Thomas Hübl: First of all, I’m very grateful that you made the time for us and that we can have this exciting conversation. I’m looking forward to it. And then I have many questions or interests, so I’m happy you’re here. So first of all, welcome.
Dr. Ruby Gibson: Thank you for having me.
Thomas: When you hear ancestral healing, maybe you can frame for us a little bit your view on that. How would you hear how you experienced that, what is the world of ancestral healing for you? Just to dive a bit with you into your understanding. And then let’s see how we emerge from our conversation. But I’m very interested in ancestral healing or healing ancestral trauma, trauma in our lineage, how that shows up for you. What’s your experience of it? How does it work in your understanding? All that. Your universe of it.
Dr. Gibson: I’ll try to be as succinct as possible here. I don’t refer to it as ancestral healing. Because the healing is really not of the ancestor, it’s the person. Anyways, I call it “historical trauma recovery” or something along those lines, but I can understand that catchphrase that has come.
I’ve been doing this work for 35 years, doing historical trauma work. It’s been a fascinating experience, especially within our community. So our community is in Rapid City, South Dakota, and we work on the Pine Ridge Reservation. And it’s probably the poorest county in the United States. And it’s a horrible life and way to live. It’s very challenging. There’s good aspects about it but our goal is the future of native wellness.
So I look at it as a medicine that can help us reorganize wounds within our cellphones, within the culture, in order to step forward. So I developed something called somatic archeology. That’s what my book is about, and my primary work is all about that. It has been a spiritually driven work, and we were able to raise funding so that we can provide these services to our relatives in that area because they are very poor, it’s the poverty. So we raise money and then we train and teach people and then they go out into their communities and they do the work. So we’re kind of like Johnny Appleseed, planting lots of seeds everywhere. I’m hoping that our vision of a different future for native wellness will come.
I always begin by saying that I appreciate and honor all my relatives and those who’ve come before me and the ones who come after me, that I stand at a bridge like an apex. When I stand here, I have seven generations behind me, seven generations ahead of me, and I’m right here in the middle. And it’s such a potent place to be from this place. We can affect what’s happened and what will happen. We have so much power that we don’t even know or know how to utilize or can conceptualize. So the body has been my greatest teacher and the land. So I’m not sure if I’m going the direction, but I can keep sharing a few more things.
Thomas: Oh, please do. It’s fascinating. I am fascinated and I love the transmission that you transmit into this race. So please keep going. Yeah, that’s very good.
Dr. Gibson: You know, when I was 13, I started to do healing work. The very first thing that happened to me was I was riding my horse home from work and I was going through a meadow and the horse came upon a deer standing in the meadow, just one single deer. And the horse stopped and I looked at the deer and she looked straight at me and said, “Please don’t eat us. It’s not your way.” And I said, “Okay. And I haven’t since that day eaten a piece of meat.” And so that was 50 years ago. My teachings began with the Earth, began with coming into relationship with all four worlds: the mineral world, the plant world, animal world and human world, because all are equal and all are important. All rely on each other for survival. So when we think of ourselves, we think of the great circle of life that’s around us. We think of all the components. What’s beneath us, what’s above us, What are we dancing in, so we use the sacred medicine of the Lakota traditions, part Ojibwe and also part Italian or Spanish? I’m not sure. I’m a mixed-blood woman. Since I was 13, my journey has been all about healing and I became a licensed massage therapist.
I didn’t want to have to box myself into university or college because they weren’t teaching me what I needed. So I started studying with medicine men. I studied in Australia, Aboriginal people, I studied in Canada, First Nations. I stayed in Mexico with the Otomi, and with numerous tribes around the United States because I wanted to understand the medicine. I was adopted by grandfather Frank Fulscrow who was the spiritual leader of the Olalawasu. He was an amazing man. He’s passed on now. I became an adoptive parent for six or eight of his great grandchildren, and I spent a few years just caring for the people and caring for the children. It was beautiful. You know, It’s a beautiful time, but all good things have a beginning and end.
