Okichitaw – The World of the Nêhiyawak – vol. 1a

Okichitaw — Volume I
The World of the Nêhiyawak

History · The People · The Land · Philosophy · Cosmology · The Founder

A martial art does not begin with a technique.

It begins with a people.

With a landscape.

With a language.

With memory.

And, sometimes, with the determination to preserve what history tried to erase.

That is the starting point of Okichitaw — Volume I: The World of the Nêhiyawak.

This is not a manual of punches, throws, weapons, or fighting combinations. Those belong to Volume II. This first volume asks a more fundamental question:

What must we understand before a martial system can truly be understood?

The answer leads far beyond the training floor.

Okichitaw cannot be separated from the Nêhiyawak. The Nêhiyawak cannot be separated from the Canadian Plains, from the land that shaped their way of life, from Treaty No. 6, from the Resistance of 1885, from the decades of cultural suppression that followed, or from the long process of cultural resurgence through which traditions survived and returned to public life.

For this reason, Volume I deliberately begins with context rather than technique.

The reader first encounters Okichitaw as a layered system: a weapons-based martial tradition, a pedagogical framework, a vehicle for language and cultural transmission, a communal space, and an ethical system whose meaning cannot be reduced to physical combat alone.

From there, the book turns to the Nêhiyawak themselves.

Their language.

Their social organization.

Their systems of leadership and education.

Their spirituality.

Their relationships with neighbouring Nations.

And the land of the Canadian Great Plains—not as scenery behind history, but as one of the forces that shaped movement, subsistence, warfare, knowledge, and cosmology.

The land matters because Okichitaw is presented not as an abstract martial system transplanted onto Canadian soil, but as something whose logic is tied to a particular environment and a particular cultural history.

The historical journey then extends across centuries.

The precolonial Plains.

The buffalo economy.

The fur trade.

The arrival of the horse.

Treaty No. 6.

The political and economic pressures that culminated in the Resistance of 1885.

The reserve system.

The Indian Act.

The prohibition of ceremonies.

Residential schools.

And the less visible history of survival—the knowledge transmitted quietly within families and communities when public transmission could carry serious consequences.

This history is essential to understanding what follows.

Because the resurgence of Okichitaw is not presented as the sudden invention of a modern martial art.

It is examined within a much longer history of cultural continuity, interruption, adaptation, and recovery.

At the centre of that modern story stands George J. Lépine.

The volume examines his family roots, his martial training, the transmission he received, the role of the Elders, the development of the Lodge and curriculum, and the process through which Okichitaw emerged publicly and entered an international martial arts context.

Lépine is also important to the research behind the book itself.

The author was given access to the manuscript prepared by Lépine and Okichitaw International Martial Arts for OIMA/UNESCO documentation purposes—material not otherwise available to the general public and used throughout the volume as a distinct category of evidence.

That distinction matters because this book does something unusual for a work on martial arts:

it tells the reader how certain it is about what it says.

The C1–C4 methodology separates four different levels of source material:

C1 — independently verifiable primary sources and official records
C2 — OIMA/UNESCO documentation and material provided through George J. Lépine
C3 — academic historical, anthropological, and linguistic scholarship
C4 — the author’s own interpretation, comparison, or synthesis

The purpose is not to make the text look more academic.

It is to allow readers to distinguish documented fact from interpretation and to challenge the latter where appropriate.

That same transparency extends to the author’s own position.

The book explicitly acknowledges that it was written by a non-Indigenous researcher studying a culture that is not his own. It does not claim insider status, does not claim to speak on behalf of the Nêhiyawak, and identifies limitations of language, geography, and perspective rather than concealing them.

This is particularly important because The World of the Nêhiyawak is not interested in turning Indigenous culture into an exotic backdrop for martial arts.

Its purpose is almost the opposite.

The martial system is used as a doorway through which the reader encounters the civilization that gives the system meaning.

The final part of the volume makes that especially clear.

The Medicine Wheel provides an architecture of orientation, relationship, character, and practice.

The Seven Grandfather Teachings establish a framework of personal and communal values.

The Warrior’s ethical code then confronts one of the most important distinctions in any serious martial tradition:

the difference between possessing strength and knowing when strength should be used.

The book examines protection, responsibility, de-escalation, withdrawal, proportionality, contemporary Canadian law, responsibility toward future generations, and the meaning of training outside the Lodge.

Technique, in this framework, is not the final purpose.

A technically skilled practitioner who fails ethically has not reached the objective of the system. The physical competence of the Warrior exists within a larger obligation to character, community, and responsibility.

That is why Volume I and Volume II have been conceived as two halves of the same work.

Volume II can describe the weapons, movement, Four Gates, techniques, pedagogy, and living practice of Okichitaw.

But Volume I explains why those things mean what they mean.

Without that context, the reader may learn the syntax of the system while never understanding its language.

This volume is therefore written for martial arts practitioners, historians, readers of Indigenous and Canadian history, researchers, and anyone who has encountered the name Okichitaw and wanted something deeper than a short definition or a collection of techniques.

Ultimately, The World of the Nêhiyawak is a book about a martial art—but it is equally a book about memory, land, survival, cultural transmission, and the responsibility carried by knowledge.

Its central premise could be expressed very simply:

You cannot understand a martial tradition without first understanding the world that made it necessary.

And for the website, I would use this as the final claim:

“Before learning how a Warrior moves, understand the world that taught the Warrior why to move.”