Remembering Sun Bear Sun Bear, the teacher who envisioned this Medicine Wheel, departed the earth plane on June 19, 1992. Who was Sun Bear, this man who moved so many? What made him stand so much taller than the rest of humanity? What allowed him to know the human condition so well he could speak to each individual he met with the compassion born of true understanding? What accidents or circumstances of his childhood conspired to make a "poor reservation Indian with an eighth grade education" into a man who inspired hundreds of thousands of people--most of them richer, better educated--to reach for and find their own path of power?
Sun Bear was born Vincent LaDuke on August 31, 1929, on the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota. Two months after his birth, the stock market crashed. Sun Bear said he was shaped in part by that event and by the dustbowl he witnessed as a child, "a plague upon the Earth caused by the wheat savages," farmers who raped the earth with no thought for the consequences. Sun Bear was raised on the reservation, taught about plants and the natural world by his Ojibwa grandmother, and about healing and other forms of medicine by two uncles who were medicine men. In Native culture medicine people were sacred teachers, ones who could communicate with the many realms of reality and bring understanding. They also served as healers of bodies, minds, souls and hearts. These uncles taught Sun Bear about vision, which he defined as personal communication between the individual and the Creator Spirit.
Sun Bear experienced many visions in his life. His first came when he was three years old. He remembered very little of it and was told the rest by his family. He woke up making the sounds of an angry war chief and he wouldn't stop until his uncle gave him medicine that allowed him to sleep.
Sun Bear's second vision came when he was five and sick with diphtheria. In it he saw a large black bear surrounded by a rainbow of color. The bear reached through its rainbow sphere and touched Sun Bear on his head. Following that vision he came out of convulsions and lived.
Sun Bear went through the eighth grade in the LaDuke school, which had been named after his father, liking the walk to school more than the classes. His family had a big garden and raised animals, so they fared pretty well during the depression. At one point they traveled around while his father looked for work and Sun Bear went with them. Sun Bear trapped from the time he was seven to help with his family's financial needs, although he later opposed trapping. He hunted for food from the time he was nine. These experiences gave him the early base for his teaching about self-reliance and for writing At Home in the Wilderness and The Self-Reliance Book.
When Sun Bear was fifteen he went to a White Earth Tribal Council meeting and tried to tell the members how to better manage the tribe's resources by encouraging his tribesmen to become self-sufficient. They didn't listen then, saying he was too young to know anything. Twenty-five years later, when he had become an economic development specialist, his own and twenty-five other Ojibwa and Winnebago bands paid him to come tell them the same message of self-sufficiency.
Shortly after his first tribal council encounter, he left White Earth and traveled the country working in the fields, cutting wood, picking potatoes, doing dishes, helping in a cemetery, selling and cooking--whatever jobs he could get to support himself and widen his view of the world.
While he was exploring the white world, Sun Bear also explored the Indian one. Traveling the country gave him the opportunity to meet medicine people, teachers and just plain folk from many of the Native nations. During this period, Sun Bear formulated much of the philosophy he would later teach to others. Periodically he would return to White Earth and the woodlands that first taught him to love the Earth Mother in her many seasons and changes.
The gypsy lifestyle suited Sun Bear. But the Korean War was being fought and friends and relatives were advising him to enlist rather than be drafted. He did and lasted through basic training. Following that he realized, "If I wanted to fight those who took my country from me, I wouldn't be fighting Koreans." He headed for the hills. "I was a ninety-day wonder," Sun Bear said, "but in a different sense than usual. I did my ninety days and for the next four years the FBI wondered where I was."
During those four years he continued working and learning about his people. He went to Hollywood and worked as an actor. He became active with the Los Angeles Indian Center and the early renaissance of Native culture there. He also worked with the Reno Sparks Indian Colony on crafts programs and on improving the self-respect both of the colony and of the people living in it. He learned about working with the media and eventually got enough paint donated to paint the entire Reno Sparks Indian Colony. While he was in Reno, the FBI caught up with him.
