Sioux, Cheyenne ans other tribes.

"Any involvement with the US government is considered non-traditional, an unspiritual thing," said council spokesman David Sallie of Rapid City.  "We like the reconciliation idea. But anything to do with the military or US government where it involves spirituality we do not support. "

Here David is just said to be a member of Bear Butte Council...  ( Other entries on line claim he is the founder )

http://www.mail-archive.com/nativenews@mlists.net/msg05038.html.
 

David Seals, Huron, is the author many books, including the novels 'Sweet Medicine' and 'The Powwow Highway', which was also made into a feature film. Mr. Seals, residing in Rapid City, SD is a member of Black Hills AIM and the Bear Butte Council.

As has been pointed out in the other thread, Seals appears to be quite involved in publishing what he says people say about the murder of Anna Mae Pictou Aquash.

Much of what he has published has been controversial , of doubtful accuracy and even extremely offensive .

For example... ( I have no idea if the allegations in the links below have any truth in them ) 

http://www.dlncoalition.org/arlo_looking_cloud_interview.htm

http://www.grahamdefense.org/20040110seals.htm

The family of Anna Mae Pictou Aquash have apparently created a webpage denouncing Davids reports as both offensive and fabricated .

 http://indigenouswomenforjustice.org/seals.html

We are disgusted that our mother's name and tragedy continues to be exploited in this way, and in the name of decency we ask this individual and others so inclined to cease and desist. As Anna Mae's next of kin, we hereby inform Seals and those responsible for this, that they do not have permission to use our mother's name.

(con...)

I continue to be disgusted by Seals and others like him whose morbid fascination with my mother's murder debases all that she lived and died for, and attempts to reduce her suffering, and ours, to the level of a sick hobby or Internet spectator sport.

And then someone posting as David Seals (?) in a google group comes out with this ... which denies some of the most basic physical evidence and apparent facts of the case.

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.native/browse_thread/thread/ee29ef8e
540c78c8/b2fb56974a05830d?lnk=raot

From: Dave <sealsor...@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2009 13:56:57 -0700 (PDT)
Local: Thurs, Apr 2 2009 1:56 pm
Subject: Re: Mato Wicayuwakanpi {Bears are Wakan; dispatch from ALCDF)
Reply to author | Forward | Print | Individual message | Show original | Report this message | Find messages by this author
On Apr 2, 11:30 am, Ali <johnson.al...@gmail.com> wrote:


Yeah. Arlo is in a holding facility now, waiting to testify at the
Graham-Marshall trial. Technically he's out of a Federal Jail, and
they're trying to promise him a reduction in sentence, or something,
if he talks about this alleged gun the Gov't is saying they used to
kill Anna Mae Aquash.

wrong. The Spirits are telling us now, at Bear Butte, she was thrown
off the cliff at that ravine in Wanblee, and she wasn't shot at all.

Look at the evidence. Nathan Merrick in Arlo's trial, the first one on
the scene, said, "...I just felt somebody threw her down in the ditch,
down into the ravine." He said she had some blood on the back of her
head, which could have been from the fall, hitting a rock.

Much more to come soon.

I don't know enough about this to have an opinion either way.

I do know a couple very reasonable not crazy at all people who have told me about experinces with UFO's so I don't think Dave is a nut to have had an expereince like this, or to report it.

However, if Seals honestly believes the truth is not geting the credit it deserves, I have to wonder why Seals would choose to do these very sensitive interviews and report his family was abducted by aliens.

Surely Seals must have realized this combination of controversial allegations in a serious case of what maybe a gross social injustice, combined with his stories of alien abduction, is going to be used to discredit the statements he claims people made to him... I don't know if people actually made these statements to him as reported or not, but if they didn't there is a problem and if they did, I would have hoped Seals would have more concern for his preserving his own credibility.

I certainly wouldn't want him representing me if I was unjustly convicted of a crime i didn't commit.

So even though this is beyond the scope of what NAFPS usually discusses I am also wondering about this persons effect on the people and causes he claims to be serving.

If one of the moderators feels that some of this involves a discussion that does not belong on this message board, please feel free to edit this post.

[Sizzle Flambé]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Peacemaker

The Great Peacemaker, sometimes referred to as Deganawida or "Dekanawida" (although as a mark of respect some Iroquois avoid referring to him by this name except in special circumstances) was, along with Hiawatha, the traditional founder of the Haudenosaunee (commonly called the Iroquois) Confederacy,

(con..)

It is reported that he was born a Huron and by some accounts it was a virgin birth.

Next sentence: "Others say he was born an Onondaga and later adopted by the Mohawks."

This indicates that (as with many legends) differing versions are told, and that we do not know with certainty which, if any, is true.

Did Deganawida have children and leave known descendants?

