2022 GOC: Stay the Course
Our very first Speaker at the GOC, in 1998, was Marcellus “BearHeart” Williams, who passed in 2008 at the age of 90. It is our great honor, as we Stay the Course, to invite his wife, Reginah Waterspirit to give our Keynote for this year.
Reginah Waterspirit
Reginah’s information https://www.facebook.com/reginah.waterspirit
I was born in The Bronx, New York on August 23, 1942. When I was three years old, my family moved to Southern California. After high school, I worked in the garment industry while attending college. During the next 26 years I owned and operated a number of garment industry related businesses, attended UCLA, and travelled extensively in the USA and Europe.
While living for two years in Italy, I painted and sold miniature paintings in Rome as I healed from a serious illness. After I returned home to the United States, I studied with numerous teachers in the holistic health field. Dr. Sidra Stone and the late Dr. Hal Stone became major influences on my life’s path. I became a teacher of their Voice Dialogue Method for many diverse organizations.
My interest in psycho-spiritual paths then led me to New Mexico and eventually to Marcellus Bear Heart Williams, member of the Muscogee Nation-Creek Tribe and a caretaker of sacred ways.
At the age of 42, in 1983, I began a new kind of life with Bear Heart. I accepted his offer to help him with his work, although I was not sure what that entailed. He called me a medicine helper and we traveled in the United States, Europe, Mexico and Canada for the next 23 years. We eventually married in a spiritual ceremony in Oklahoma.
Today I use my years of experience with indigeous ways, art therapy tools and dialogue to help expand awareness of how we ‘operate’ in life and in our relationships in order to create more choice for ourselves.
I am a member of The Earth Tribe, an earth-based community committed to the necessary truth that humans are but one among all species.
As an artist from early childhood, I was inspired to recently develop a program, Art In The Park, Shapes in Nature, a realistic drawing class for the very young, elderly and other two-leggeds who are interested in honoring our connection with all living things.
I recently became a co-author of a book which began in 2002 with Bear Heart called The Bear Is My Father, Muscogee Creek Caretaker of Sacred Ways, published by Synergetic Press in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2022.
In my studies of Indigenous spirituality, I reconnected with my own Jewish faith that had never really left me. I have the sense of coming full circle in life, and as a life-long learner, I look forward to the mysteries and adventures on the horizon.
*Reginah WaterSpirit*
*Brown Dove*
*Yigaquv osaniyu adanvto adad naqvv utlogasdi nihi(May the Great Spirit’s
Blessing always be with you) *
Muscogee Nation-Creek Tribe language