And so I just kept I had a drive inside of me and I spent from the time I was 15 until I was 35 – I meditated for one hour every day for 20 years and it allowed me to deepen inside of my body, inside of my spirit. And I began to have conversations with the unseen world. I studied magic, shamanism, you know, all sorts of things because I was hungry, so hungry. I fed myself regularly. I got into some very challenging situations, but I was always taken care of.
One day, Thomas, I had this dream, and the dream was that I was driving to a sweat lodge ceremony, there was a grandmother next to me and there was a medicine man in the backseat with his dog. And we were driving and the grandmother said, “Granddaughter, turn here.” “No, grandmother. I know where I’m going.” And kept going. She said, “Granddaughter, I really think you should turn.” And I said, “Oh, no, we’re late. And I know how to get there.” Third time, “Granddaughter, you should turn.” I said, “No, I’m almost there.” And the next thing I know, the road turns to gravel and crosses a creek and goes up a hill. And there’s this park there with all these people laying in the sun, eating and things. And we stopped the car and I thought, “Well, this isn’t it. Where are we?” And I looked around and I didn’t recognize anyone. And the medicine man got out of the car and the grandmother got out of the car and the police showed up and arrested the medicine man for having a dog in the park. Everything started getting chaotic, I was standing there scratching my head. I looked over at the grandmother and she winked at me and she whispered in my ear. “The moral of the story is to always let the grandmothers drive.”
So in that way, I have a group of grandmothers. And they are a large group and I’m not the center of it. It’s a spiritual group that’s out to heal the planet. People like Mother Teresa. That’s how they are. They started guiding me. As they guided me and opened doors, I was able to begin this nonprofit group and develop the work in a way. So now we’re researching and evaluating it and then publishing papers on the work, which I never would have done before, because I’m a real give away girl. My heart’s for the people. So I give probably more than I should, but it’s just who I am. So it allowed us to get some great funding.
It’s kind of a long story, but in short, somatic archeology was a vision. In our tradition, we use the medicine wheel to track everything. The four stages of life, you know, protection. I mean, the medicine wheel is representative of the whole universe, the whole experience.
And so I know if I can take a model and put it on the medicine wheel and it holds water, that it’s good. And I had to do that with somatic archeology. I had to start taking the steps because as I was doing massage, I would find someone would feel better and then they would come back with the same pain. And so I would say, Well, what’s under that? What’s under that? What’s under that? And we began digging or excavating, and it happened quite naturally. Then it kept happening. And then I noticed people were getting really well, whether it was a physical symptom or emotional or spiritual, they were able to find this recovery. So I started working on people and training people, but I hadn’t reached that point where, yes, let’s take this work into a community. And let it flourish. And the grandmothers gave me, gave us the opportunity.
Thomas: So beautiful.
Dr. Gibson: Yeah. The grandmothers gave us the opportunity to have some unlimited funding. We’ve touched in the past eight years millions of lives. You know, you come to a point in life and you just feel like you’re 100% ready. That there’s nothing in your way? That’s what happened. I had done enough of my own work, my own recovery work that I was completely there. And the work just started moving through me and articulating.
I watched your presentation the other day that you gave this weekend. I watched the video and I really enjoyed listening to you talk because that passion for cultural trauma healing is really what’s in my heart. And how do we rebuild those wounds and how do we rebuild the people? How do we remember without wanting to be unconscious? You know, it’s like a fine line. It’s that way with our people. I’m sure it’s that way there as well. We have a lot of communities of people who have been taken over or controlled. The conquistadors did some pretty big damage for our people. It’s been a long journey and I’m happy to be at this place in my life right now. And because now I get to write and think of bigger things. So we’re going to open a historical trauma recovery center.
Thomas: Oh, wow.
Dr. Gibson: In Rapid City, as our first prototype. And then we’ll see how the people do if we can maintain our funding. I can see the transformation. I can already feel the potential of it.
