For forty years I ate carefully, by the best information I had. Then I changed one thing. Nearly 78 and more grateful than ever to live in Wyoming, I'm sharing what happened next, and the secret Wyoming has been keeping all along.

The White Buffalo Calf Woman brought a gift to a starving people — not just starving for food, but starving because they had forgotten how to live in right relationship with all their relations. The gift was a sacred pipe, the Cannunpa — a physical instrument for reconnecting with all of creation energetically, for breathing the prayer of Mitakuye Oyasin into living, resonating reality. Arvol Looking Horse has carried that bundle for his lifetime. World Peace and Prayer Day has circled the globe. And on Summer Solstice 2028, the circle mends — at Mato Tipila, on the longest day of light, in the 7th generation Crazy Horse saw coming.

In 1977, Steven Spielberg chose one specific location on earth as the landing site for his star beings — the place where humanity and the cosmos would make first contact, where history would change and friendship would form across the great distance of the unknown. He did not choose randomly. He chose the stone the Lakota have always called Home of Bear. And he used declassified government research to do it. Was that art? Synchronicity? Or something the ancestors would simply call: remembering?

You may have seen the photographs. The extraordinary column of ancient stone rising from the Wyoming plains, wrapped in its famous vertical columns like a bundle of gathered reeds. You may know it by the name a U.S. Army colonel's interpreter mistranslated in 1875 and the error stuck. But Mato Tipila — the name it has always carried — means something the park service signs will never fully tell you. And what it means is the reason you are here.