Humility In Lakota Culture

The Lakota culture has seven virtues, including humility. C.S. Lewis, author of Narnia, once said, “Humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.” Many people associate humility with embarrassment and hanging your head. The actual definition of humility, however is, “a modest or low view of one’s own importance.” In the older times, humility was recognized just as the definition implies: modesty. Today, if one has humility it, is assumed he or she is disgraced or shamed.
Humility, one of the seven Lakota virtues, is the ability to give up your pride and still retain your dignity. In many Native American stories, the reader can detect that this is how the Natives understood humility. It was taught that warriors must be humble after being victorious in battle and if they defeated, they kept their …show more content…
Many times the preacher’s homily was centered around humility. I vividly remember first learning about humility during Father Brian’s homily; I was about five years old sitting between my parents and my baby sister on a Sunday. He was talking about John, who was a very humble person. I remember that Father Brian would break his homily down so people could understand God’s message for us that weekend and then relate it to their personal lives and finally to the Bible. “Humility isn’t me before you rather it’s no, you first my friend.” That was what really caught my attention as a five year old as the week before I was in line for something with my mom when an elderly lady got in line behind us. Mom, a true Catholic woman, let the woman go in front of us. As a tired five year old would, I pouted because now we had to wait while the slow old lady went ahead. After he said that, the little wheels in my small child mind got to rolling. I realized that God wanted me to be humble, like my mother who was and very much still is my role