Days three and four: What have you learned?

Tonight, after a long day fixing buffalo fence, our host, Uncle Floyd, asked each member of our group what we had learned during our time so far here on Pine Ridge.

We all felt the same way, I think – it’s hard to pick just one thing. But for me, the most surprising thing I’ve learned is that I have been wrong about the Rez all these years.

I grew up here in western South Dakota and have visited the Rez many times, starting when my grade school basketball team traveled here to play, and to have our legs run off by the Indian teams.

Starting way back then, I have always thought of Pine Ridge as a place of desolation, hopelessly broken, where animosity toward white people was permanent and deep – a thought that was born, I suspect, when an Indian kid spit on me on one of those early trips to play here.

But it turns out I’m just wrong about all that. Mind you, there’s plenty of desolation and animosity here, make no mistake. But I have learned in the last two days that joy lives here, too, and that it has faces, and names: Alex White Plume and Henry Red Cloud, for starters.

Alex and Henry both left Pine Ridge in search of something – including themselves, I think it’s fair to say. Or maybe they just wanted to leave the desolation behind and to escape the alcoholism and the poverty and the brokenness before that unholy trinity locked them in its fatal grip.

Like all young Lakota, Alex and Henry had grown up speaking English (step one in the colonization process, as they will tell you), so they learned to navigate the white man’s world well enough. They acquired marketable skills and, with them, some measure of prosperity.

Henry spent his years off the Rez traveling coast to coast, a skilled steel worker who helped build some of the biggest buildings in America.

But Henry is also a fifth-generation descendant of Chief Red Cloud, the last Lakota war chief. He discovered in his sojourn off the Rez that money and success did not feed his soul. And so in time he returned home to his land, his culture, his people.

He now runs Lakota Solar Enterprises, a small industrial operation located just west of Pine Ridge on a plot of land his grandfather acquired in the Indian Settlement Act. He welcomed us to his property and showed us around his land and his facility with an infectious, open-hearted zeal.

Henry’s vision is to bring renewable energy to the Rez and to use modern technology – solar panels and wind turbines – to help his people connect with the old way of living close to the earth and in harmony with the rhythms of the land and the seasons. And in so doing, he hopes to give the Lakota a certain measure of economic freedom.

But Henry’s plans don’t stop there. He’s also working to introduce organic gardening techniques, so that people here can eat home grown tomatoes and fresh sweet corn instead of building their meals around spam and processed cheese purchased with food stamps.

But Henry’s grandest vision is centered on buffalo restoration, bringing back the big animals on whose powerful humps Lakota culture rested.

Alex White Plume shares Henry’s vision of bringing the buffalo back. Alex is a kind of benevolent tornado on two legs. He’s an activist – he is the former president of the Oglala Sioux tribe and was involved in the Wounded Knee uprising in 1973, where his wife was shot five times, and lived.

He retired at 45 from a career as an administrator in the Badlands National Park to return to his family land and to live in the old ways – a life based on living close to the land in the Lakota tradition; a spiritual life, in other words.

Not to say Alex is a saint. He smokes almost continuously and tells bawdy jokes. But he works hard to wrest a living from his ranch land, and he laughs easily and often.

Today he graciously invited us to visit him on his property. As a formal tribal chief, he is a highly respected elder. Indeed, he led the tribal council meeting we attended just two days ago – and was the one who told the joke about Custer and blond women.

As we arrived on his property in our rental van, he pulled up beside us in his pickup and proceed to lead us way back off the main road. So far back that my primitive fears of Indian people were briefly activated, and I wondered, is he taking us back to where no one can hear us scream?

Instead he hopped out of his truck and proceeded to give us the tools and freedom to do things we’d never done before. (When was the last time you repaired a buffalo fence?) We hauled heavy cedar fence posts that he had cut himself on his own property, and sunk those into deep holes he showed us how to dig with the ease of an expert.

It turns out this was urgent work. Alex has one of the biggest herds on the Rez. But buffalo are big, wild, plains animals and they do not submit easily to captivity. The bulls grab the barbed wire with their great horns and twist it until they are free.

Some 28 head had just escaped, in fact -- perhaps two or three years’ worth of income for Alex, maybe even more than that. He didn’t tell us how much was at stake in this process. He simply let a group of greenhorn students repair the fence that would keep his buffalo -- his livelihood -- close to home.