Thomas: It’s so lovely. First of all, I deeply enjoy your transmission. Like what you transmit when you speak. It’s so beautiful. It touched me also, two things to underline that I hear when I listen to you. One is when you said, when you do enough in a work that there is a point where you experience the point when you start to ride the wave. Like when it’s the energy takes over and the limitations and not anymore and the strings that feel like a limitation. I think that’s a beautiful description. So I just want to underline what you said. This touched me. The other one is also when you speak about the grandmothers and I feel your deep connection and how it touches your heart and how you transmit that, it’s really beautiful and it’s a beautiful honoring also of, on the one hand, the collective, but also the lineage is so much in it.
When you speak, it’s very honoring, respectful and deep. So thank you for that. And, I also like the spark in your eyes when you speak about the bigger vision. That’s so beautiful because I think we need to grow into it and then it’s lovely when you speak about it. And I will come back to the bigger vision in a moment. I would also love for everybody listening to our conversation, I would love to hear a bit more because I’m very interested in different ways of doing the “digging” that you said, because I’m very passionate about digging. And so I like the revealing layers of somatic archeology. Maybe you can speak a little bit about how you do that or how the process looks like. And I think it’s going to be very interesting for us to get your transmission.
Dr. Gibson: There are five steps to somatic archeology. Really simple. Because I don’t think trauma’s hard to hear. Not if you have the right tools. It’s like getting over a bump in the road, you know.
The first step is I notice. That’s the whole wheel. Noticing yourself, 360 degrees. What’s happening inside? What’s happening outside? Where’s the most tension? What are you holding? You know, we just kind of do an overview and intake and get a sense of the history. And sometimes we do a timeline at that period where here you are when you were born, here you are now, and then we can track all those things because I’ve experienced that people have bundles of trauma and teasing them apart helps them to resolve it, because sometimes the way that we bind our trauma in our body is for safekeeping. But there comes a time when it’s no longer useful. So we notice. And so if someone says, “Well, I notice that I keep getting the stomach ache or I have anxiety, in the solar plexus.” Ok, take a few deep breaths into that area and we do this thing that I call Breathe, Ground, Settle. So we breathe in, exhale down, settle on their bones. I teach this in grade school. The kids love it. Breathe, ground, settle.
Usually we do things three times because three is the number of creation. One is the seed, two is the root, three is the flower. So if we want something to flower we say it three times. Anyway, as we look at that person, they’re having this pain here. We take three deep breaths. And then I ask them to feel from the inside out, What do you notice? What do you sense in there? We get into step two of I sense. And it’s the language of the body because the body doesn’t speak in English or Spanish or anything. It speaks in sensation. And so being able to decipher sensation is part of the learning and part of their awareness of themselves about their managing. So we sense, we find that place. And it can be dense, it can be solid, it can be in the egg shape. I mean, our body comes up with so many beautiful ways of managing things that you’ve just got to listen and your body will show you when you take the time and slow down, come out of your head into your skin. And we start to feel from the inside out.
What emerges is a bit of a story. Oh, well, you know, I might ask questions like, when was the first time you felt that or anyone else in your family had that same experience? We tap to see if it’s a familial situation, if it’s individual, simply based on sensation. It’s only important because you’re going from I notice to I sense to I feel. So we start in the center of the wheel, notice; to the West, I sense; we go to the South, I feel. That’s the place of emotion. It can be tears, laughter, shaking. Some kind of movement occurs. Those three steps are probably the most important: I notice, I sense and then letting whatever they’re sensing make its way through and it emerges. From that point, we go to the north of the wheel, which is I interpret. So it’s like a bottom up neurophysiological process, which is what a lot of somatic therapies currently work with.
