ONE of the moreunusual visitors to our shores this autumn is an Oglala/Hunkpapa Lakota (Sioux) called Skyhorse, who is an expert on, among other things, the medicine wheel drum dance and endless Native American ceremonies.
Skyhorse has a number of names, the one on his birth certificate being Grant Edward Downs. His native name was given to him by his grandfather as a result of a vision. My people recognise the earth and take our names from the earth," he says.
"In everyone's life there is a change of names at different times and stages of life, he adds. "It is only in the West that such changes are dismissed as nicknames. Skyhorse is the name that I use openly to the public." A professional name, then?
"I don't have a profession. I'm just a human being living my life. There is no need for this separation of different parts of our lives that takes place in the West."
Sky horse's life began Marion County, East Texas, in a community that had been moved 1,500 miles by the colonists. At the age of seven he ran away from home my mother and I didn't get along from my birth" and went to live with his paternal grandfather. He was the spiritual leader of our community. I lived with him from when I was seven and he was a wonderful man to grow up with. It gave me a firm grounding in what was important, a foundation which allowed me to develop into the man I am today.
After the death of his grandfather he left the community and worked across the ifs. He served in the US Marine Corps in the Vietnam war for "three years, five months and four days" and after that drifted for a year and a half. He wound up in a youth hostel in Boston where he met his future wife, from Yorkshire and after another vision - his own this time - he moved to England with her, where they settled down to have a family of three sons. But his life and work is still informed by the experiences of his native people.
"We were neither black nor white," he says of the Lakotas and all the peoples dubbed "Indian" by the white invader. "There is oppression everywhere but we were the only people declared not to be human beings they said we were vermin. In recent years, they've gone from calling us heathen savages to noble redmen. The truth is we're just human beings - but human beings who still live in cooperation with the earth. There are other peoples when this spirit is still alive, the Aborigines, for example, some of the African people and the tribal Chinese. But not many."
To revive this spirit in the Western world is Skyhorse's mission and he travels around Britain and Ireland, teaching the history, culture and spirituality of the Native American people and encouraging their incorporation into our Westernised lives.
"I have a gift of being able to translate for people some of our traditional thought in a way that helps them find their path in life," he says. "I'm good at teaching people how to balance the past and present in order to help build the future."
As well as running Awaken The Spirit retreats and teaching people about Native American traditions like the medicine wheel
"a philosophy of how we can live within the universe" Skyhorse also visits schools and colleges where he tells stories and gives lectures on American history, correcting what he says are the grave inaccuracies of the white historians.
"I want to dispel some of the myths about my people," he says. "For example, Hollywood films show us living in tepees, but in reality it was the Indian who gave the early colonists the log home and showed them how to build it. Sixty per cent of the world's agricultural practices came from us.
I don't teach people how to be Indians but how to rediscover what they already know. Take sweating lodges, ridiculed by the whites in the US as a heathen practice, yet there is anthropological evidence to show that there were sweat lodges on these islands before the Romans. And what is a modern sauna except a sweat lodge without the honour and respect? This is what I teach people - how to get back what they have forgotten.