I had the enormous good fortune the other day to sit like a mouse in a corner and listen to two of North Dakota's artistic masters at work. Kevin Locke (Tokeya Inajin) is a Lakota flute player, hoop dancer, storyteller and educator, and David Swenson is the founding director of the award-winning Makoche Recoding studio in downtown Bismarck.

Locke, whose Lakota name means "The First to Arise," lives on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, but he performs all over the world. Swenson, who lives in Bismarck, has spent the past 11 years recording American Indian songs and stories and encouraging the preservation and dissemination of traditional Indian oral culture.

They were talking about the sun dance that is held every year near the Sitting Bull camp on the Grand River at Standing Rock. There was something hushed and magical in their conversation about the central religious ceremony of the Lakota people, which was banned by the United States government between 1904 and 1977. (So much for the American constitutional guarantee of religious freedom for all).

Locke is as unassuming a man as you are ever likely to meet. He has a shy, "who, me?" soul, and every word that comes out of him comes from both his mind and his heart. He speaks with a gentleness that is intoxicating. And he makes it clear that he regards himself as the luckiest and least likely of men to have been gifted with the talents he shares - humbly and in good cheer - with the world. He's performed in 85 countries, so far.

As Locke described the sun dance, I could see the tall cottonwood embedded at the center of the dance circle, with a medicine nest in the upper branches, prayer bundles tied lower on the trunk. Around the dance circle an elaborately constructed arbor. Outside the circle, drummers seated around a large buffalo-hide drum recreating the heartbeat of the planet.

Birds clustered in the cottonwoods nearby listening to the concert of drum, that high-pitched songline of the Lakota, and the eagle bone whistles. The dancers, fasting, sleepless, taking not even water during the four days of the ceremony, moving against the earth hour after hour. And on the periphery, food preparation for non-dancers, feasting, prayer, community, and - for some - courtship.

What makes Locke so amazing is that he is willing to talk about something this sacred, in a generous and open, albeit very careful way. You can see, as he plays out his sentences one by one, that he is saying that which is appropriate for outsiders to hear, but in a way that does not make them feel like outsiders. He is talking about something that does not belong to non-Indians, indeed at which non-Indians are not generally welcome, in a manner that would not upset the most separatist of Lakota insiders. That's a form of genius.

Swenson is one of those rare non-Indians who is not only permitted, but actually invited to take his place at the sun dance. After almost 20 years of quiet, deeply respectful work with Indian drum groups, singers, dancers and storytellers, Swenson has built up a large fund of goodwill in Indian country. He has credibility, in part because the Indian community knows that there is not an exploitative bone in his body.

On the walls of the Makoche studios you will see photographs of Keith Bear, Annie Humphrey and Mary Louise Defender Wilson, but also Dylan and the Beatles. Swenson is part musicologist and part '60s rocker. He's best known for his Indian record label, but more recently he has begun to get attention as a talented videographer. He wants to make documentaries.

Locke is a world-class Indian flutist and he played a pivotal role in the early success of Makoche. Swenson regards Locke as "the greatest traditional Indian flute player in the world."

Locke played a couple of songs on two different flutes at the Makoche session the other night. They were hauntingly beautiful, partly because of the reedy-raspy quality of the Indian flute in the hands of a master.

I asked him how long the flute has been an important vehicle for plains Indian music. The journals of Lewis and Clark do not, so far as I know, ever mention flute music, though the expedition encountered more than 50 distinct tribes. He explained that the flute is an essentially private instrument, usually played by an individual who was stationed at some distance from the village. Lewis and Clark, he explained, would have been treated to more public music: drums, what the journal keepers called "tambourines," and rattles.

"Flute songs are a little like country-western music," Locke said. "Often enough they are about someone who loves a woman, but she actually loves someone else. A lot of flute music is about unrequited love." You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille.

A handful of individuals come along from time to time who are really touched by grace. Locke is one of those exceedingly rare people who find the lyrical, the whimsical, the life-affirming all around them, in a world that it would be possible to see as horribly fallen. He has a bit of the Renaissance humanist Erasmus' "wise fool" about him, or Jack Kerouac's "holy goof," both of those terms being wholly positive in connotation. He smiles more than anyone I know and his laugh - ready, unrestrained and unforced - is one of the most restorative sounds I have heard.

Makoche Records has a CD of Locke playing historically important flutes at the Sitting Bull camp on Standing Rock. The album is called The First Flute. It's the recording for which Swenson seems most proud.

If you have never seen Locke's hoop dance, you have one of life's great experiences ahead of you. Accompanied by Lakota music, often enough the traditional drum, Locke gathers up hoops, one by one, with his feet alone, and then twirls them simultaneously on his arms, on his legs, on the ball of his feet, around his neck and torso, in elaborate lyrical choreography, without ever pausing or missing a beat in his Lakota dance.

He works with 28 hoops, one for every day of the lunar cycle, and as the dance progresses he configures the hoops, now one, now four, now nine, now 18, to represent clouds, flowers, butterflies, the sun, moon, the eagle and other natural phenomena of the Great Plains. By the end all 28 hoops are dancing (almost by their own volition) around his body as he dances on the prairie grass. It's as close to the literal meaning of "incredible" as anything I have seen.

Twenty years ago I had the honor of spending a full summer working with Locke in the Great Plains Chautauqua. He concluded each of his presentations with the hoop dance. The audience would gather in a big circle on the grass outside the tent.

It was marvelous to look around at a couple of hundred faces as he formed more and more sophisticated hoop figures in a dance that lasted 10 minutes or more. People laughed in wonder, and cried the way you do when you see something profoundly authentic in life, and their mouths literally hung open in awe. At the end, in his self-deprecating way, Locke would clutch his knees and gasp, "Anyone know CPR?"

Great Britain has an ingenuous dual system of leadership. There is a prime minister to run the government (Tony Blair) and a monarch to represent the nation (Elizabeth II). In France, the prime minister manages legislation, but a president handles the ceremonial functions of the nation.

This would be a good system for North Dakota. Let Gov. John Hoeven (or Schafer or Heitkamp or Satrom) legislate, but let's nominate Locke as Chancellor or First Citizen of the sovereign state of North Dakota. If he were our ambassador-at-large to the planet, North Dakota would get loving attention wherever he went and our image in the world's arena would soar.

Think of it: a gifted, graceful, wise and extraordinarily articulate Lakota artist as the poster child for who we are and what we prize.

(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Jenkinson at Jeffysage@;aol.com.)