At his court-martial people from many walks of life asked for his release because of the importance of the public service work he was doing. Nonetheless, in a time when conscientious objection was not very prevalent, Sun Bear was given a bad conduct discharge and one year in prison. Rather than curse his fate, Sun Bear used his time in prison to learn about himself. Sun Bear always had the ability to make the best of any situation, an ability he tried to pass on to his students. Because of continued support of Sun Bear's release, he was freed from prison after serving six months.
Following his release Sun Bear split his time between Reno and Los Angeles, working both in movies and with self-help projects. This was the time when the Eisenhower administration was working hard to eliminate reservations and force Native people into cities and away from their culture. Sun Bear was working with the Los Angeles Indian Center helping relocated Indians get enough to eat. After a while he decided to bring attention to the problems of Native people by hitchhiking to Washington, D.C., wearing a war bonnet and carrying a sign saying HAVE BLANKET, WILL TRAVEL, and he spoke to interested groups along he way. On this trip he met Betty Bernstein, his companion for the next four and a half years and mother of their daughter Winona LaDuke.
Sun Bear continued to work both in Reno and Los Angeles for the next decade. Along with Nimimosha, whom he met while he was attending a Berkeley Free Speech Movement event, he developed Many Smokes, the newsletter he had begun in Los Angeles, into a glossy national publication. They published At Home in the Wilderness and shortly after Sun Bear went to work for the Inter-Tribal Council of Nevada developing self-help programs. When he became an economic development specialist who spent more time with paperwork than people, he resigned.
Following that, Sun Bear helped design a Native American Studies program at the University of California at Davis. He wrote Buffalo Hearts, a book honoring various great leaders of Native nations. Sun Bear began teaching at the experimental college, and that planted the seed that allowed his true work in life to grow. Sun Bear began to meet with a group of people in Davis whom he encountered through the experimental college, and out of this group came the core of the initial Bear Tribe.
The Bear Tribe is Sun Bear's vision child, which he had begun to birth when he was five. The birthing continued through subsequent visions. He knew he was to build a tribe of teachers responsible for sharing with other people those lessons of harmony and balance they had succeeded in learning through their own experience.
The Bear Tribe began in California in 1970. By 1971 there were more than two hundred people living with the tribe in over seventeen donated bases in that state. Invitations to speak about the tribe and requests to join the tribe came in from all around the country. As the number of people in the tribe grew, so did the problems. Eventually the problems outweighed the pleasure of seeing his vision come to life, and Sun Bear left for Reno with a small group of people, including Morning Star, who gave birth to Sun Bear's daughter Autumn in 1972.
It took quite some time for Sun Bear to recover from his first and only misgivings about the fulfillment of his vision. It took even longer to evaluate the problems and come up with some experimental solutions. The group attempted to help people learn to live together in a truly loving way without greed, envy, fear or competition. It was hard work to try to build a tribe of teachers out of people all raised in the dominant society. But Sun Bear persevered, helped by the people who shared his vision and by the further clarification that came to him in subsequent visionary experiences.
One of these visions led him to the place outside Spokane, Washington, that became known as Vision Mountain. On this land many people learned about self-reliance and about their true connection with the Earth Mother.
In another vision he saw people of all the clans, of all the directions returning with peace in their hearts and prayers on their lips to the sacred circle, the sacred hoop of his people. From this vision came the Medicine Wheel Circle, then The Medicine Wheel: Earth Astrology, then the Medicine Wheel Gatherings. As a result of this vision, Sun Bear gained worldwide recognition for his work in healing people and the earth, and he touched hundreds of thousands of people with his message.
In another vision Sun Bear stood on a hilltop in total darkness while he prayed to the Creator. Then his hand was moved, and everywhere he pointed a brilliant light came on. These lights were different sizes, shapes and colors, and they reminded him of his childhood vision of a large black bear surrounded by a rainbow of color. This time the Great Spirit told Sun Bear the lights represented people who would come to him to learn, then go into the world to use their medicine knowledge. ...
