Earthkeepers: A Circlewood Podcast on Creation Care and Spirituality · Forrest Inslee

“All Our Relatives”—Learning to be Part of Creation, with Lenore Three Stars | Ep. 122

·36 min·2 clips

Lenore Three Stars says creation is “totally marginalized” and “everything is suffering in creation.”

1. Earthkeepers: A Circlewood Podcast on Creation Care and Spirituality revisits “All Our Relatives”—Learning to be Part of Creation, with Lenore Three Stars. 2. Forrest Inslee interviews Lenore Three Stars, a Circlewood board member and Oglala Lakota woman, because her voice helped shape the podcast’s priorities and values. 3. The episode asks how Lakota kinship, Indigenous theology, and following Jesus together form a different way of understanding creation. 4. Lenore says her surname “Three Stars” signals Native identity, and she identifies herself as Oglala Lakota from Pine Ridge Reservation. 5. She names the Ocheti Shakone, the seven council fires, and says her ancestral lands include the Black Hills, which she calls “Hesop.” 6. Lenore says kinship is “everything” in Lakota culture, and she points to tiyoshpaye as the extended-family system. 7. She names Richard Twist as a major influence and ties his teaching to mitakoyeoyansin, meaning “we are all related.” 8. She says her Christian upbringing required her to leave parts of her Native identity at the door, or else be accused of syncretism. 9. Lenore describes the North American Institute of Indigenous Theological Studies and says the first cohort, through George Fox, gave her “my faith life again.” 10. She says her theological confusion was tied to “a difference in worldview” between Western and Indigenous frameworks. 11. Lenore recalls Richard Twist telling a room of white people, “in the beginning was the word, and the word was white.” 12. She says that joke was “funny and true,” and she uses it to show how Indigenous language can correct imbalance in Christian understanding. 13. Lenore says Lakota adoption relationships through honka can be “just as strong, if not stronger” than blood ties. 14. She defines witakliyé ollantsi as “be the best relative you can be,” including the responsibility to restore right relationship with creator, people, and creation. 15. She says the mainstream church is incomplete without “the corrective voice from native people,” especially when it stops seeing Native communities as a mission field. 16. Lenore argues that creation is suffering and that humans must be “caretakers” and “co-sustainers,” not owners of a resource colony. 17. She rejects dualisms that split sacred from secular or spiritual from material, saying the church taught her that “this world is not our home.” 18. Lenore tells a Buffalo-race story in which all of creation participates, and she uses it to show sacrifice, generosity, humility, and respect in community. 19. The conversation is an interview with a reflective pace, and Forrest repeatedly asks follow-up questions about worldview, discipleship, and hope. 20. Listeners drawn to Indigenous theology, creation care, and Lakota spirituality would likely stay with it, while people wanting a brief devotional or simple science talk might skip it.

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