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Community has been lost in today’s world. People have become so engrossed in their own wants, dreams and desires that they don’t worry about helping anyone else. One of the truest definitions of community is fellowship, and we can’t have fellowship going about life on our own.

Amongst Native culture, the importance of community is prevalent throughout their history. This becomes evident as you learn of the many different Native customs and beliefs, yet come across one common expression in nearly all Native nations and tribes. For the Lakota people the expression is Mitakuye O’yasin, for the Cherokee it is Ahwensa Unhili, and in English it translates to All Our Relations.

All Our Relations is exactly what it sounds like, yet much more than it sounds. All Our Relations isn’t just about your family, loved ones or those biologically linked to you. It is much deeper than that. All Our Relations is the acknowledgement that each and every person you encounter throughout life is from the Creator and thus, related to you. They are your brothers and your sisters. They are an extension of you because the Creator lies at the heart of both of you. You are more than family; you are spiritually linked to each and every person, and each and every person is dependent upon you to experience their sense of community.

Just this brief description of All Our Relations can bring to light the importance that Native people place on community, but it goes much deeper than this. To Native people, each and every living thing, whether it be animal, plant, reptile, mineral, all the way to the atom, is a living thing created by the Creator. In accepting that the Creator lies within each of these things, you accept that the Creator is inside of them the same way the Creator is inside of you. These things, too, become your relations.

Even in everyday routine life, Native tribes exhibited community in all things. They hunted, not for the sake of one household or family, but for the benefit of the entire tribe. Children in Native villages were allowed to wander from house to house. They could enter any lodge and would be welcome guests. Every woman cared for each child, every man protected each child and all of the elders taught each child. To each child, every woman became a mother or grandmother; every man became father or grandfather. Children were shown from birth that people were not meant to have to survive on their own.

So where have our communities gone today? Why the need for the separation of the classes and the masses? When did we lose the ties that once bound us so closely together? I believe we haven’t lost those ties; we have just lost sight of them.

I have found community and fellowship within a place most people fear more than anything else. For the last nine years, I have been incarcerated at Indiana State Men’s Prison, a maximum security hellhole. Yet, while living with the worst of the worst, I have found the best of the best and a place with true community and fellowship.

I am a graduate and now an aide/mentor of the Purposeful Living Units Serve program, or PLUS program. This program is designed to help inmates to correct their thinking and behavioral patterns through a series of classes and projects. But the most successful way we have found to heal ourselves and the victims of our crimes is through service to our community. Through this service we have found that we depend on each other, help each other, teach each other, and that we succeed or fail as one.

We go to classes, eat, sleep and many of us pray together. We do service projects for the prison and the local community together. In a prison filled with what the state calls animals, we have found community and fellowship and have come together to create something positive. We have found success through service to our community and are striving to help others learn to do the same.

So why is it that society can’t come together and find fellowship themselves in the free world? Whether it’s a Native path and you accept all living things as an extension of yourself through the Creator, and show all things the respect you would show yourself, or whether you follow the lead of a bunch of convicts who have come together and found the healing power that community and fellowship bring with it, each and every one of us is responsible for bringing back our fellowship with All Our Relations. Each of us has the power within us to take the first steps to repairing the damage done by today’s society on our communities.

All we have to do is make the choice to change our way of thinking, our way of dealing with people and focus on the whole rather than the one. We need to live in the essence of All Our Relations, to look back at the days when family and community came first, and when the things that bound us together meant more than the objects we allow to tear us apart.

I pray you will find the spirit of Ahwensa Unhili, Mitakuye O’yasin, All Our Relations, and Walk in Beauty with the Creator.

—By Randy Miller, CLF Member, Indiana State Prison