Star People: Action for Information

Aliens. Extraterrestrials. Little green men and women. Call them what you want, and question if you will. In many Native cosmological traditions, we call them Star People — and many of us have been questioning for a long time. As it turns out, the U.S. government, too, has been looking into things, setting up what began as a secret program to study Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon (UAP) in 2007. In 2017, The New York Times published articles exposing the program’s existence, but some of those who worked inside it say there’s far more the public should know.

For many years, Daniel Sheehan, who co-founded the Romero Institute and the Lakota People’s Law Project, has been working to achieve government transparency around UAP. Now, at a time when misinformation runs rampant, the health of our democracy depends on trust in institutions more than ever — and yet the federal government continues to hide much of what it knows. That’s why the Romero Institute has founded the New Paradigm Institute (NPI), a project dedicated to exposing UAP truth. If you care about this issue, I urge you to take the New Paradigm Institute’s call to action and contact Congress today to demand full disclosure regarding UAP. You can also opt in to continue hearing from NPI going forward.

Watch: Romero Institute and NPI president Danny Sheehan discusses UAP disclosure.

I acknowledge that this message may seem tangential to our usual work to achieve Indigenous and environmental justice. But Uncle Sam has let Native nations down many times, and we Lakota understand better than most the importance of holding the federal government accountable. If we are ever to build trust, establishing proper governmental oversight and full transparency is important.

I’ll also say that Lakota Law exists in part to preserve our cultural heritage and share our traditional ways of understanding the universe. So in that spirit, I’ll tell you that many of our stories contain references to the Star People and interactions with the cosmos. One of our teachings says that we come to this plane of existence through the Big Dipper (or as we call it, Matȟó Thípila — Bear Lodge), and if we live well and honorably, our souls earn the right to return through that same portal at the end of our lives.

Another tells of when Matȟó, the bear, gave chase to a group of our people who had become lost. This particular bear was enormous, and there was no way the group could outrun its massive strides. They fell to their knees to pray for divine intervention. Hearing their desperate call, Tunkasila (Creator) came to their aid! He lifted the ground beneath the people higher and higher, rising them up on a precipice nearly a thousand feet in the air, just beyond even Matȟó’s impressive reach.

Before finally giving up, the great bear clawed at every edge in search of his human meal, creating vertical ridges along the sides of the newly formed mesa. And that’s how the earthbound Matȟó Thípila (known by colonizers as Devil’s Tower in Wyoming — the setting of Spielberg’s classic “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”) came to be. And the lost ones? They couldn’t get down, so some say Tunkasila rescued them a second time, sending them to the heavens to live among the ancestors — and the Star People — as the Pleiades.

We look forward to sharing more of our traditional knowledge systems in the coming seasons. Meanwhile, my gratitude to you for reading, for considering our sister program’s effort to achieve government transparency, and especially for being an active participant in our mission to win justice.

Pilámayaye — thank you!
Chase Iron Eyes
Director and Lead Counsel
The Lakota People’s Law Project

P.S. To hear more from the New Paradigm Institute as it demands full disclosure around UAP, send your message to your reps asking for the creation of a governing body to achieve full transparency from the federal government.