2007 VISIONARIES:
• Lily Yeh • Vernon Masayesva • Joanna Crell • Aimee Beth Ward • Dr. Gladys Taylor McGareyVERNON MASAYESVA
Leader, Activist, Visionary on Water, Formal Tribal Chieftain
Vernon Masayesva is Founder and Director of The Black Mesa Trust and former Tribal Chairman of The Hopi Nation. Who is this visionary leader who sees into the heart of his people?
Vernon Masayesva comes from a close-knit, hard-working, traditional farming family of the Hopi village Hotevilla on Third Mesa in Arizona. The oldest of nine children, he received a BA in Political Science from Arizona State University and an MA from Central Michigan State.
Vernon believes that true education means a passionate desire to learn — to discover the jewels in every form of creation. He visualizes a day when his people will become self-sufficient again, recreating their own businesses and housing, arts and education. He was the first Hopi principal of a local school controlled by parents instead of the federal government. Vernon and Becky, his wife, are Founders of The Arizona Native Scholastic Enrichment Resource (ANSER), which awards gifted Native American students scholarships to private schools and colleges. It’s no wonder Vernon Masayesva is a trusted spokesman and role model for The Native American Community.
Vernon is dedicated to healing our out-of-balance world. He travels widely conferring with world leaders such as Dr. Masaru Emoto of Japan. In fact, they are collaborating to bring the songs and messages of water to the world. One result of that collaboration took place in April 2006 — The Hopi Indian Run.
Vernon’s Hopi Indian runners and supporters completed a 3,218 kilometer ceremonial prayer run from an endangered spring at the small Hopi village of Moencopi, Arizona to Mexico City, Mexico — over 1,500 miles to the south.
Four weeks earlier, the Hopi runners had gathered water from that spring and added it to waters that had been sent from sources all over the world. The Hopi chose a prayer run as a way to remind humanity of a spiritual relationship with the powers of water and a covenant with Creator to maintain its natural ways and purity to receive its blessings--or its consequences: drought, floods and world climate changes if water is not respected.
Composed of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, water is power. Water makes up 70 to 80% of our bodies. We are the power that can change the world for the better!
Currently, Vernon Masayesva has another project in mind: The Healing Power of Children. To Hopi, children are the natural healers of the manifest and unmanifest world. They bring fresh attachment to life and the future, hope to what is ever-coming to be. It is in learning through them that we come again to restore our true selves and to create the daily balance by which we and all life are sustained. It is time, once again, that we turn to the children and seek from those who are innocent and who have the power to heal waters and life, which it sustains.
Hopi science teaches that water lives, that it responds to influence — spiritual and emotional as well as physical — that its true nature is life, and that we can affect the quality of that life by what we bring to it.
During the next four years, Vernon and his Black Mesa Trust will gather children’s prayers, written in their own hand and tongue, and send them to Dawanasavi — the Hopi Spirit Center. They will collect water from many places around the world. These waters, vitalized and restored by the combined energy of children’s prayers will bring fresh purity to the spirit of water, optimism to all life it nourishes. The prayer-rich water will then be reintroduced into the waters of the six cardinal points, into the sacred cycle of water. It will be carried in human hands back to its sacred terrestrial sources — the waters of the continents and islands.
In Vernon’s words:
To bring hope to life and life to hope — no less than this is our mission.
The heart of civilization needs a visionary of spirit — Vernon Masayesva is that and more.
Vernon needs your help to continue this essential and elemental work to heal and enliven the soul of humanity — and the soul of our precious water.
Please visit our Donate Page and assist Vernon Masayesva in his commitment to restore balance to our world. Ten per cent of your donation will go to Gardens for Humanity and will be used to aid other visionaries in their efforts to improve the quality of life on Earth.
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