I grew up near Boulder, Colorado, and that’s where Peter Levine lived. We were friends and he was developing somatic experiences while I was developing somatic archeology. There was like a seedbed here of all sorts of people who began coming up with these ideas, and they were all based on that same principle. So if you understand the body’s neurophysiology, it’s going to help you watch and track what changes in that person. And so for me, it’s a lot about being present and maybe giving little guidance along the way. But once you notice, you sense, you feel and then all that energy comes up into your head and you’re like, “Oh, that’s why.” And then you start analyzing and kind of putting it into place in your mind and in your life.
And then the last step is reconcile. Reconciliation is: so who are you when you’re no longer carrying that baggage? And then we help them dream forward, start to envision who they are when they’re not holding something or feeling anxious or in pain. Who are you when you’re free from that? And then we work, we do a session and then come back once a week. It takes seven days or one quarter of the moon cycle to clear out all that energy that got released into their energy field. And then it takes seven days for it to purge through. So we come back seven days later and do it again.
Thomas: Very beautiful description. Thank you for being so precise in really guiding it. It’s very easy to get, especially when you feel it in the body, how you speak about it. It’s very beautiful. When you now transition back to from so that’s something that we do in our individual or personal however we call it experience. If we translate that to maybe like the cultural application of it, how can we think of somatic archeology in the archeology of a society or a community or a group? Is there an equivalent in your work? Do you do this with individuals or also in group spaces or for cultural trauma archeology? Is is working every time through the individual, but is there anything about the collective space? Maybe you can speak a bit to your understanding here, like how the cultural traumatization gets affected or can be worked on.
Dr. Gibson: We have three wheels: the wheel of suffering, the wheel of healing and the wheel of transformation. So this is what I was sharing with you. I notice. I sense. I interpret. I reconcile. And what do you notice now? That’s one session. That’s another session. So I wanted to keep it very simple.
Thomas: You also spoke about the bigger vision of your center and how the work’s expanding like how does cultural transformation happen in your understanding? Or how do we work with cultural traumatization like the trauma wheel we have been born into our societies and that shaped us, that conditioned us that we are looking through that we often don’t notice at first because it’s so normal, so regular. As you’ve described your own spiritual journey, it takes a detoxification process or like a cleansing, and maybe you can speak about whatever comes up in you when you hear me speak about it, how this lives in you and in your work.
Dr. Gibson: Our cultures, I think we have 360 tribes in the United States. All those different cultures are so hesitant, sometimes to share or to expose themselves. We have been under duress for 500 plus years and there has never been any normalization. Poverty is devastating. Housing is terrible. Ceremonies are good. Lots of alcoholism. Meth use and drug use. They banned alcohol on the reservation. But people still drink and they approved marijuana. So you have this big Republican state of South Dakota, and then we have these reservations that have their own culture, community lands. It can be very isolating, but it can also be the boundary of safety for the people to be around their people. Because if you’re native, people know and they connect with you. We’ve all gone through so many changes. The tribes that were once warring with each other have had to learn to come together because it’s really the survival of our people that are weak.
And so we have some very strong elders and helpers. What we have is a group of youth. They have the highest suicide rate in the United States per capita. I spent one entire year at a school where they only had 100 native kids and out of that, twenty had committed suicide. There was no help. And it was a really, really bad situation. And I dropped everything. And I went to Montana and I work there. I got a grant, got them a counselor or two counselors. And I started working with the kids. I started changing the culture of the entire identification of teachers who are trained to deal with all of this because they had no counselors. At the end of the year, when graduation came in May. That year that I was there, we only had one suicide. I know how to do it or the grandmothers know how to do it. And I’ve been very, very successful with youth suicide. So we work a lot with kids. Because they are our future and because they need help, they don’t have too much to look forward to. A lot of their friends commit suicide. And then everybody is grieving. It’s a rough place. There’s gangs and all sorts of things going on, but there’s also such beauty. I mean, it’s just incredible how beautiful the people are and how they use laughter as a way of dealing with their grief.
