Our First Full Day

Sun. June 19: HAPPY FATHER’S DAY!! Today only we got to “sleep in” until 7:00, as opposed to our usual 6:00. My team was on Breakfast Prep so I went up early to cut oranges and put out milk. All the cereals are sweetened, underscoring that Re-Member is really more geared to Youth Groups than intergenerational groups such as ours. One of the staff read verbatim, in a stumbling monotone, the Wisdom of the Elders quotes, which was pretty disappointing. (We would hear many times through the week how wonderful the Wisdom of the Elders and the Reservation Tour are when presented in context by the missing director.) We left right after that for Wounded Knee. The rain was spitting a bit but we stayed mostly dry under a shelter of pine boughs as a young man named Dakota welcomed us and gave us the history “as he learned it from his elders”. It was pretty much the story as Marv & I have learned it, since we have both done extra reading and study, but it was sobering and moving to hear it from Dakota at the sight. He did a nice job and then sent us up to the graveyard to look around for a while. Kari suggested we also go down to the Museum at the bottom of the hill, which dealt more with the problems in the 1970s. It was raining harder and harder as we drove on to the White Cloud Visitors Center for the south part of Badlands National Park. When this part was added to the Badlands National Monument it was put under Oglala Lakota management with native Rangers and Interpreters. The Lakota people had access to this land until it was procured for bombing practice during World War II. They call it not “Bad” but White Land, for the light color of the rock formations. They allowed us to eat our picnic in their “basement” as the rain picked up. After a bit more time in the Center we climbed back on the bus, thinking we were going to hike in the Bad Lands. To my great disappointment, we learned that the rain caused the roads and trails to be too slippery to proceed on, so we just drove back to Re-Member. After killing some time, we watched an interesting documentary about the reservation radio station, KILI, called “No More Smoke Signals”. After chicken for dinner, we had a speaker whose Lakota name, Inila Wakan, means Quiet Spirit. He first blessed us each individually with burning sweet grass and then offered an ancient prayer-song, turning us all to the directions of the four winds. In a VERY quiet voice, which unfortunately some people were unable to hear, he told us about the history of the White Land/Wilderness. He is a land acquisition leader in the Oglala Lakota nation and has taken back his own family’s lands, where he lives with three generations “off the grid” with no plumbing or electricity. His is the only one of his extended family that hasn’t succumbed to alcohol and drug abuse and the ramifications of them. He held us mesmerized for over an hour. When we returned to our building we got our Prayer Partner packages, talked about the growing bed bug problems and went to bed.