He filled the time as we worked with stories about the soil, about the grasses, about buffalo and forgiveness, about Mt. Rushmore and about how each of the presidents depicted there treated native people (in short, not good).

He laughed a lot and smoked some more and he made us feel, made me feel – the one who worried if he was taking us to a place where no one could hear us scream – like we belonged there on his vast, open land.

And I was reminded of the other thing I have learned, that Pine Ridge is also a place of forgiveness and healing. I suspect those are the root of the joy you see in people like Alex and Henry.

On Tuesday night we got a first hand glimpse of what makes forgiveness and healing at this level possible. (By “this level” I mean the kind of forgiveness that follows things like forcing people like Alex and Henry to live on reservations.)

Uncle Floyd had arranged for us to participate in a sweat lodge ceremony – one of the seven sacred ceremonies in Lakota culture -- a very high honor indeed.

For years the U.S. government outlawed the sweat lodge, along with the Sundance, the vision quest and all the ceremonies that comprise Lakota “religious” practice. (I say “religious” because the Lakota don’t have a word for that in their language – all of life is a spiritual practice for them).

Those restrictions remained in place for nearly 100 years and, astoundingly, were only eased under Jimmy Carter’s administration.

Since then, more and more Lakota have reclaimed this ceremony as a way of dealing with the pain and trauma they have experienced as a conquered people, and as a way to strengthen and equip themselves for the challenges we all face as human beings.

They enter that lodge as though they are entering their mother’s womb, and there in that sharp cleansing heat they sweat out the toxins of hatred and resentment, and all the negative emotions that build up in the course of a life. And when they leave the lodge, they crawl out on hands and knees, as though leaving the womb, for this experience of being cleansed and renewed is, for them, like being born again.

The leader of this particular sweat, Ben, was just finishing the fourth day of a four-day mourning ceremony centered on the loss one year ago of his new-born twin sons.

This could not have been a more important or sacred occasion for him. And yet he gladly welcomed us – again, a group of strangers and outsiders -- into his lodge, and told us, quite sincerely I think, that he was glad we were there to share with him in this, the last day of his grieving ceremony.

What do you do with generosity like that? It’s like someone hands you their heart and says, Here, I don’t know you, but you are a human being. You are my brother, you are my sister, and I can’t be myself without you, and you cannot be yourself without me. Let us walk this sacred journey of life together.

So there we sat in the blinding darkness of that sweat lodge, the hiss of the water hitting the “grandfathers” (the rocks that had been heated until they literally glowed), the sharp sweet smell of sage filling our nostrils and our lungs with ancient medicine, the steam and the heat gathering, the drums pounding and the singers singing prayer songs to Tunkashila (Grandfather).

And I thought about what I have learned -- about joy and forgiveness and healing and generosity. And I breathed into that hot, cleansing steam my own prayer of thanks.

Now you’d think that would be enough for a couple of days’ time. But no. Apparently I had one other lesson to learn.

Just before leaving for the sweat lodge, we returned to the retreat center where we are staying to grab towels and shorts. Two brothers were sitting outside. One of them was very drunk – actually, I think he was high from huffing hair spray – but in any case he was so altered he could not stand up.

Indeed, he had fallen and hit his head on the corner of a metal picnic table, opening up an ugly, gaping wound just above his eye.

Our Uncle Floyd had told us just the day before a story about how, when we give a dollar away, it’s no longer ours to worry about how it is used. It’s only ours to give it away. And then he went on to tell about how one time he stopped his car to give a homeless man a dollar. His young son asked him to turn around and go back so that he, the son, could help the man too. And in the minute or so it took to turn the car around, the man had disappeared. Floyd said he realized in that moment that this man was a Christ-figure, sent by the Sacred Spirit to test him. And he had passed.

Even with that story still fresh in my mind, I could not bring myself to give this man a dollar, for it was clear to me he would use it to buy Wild Turkey or hairspray and so continue hurting himself. As I saw the situation, what he really needed was not my money but stitches and food. But he would accept neither.

I thus left him there hungry and bleeding, so that I could go off and pray in a sweat lodge. And I thought of the parable from my own tradition of the Good Samaritan, of how the two religious figures in the story each pass by the wounded traveler lying there in the ditch, hurt and bleeding, so that they could attend or lead some important religious ceremony.

And I realized how much I still have to learn about being a minister – about joy and forgiveness, and healing and compassion.

Which is to say I realized how much I still have to learn abou being a human being.

Mitakwe Oyasin. (All my relations.)