By Winona LaDuke

August 16, 2012

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 percent of the cave’s volume and breath, 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 (1996) and international law are to be protected.

On August 25, the Center of the Heart of Everything that is, will come up in on the auction block a 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”.

The Brock Auction Company of Iowa and South Dakota in mid July announced, offering the Reynolds Ranch, noting, “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 & imagine the Native Americans, the Homesteaders & Pioneers who passed across this land that is now a part of yours & your families legacy forever!…” Some Lakota find this 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, 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, Mayan, or that 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.

Winona LaDuke is an Anishinaabekwe (Ojibwe) enrolled member of the Mississippi Band Anishinaabeg who lives and works on the White Earth Reservations, and is the mother of three children. She is also the executive director of Honor the Earth, where she works on a national level to advocate, raise public support, and create funding for frontline native environmental groups.

 

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