"It is an understanding with the Great Spirit or Creator that we will follow these ways"

These words point to a covenant rather than a command. An “understanding” suggests mutual recognition: human beings acknowledge a sacred order, and in turn accept responsibilities that flow from it. The Great Spirit or Creator is not invoked as a distant authority, but as the living source of relationship, between people, land, waters, animals, ancestors, and those yet to be born.

“These ways” evoke teachings handed down through ceremony, story, and practice: humility, respect, courage, honesty, and gratitude; care for the land as a relative rather than a resource; obligation to community over individual appetite; attention to balance and reciprocity in all exchanges. To agree to follow these ways is to move beyond belief and into practice, daily acts that align life with natural law and ancestral instruction.

The language of understanding carries consent and accountability. No one is coerced; one chooses to live in good relation. Yet choice carries consequence: harmony when alignment is kept, disorder when it is abandoned. The commitment is renewed continually, at the fire, in the lodge, in council, on the trail, so that tradition remains a living path rather than a relic.

There is also a pledge across generations. “We will follow” extends a promise forward, binding the present to the seventh generation. It affirms sovereignty of spirit: even under pressure to assimilate or forget, people can still choose the old road, making culture tangible through language, foodways, song, kinship obligations, and protection of place.

In contemporary life, this understanding becomes a guide for healing and justice: restorative practices over punitive ones, food and land stewardship over extraction, sobriety and ceremony over despair, solidarity over isolation. The statement calls for a disciplined tenderness, walking with the Creator by honoring relatives seen and unseen, measuring success not by accumulation but by right relation. To follow these ways is to live as if everything is connected, because it is.