Silence is the Mother of Truth, for the silent man was ever to be trusted, while the man ever ready with speech was never taken seriously.

Today the children of our public schools are taught more of the history, heroes, legends, and sagas of the old world than of the land of their birth, while they are furnished with little material on the people and institutions that are truly American.

The old people came literally to love the soil and they sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being close to a mothering power. The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing and healing.

For the Lakota there was no wilderness. Nature was not dangerous but hospitable, not forbidding but friendly.

The man who sat on the ground in his tipi meditating on life and its meaning, accepting the kinship of all creatures and acknowledging unity with the universe of things, was infusing into his being the true essence of civilization.

The old Lakota was wise. He knew that a man's heart away from nature becomes hard.

Silence is the Mother of Truth, for the silent man was ever to be trusted, while the man ever ready with speech was never taken seriously.