How we come together at ceremonial times, sun dances and ceremonies. That’s so important. I see so many people doing work, but without helping someone to really embody their spirit, it seems to be off in a different dimension or something. My doctorate is in theology and psychology and I’ve studied all the world religions. What we as Native American people have in their culture is that really, really strong spiritual connection to our ancestors, to our lands and to the people. So I feel in our community we’re not even allowed to build the Indian center, even though it’s the home. it’s the Black Hills of South Dakota, it’s the birth land. It’s the place the people emerged from the earth in. It’s so Republican. And the governor wants to take all Indian history out of history books in their state. I mean, we’re dealing with racism. So we have to be so bold, you know? And I think it’s just time to say, all right. You know, Indian Health services run by the government are not very effective. So let’s help people get well. And that’s my mission. And if we can do it and we can document what we’re doing, I think it’ll be a beautiful model for other colleagues to be able to work in their communities. So it’s a little bit precarious. I feel pretty bold making these statements. But my heart and my vision, and these grandmothers will not let me rest.
Thomas: Hmm. Yeah, I can totally feel that being said. So first of all, it touches me very much. And I am also really sorry to hear some of the things that are going on there, just the suppression and the racism that’s happening. I’m wondering also because to me, it always feels like such a challenge as to how to do trauma healing and ongoing trauma is happening the whole time. Basically, there’s no rest. Kind of so that we can recover in a kind of very safe space because the cause has stopped. So that’s not happening.
So I’m wondering what are ways to do that kind of inner healing work that basically opens us up and reconnects us to do that while permanently there is racism or retraumatization happening? And can you speak a bit to that? Because I think it’s very important because they are different. You know, you can do trauma work in places where the traumatization stopped and you’re dealing with the aftermath or we need to deal with the historic trauma while the traumatization is going on, which is much more complex. And so maybe you can speak to us a bit of your experience of how to do that well, or maybe also what can not go well when we start opening traumatization while it’s still going on?
Dr. Gibson: Yeah, I think it’s probably pretty different from culture to culture. In our lands we say “Today’s a good day I’m above ground.” You know, it’s kind of a survival base. There are people who are very functional, very healthy and do great things. And then there’s a lot of people who are really suffering. When I first started there, the Freedom Lodge, our nonprofit group there. I started talking about historical trauma. People just sat there and looked at me. They didn’t even know what to say. Or people would say, there’s no such thing as historical trauma or who are you to speak? It was difficult to get it past the adults. And specifically because we have a lot of Anglo teachers on the reservation, which is always kind of contrary in some ways. People are slowly, slowly repairing themselves and their lives. But it’s the kids who have come into all the kind of mud and muck all that history. And I’m not going to go into it.
Probably like aged 10 to 20 is where I think transformation can happen within our community. And if you get the kids involved, the parents will get involved. If they’re not in jail. We have a lot of our men in jail. I mean, huge. A disproportionate amount in South Dakota. There’s a lot of women who run their families and raise their kids. And we have a word, it’s tioshpe that means the bigger family, like not just mom and dad and kids, but all the relatives, all of the uncles, aunties. When that information, when someone improves or changes, there can be a really good kind of response from the community, and this comes from trauma. What happens is it’s like lobsters in a bucket. As one person climbs up to get better, the rest pull them down as they’re trying to go. So people are shamed for getting better sometimes. That, for me, is the crux of the issue we have here. I don’t know as in depth as other communities.
Thomas: To me, everything you said so far makes a lot of sense. I think everything lands very clearly in my body and I can resonate with every word you’re saying. That’s why I feel very connected to the work that you do to the collective work. I mean, it makes a lot of sense. Sometimes on the one hand, this loyalty to the trauma and when we get better, like what happens in the person, but also what happens in the community. That dynamic, I think, is very interesting to look at. And then also what we sometimes feel is the hierarchy of trauma between different communities or different populations who like the scarcity at the base of trauma, the lack of so many things that creates this vacuum. And so I’m always looking how we can create spaces to embrace that vacuum and bring generosity into the deep filled sense of scarcity that comes with ongoing and collective traumatization. And I see this also in, as you said, because you ask if that makes sense as it hides in other communities. I have experienced it also with healing, like climbing out and pulling down. I have seen this in different places. I think that’s a very interesting dynamic to look at and the deeper level happening there.
