In Memory of Beverly Little Thunder

Beverly Little Thunder was the founder of Kunsi Keya Tamakoce — Grandmother Turtle Land — and the visionary who brought the Women’s Lakota Sundance into being in 1987. Her life’s work opened a ceremonial pathway for women, Two-Spirit relatives, LGBTQIA+ people, and community members seeking healing, belonging, and relationship with Lakota teachings.

Beverly connected to others through her honesty, humor, courage, and deep compassion. She had a way of making people feel seen, even when they arrived carrying grief, confusion, longing, or questions about where they belonged. Her presence was both fierce and gentle. She could challenge people toward responsibility while also holding them with love.

What made Beverly extraordinary was not only what she taught, but how she lived. She knew what it meant to be excluded, misunderstood, and asked to stand at the edge of belonging. Rather than allow that pain to close her heart, she transformed it into a doorway for others. She created ceremonial space where people who had been pushed aside could remember their dignity, their sacredness, and their responsibility to community.

As a Lakota woman, mother, grandmother, Two-Spirit elder, author, and ceremonial leader, Beverly carried stories that helped others understand the power of truth-telling, survival, humor, prayer, and love. She shared her life openly so that others could feel less alone in their own. Her teachings reached those navigating grief, identity, family rupture, spiritual longing, community harm, and the search for a place to belong.

Beverly believed that ceremony was not separate from life. It lived in how we fed one another, how we listened, how we cared for the land, how we repaired harm, how we told the truth, and how we remembered our responsibilities to All Our Relations.

Through Kunsi Keya Tamakoce, Beverly’s vision continues as a living legacy. The land holds decades of prayer, songs, tears, laughter, and transformation. The Sundance she founded continues to call people into humility, service, sacrifice, and connection. The community she nurtured continues to grow through the leadership of those who learned beside her, prayed with her, and carry her teachings forward.

To remember Beverly is not only to speak her name. It is to live the values she carried: courage, compassion, inclusion, accountability, humor, generosity, and love for the people.

Her legacy remains in the arbor, in the lodge, in the songs, in the land, in the stories, and in every person who found their way back to themselves through the doorway she opened.

Pilamayaye, Beverly.

We remember you.

We carry you.

We continue.