LORETTA AFRAID OF BEAR COOK is among the gems of the Indigenous traditional world. She is a natural inheritor of her Lakota people’s extensive knowledge and a fluent speaker of their ancient language. Loretta is individually endowed with extraordinary memory, curiosity, and intelligence, a noble woman elder bundled in the high character and guidance of master teachers.
Her community and cultural world is an important core foundation of the extensive traditional world of the Lakota-Nakota-Dakota kinship that extends throughout the Great Plains of the United States
and Canada. Loretta is at the forefront of contemporary movement on the central cultural issue of her people: the resolution of use and ownership of Paha Sapa, the sacred Black Hills. She possesses mastery over all of the ceremonial rituality associated with the tradition of the Sacred Pipe, Sun Dance, and other spiritual practices that promote unity.
Loretta’s vision recognizes Native relatives and all people of good will, wherever they are situated, and moves us toward restoration of spirit and sacred space.
In 2018, Loretta received an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Alaska–Fairbanks.