I haven't seen any version mention those. (But would they bother to?)

The Dictionary of Canadian Biography says that "on reaching manhood" he told his mother of his mission and left his tribe.

That would seem to exclude marriage and descendants among the Huron -- which is how Seals claims descent.

If he married and had descendants among the Iroquois (again not mentioned), wouldn't Seals have to claim to be Iroquois to claim such descent?

But then the Great Peacemaker disappears again, and who knows what happened after that? Anyone can claim anything.

[Sizzle Flambé]

"David Seals, a Huron-Wendat,..."

Well, that's nice. Not only is it a change from "member of...the Cheyenne Nation", which claim he doesn't seem to be making any more, it's a change from a US-registered First Nation to a Canadian one.

"Canadian law is different in that registration as an Indian under the provisions of the Indian Act is not based on percentage of Indian blood quantum. Under previous Indian Acts, it was possible for non-Indians to gain Indian status through marriage. Under the current Act, non-Indians can gain status through adoption by registered Indians." -- <http://www.ainc-inac.gc.ca/br/is/scs/faq-eng.asp#q23>

"As the noted Paiute poet/novelist Adrian C. Lewis put it in a letter to Churchill on Sept. 21, 1992 (copy on file), 'David Seals...now has a sequel to Pow Wow Highway out. Although he claims AIM connections, etc., he is really not an Indian. He's a new age weirdo and a terrible writer at that.'" -- <http://www.coloradoaim.org/why.html>, footnote #11.

[earthw7]

this is the right place for discussion.

One AIM is an urban movement and they have all kind of people
involved with them including non-natives like seal and churchill.

This is the main reason many of us stayed aways from the Bear Butte protest
because the newagers that attended.

But still don't see how he is selling ceremonies

[Sizzle Flambé]

More examples

<http://www.aliensthetruth.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2510>

Roswell Shamanism Series

for immediate release
by David Seals
http://www.abductionatroswell.com

With so many books and dramas about the 1947 events at Roswell New Mexico, very little has been said about the Native-indigenous spirituality that was directly involved in the "Unidentified Flying Objects".

[...]

Where to begin? Of course Anthros can trace us back to at least 10,000 years ago (8,000 B.C. to use their quaint dating), in the migratory routes between Tungus Evenkia and the High Buffalo Plains of our territories. They have also established what we already knew, namely, that our relationship to the Spirit World was exactly the same, and that our 'Samans', to use the word originally from your people, knew that the 'celestial Sky Spirits' regularly traveled through the stars from the Upper Worlds to the Middle and Underworlds familiar to Earth.

At Bear Butte in the Black Hills of South Dakota, for instance, there were the Maheonox caves sacred to these Spirits, as well as Heszevox for animal caverns to be reincarnated. Such caves are also known to the Apaches at El Capitan Mountain, where we all danced last summer.

As descendents, we of course owe it to our ancestors to continue the central shamanic task of restoring harmony around here, and opposing the Russian and American militarists and loggers and miners who have threatened the spirit world itself; thus the 'Flying Discs' reported here and there in 1908 and 1947 respectively. The shamans at those times were very much aware of what was happening, and acting as intermediaries with the angry Star People.

<http://www.aliensthetruth.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2500> (again, David Seals --)

We have also, some of us, experienced strange phenomena of our own, in the Pecos Valley, and up to the Capitan Range. We have talked to Mescalero Apaches who have fascinating legends of "Spirits" from Sirius and The Pleiades, and more and more occultists and paranormal scientists who are discovering links between prehistoric petroglyphs and crop circle designs, animal mutilations and human kidnappings, religious parables of the Bible similar to so-called Pagan ancestors and goddesses of the New Age wiccan students. Archaelogists are curious about the similar burial practices at Mesa Verde and Egypt and Yucutan in Mexico.

[Sizzle Flambé]

I also want to point out that because Seals is involved in some controversial issues, it is possible some of what I am quoting below was not in fact written by David Seals, and it may be someone is intentionally writting things with inaccurate information in hopes of discrediting him.

His "Prophecies of the Black Hills", for instance? That dates back to 1992, and you can see it in the NATIVE-L archives, where it was copied from YUWITAYA LAKOTA, "the News Letter of The Lakota Sovereignty Organizing Committee, Bear Butte Council". (WebArchiveLink)

According to the 'Statement of Renewal', the BEAR BUTTE COUNCIL has already been meeting since last midsummer as the spiritual government of the Confederacy of the Black Hills. It is a Council of prophets, spirits, warriors, chiefs, and ancestors who remained faithful to the Great Mystery. It will always be the only true government of this sacred land. It is the only authority to which citizens of this Confederacy will submit.

Apparently not all the Council members need to be alive in order to govern.

(Chicago graveyard voters, take note! Elect some of your own to office!)