A Native American healer, teacher, and activist, Rolling Thunder is known to millions of people all over the world through his stories and talks, through Doug Boyd’s book about him, and the Billy Jack films, which were based upon incidents in this life. This book, long overdue by those who knew Rolling Thunder and his work, is a major legacy of his extraordinary life and the summation of his teachings and in his own words. As controversial and plain-speaking as Rolling Thunder himself, it exhorts, enlightens, and teaches through anecdotes and stories, forces us to listen and to think, and carries on his primary mission: to bring Indian knowledge to non-Indian people.
Rolling Thunder Speaks represents the gathering of over thirty years of his tapes and writings, in addition to stories, lessons, and conversations remembered by his widow, Sun Rising Pope. A Cherokee of the Blue Paint or Medicine People clan, Rolling Thunder mastered the Cherokee, Shoshone, Paiute, Sioux, and Tuscarora medicine traditions and healed and instructed both Indians and non-Indians for over forty years. The book describes the basic beliefs and practices of traditional Native American spirituality and training and tools of medicine people. It includes Rolling Thunder’s instructions for meditation and prayer, protection against bad spirits, and the use of certain herbal remedies, as well as accounts of history according to Indian beliefs, discussions of karma and the political realities faced by Native Americans, American Indian prophecies, Rolling Thunder’s personal visions. Sun Rising Pope has put together all this knowledge in a faithful rendering. As she says: “The words are his words; everything in this book is what Rolling Thunder taught.”