Winona LaDuke (Anishinaabe) is an internationally acclaimed author,
orator & activist. A graduate of Harvard & Antioch with advanced
degrees in rural economic development, LaDuke has devoted her life to
protecting the lands & lifeways of Native communities. Her most recent book is Recovering the Sacred: the Power of Naming and Claiming (South End Press).LaDuke was recognized as an Utne Reader Visionary in 2001.Keep up with her at Honor the Earth.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published byLast Real Indians.
As the wind breathes out of Wind Cave in my face, I am reminded of
the creation of humans and my own small place in this magnificent world.
Wind Cave National Park is named for the Cave itself, called Washun Niya, or the Breathing Hole of Mother Earth, by the Lakota People. In this creation story, it is from here that they emerged to this world.
It is a complex cave system, according to scientists, we may only
have a sense of 5% of the cave’s volume and breadth, and likely even
less of its power. In the vernacular of some, this might be known as
the ” known unknown.” To most Indigenous peoples, there is an understanding of the Great Mystery.
So it is that in 2012, the time of change and transformation in an
American election year, and also according to the Mayan Calendar, we
find that the smallness and the greatness of humans in a world around
us, comes face to face with us in the Black Hills. A most sacred place-
Pe’Sla, in the center of the Lakota Universe is up for sale, and values and questions clash.
As Lakota scholar Chase Iron Eyes explains, “… Pe’Sla, to the Lakota,
is the place where Morning Star, manifested as a meteor, fell to earth
to help the Lakota by killing a great bird which had taken the lives of
seven women; Morning Star’s descent having created the wide open
uncharacteristic bald-spot in the middle of the forested Black Hills.
(On American maps, this is called, Old Baldy) …The Morning Star placed
the spirits of those seven women in the sky as the constellation
“Pleiades” or “The Seven Sisters.”
This is, the “Center of the Heart of Everything that is… one of a
small number of highly revered and geographically-cosmologically
integral places on the entire planet….” Sacred places, recognized under
federal judicial review, Presidential Executive Order ( l996) and
international law are to be protected.
On August 25, the Center of the Heart of Everything that is, will
come up on the auction block at Rapid City’s Ramkota Inn, destined to
be diced into a set of 300 acre tracts, proposed for ranchettes, and a
possible road through the heart, (and more divisions) of what has been,
until now, a relatively un-desecrated sacred site. “We didn’t even
know it was going to be sold,” Debra White Plume from Manderson tells
me. “We heard nothing about it until we saw the auction announcement.”
In mid-July, the Brock Auction Company of Iowa and South
Dakota announced, offering the Reynolds Ranch, “this story begins in
1876 just 2 short years after General George Armstrong Custer led his
historic expedition through the then almost unknown Black Hills in the
Dakota Territory….In 1876 Joseph Reynolds filed his first claim &
homesteaded …”Reynolds Prairie!” He was followed by 3 more generations
…” Brock promotes the property noting, in some solace for potential
buyers, “… As you sit in quiet solitude, with only the whispering of the
wind gently easing through the pines, let your mind wander back in
time and imagine the Native Americans, the Homesteaders and Pioneers,
who passed across this land that is now a part of yours and your
families legacy forever!…” Some Lakota find this it ironic, perhaps.
Is it possible that not everything should be owned privately? While
other religions have sacred sites, which are revered and protected, the
Lakota continue to struggle to protect their most sacred of places. The
Lakota sacred sites include Mahto Paha, Bear Butte, where numerous
challenges to the annual Sturgis Motor Cycle rally have met with some
success, and protections of vision quests at Grey Horned Butte (Devils
Tower) from recreational rock climbers.
In the time of the sacred sites and the crashing of ecosystems and
worlds, it may be worth not making a commodity out of all that is
revered. A 2005 editorial in the Rapid City Journal points out that
protecting Lakota sacred sites is of interest to all. “…Non-Indians have
little to fear if familiar sites are designated as sacred; visitors are
still allowed at Bear Butte, Devil’s Tower and Rainbow Bridge, even
though they are being managed as Indian sacred sites. And in fact,
expanding non-Indians’ knowledge and appreciation of the Indian lore
surrounding such sites could lead to greater cultural understanding….”
Meetings are being held in most of the Lakota nation this week, with
organizers hoping to secure both a stop to the auction, and a plan to
protect Pe’Sla from the auction block and encroachment.
It is 2012, and it is a good time, in any calendar- election year,
Mayan, or upon this earth, to recognize and protect what is sacred.
Today I return to Wind Cave, and have the wind blow on my face, hoping
to greet the Great Mystery and, perhaps, hoping to see something sacred
preserved.
For more information or to help visit www.lastrealindians.com
Image: A road sign for Lakota, North Dakota, by
afiler. Licensed under Creative Commons.