Dr. Gibson: If you’re stuck, you want everybody to be stuck with you. So I don’t know. It’s a twisted way of thinking, but that’s what trauma does. Again, not everyone’s like that. We have some really healthy, dynamic and kind like haters in our community. They really want to improve, but they don’t want help from the outside community. So people come and they try to do things. If we can build it in-house, it’s going to make a big difference with them dropping in and doing a little workshop for kids.
Thomas: No. No, exactly. That’s why, like when I heard your vision and I felt how your spirit lit up when you spoke about it like that is so touching. That’s why I said it at the beginning, that it was a touching moment for me to listen to you, because I think that is so needed. I think to me, everything you say feels very, very aligned and connected. So the way you speak about it feels very imparted to me. And I can directly, like receive without any mediated, complicated kind of interface. Yeah, I am deeply touched by your work and I am so happy you’re doing all you’re doing. And I will be very happy to be in any way of support or connected and stay connected. You’re doing a beautiful work. Touches me when I listen to you.
Dr. Gibson: When I was watching you, I had the same experience and I was like, “Ooh, he’s on the same page.”
Thomas: Right. That’s what I feel the whole time. I had this deep resonance and I think many things about how you described the somatic archeology work. I mean, that’s very close to how I experience it too. Very much so. And also the spiritual dimension that you bring in and this deep respect for the lineage of spirit that is very beautiful. I think especially in the Western modern world, they feel that something very precious has been lost when we don’t respect the lineages, the elders and where we come from. So this feels deeply touching to me.
Dr. Gibson: Been playing with this new idea of I call it “Blood and Bones” and taking groups of native women to some of the battlegrounds and burial sites of our people. I’m praying for them to cross over because sometimes they just get stuck in that battleground and then it makes the ancestors or the next generations stuck too. So it’s for Mother Earth because she’s the one who’s holding it. So we’re looking to lighten her load and as well to have a place for people to grieve and to just really kind of know they’re doing a good thing and setting their relatives free.
I think that has never been done at the scale that it needs to be done. I think people have done it in their own little communities. But, you know, there’s still finding gravesites, especially of children. I mean, they just recently found a couple of them because children were put in forced boarding schools. They would die and they wouldn’t tell the parents to just bury them. I mean, the pain is so great. But the call for healing so that we can be strong again as a people. I think we can really change because most Native people feel like they’re the caretakers of the earth. I mean, our primary relationship is with our mother. And Mother Earth has a mother. She has a lineage, too. Right. And so it’s important to honor her lineage because her grandmothers and great grandmothers are not very happy to retrieve their daughter. So we want to go to those places and just pray and this sort of forgiveness and release the ancestors from those battlegrounds so that we can settle down. I mean, the cultural work piece is big. It daunts me and that’s why I do it. It’s a challenge.
Thomas: That’s right. And so important. I saw this in the first 20 years ago, when I started to work mainly in Europe and as in Germany after the World War and the Holocaust. And it’s very similar to what you described. It’s like how many kinds of souls didn’t cross over. And you can feel the depletion or the depression in the field. It’s very similar. We had very similar experiences to what you said right now and also how you feel deliberation when it opens up and they can start to move again. And it’s moving on. So how it changes our life today. I think that’s very important cultural work.
Dr. Gibson: Yeah, well, I would love to do some kind of project or work with you. So just because it feels like we could support each other.
Thomas: Very much so. I felt it the whole time. So I’m happy you’re saying this. I would love that too. And maybe we will stay connected. See what ideas that are coming up for us. If you have ideas, I will write to you. And then we see what feels right. It has such a strong resonance. For sure something can be borne through us. Thank you so much. This was very deep. Very close. It touched me very profoundly to listen to you. So, thank you.
Dr. Gibson: Thank you.
