Route 27, Pine Ridge Reservation, August 4th 2006 11 p.m. Mountain Time.
The stars are crisper here than most places I’ve seen. I watch the blackness that covers ramblers, and rusty cars flit past the car windows. The darkness deepens; my eyelids fall…
“Hey, you guys have to stay awake and keep your eyes out for cows!” my mom reminds my uncle and me.
We’ve discovered, while driving the route between Rapid City and Kyle during daylight hours, that rarely do fences on cattle ranches do much good on the rez. The animals wander between the road and the pasture indiscriminately, as if they own the land.
Perhaps they do.
It feels strange to be back here. A little over two years ago, my mom and I came with a youth mission group to do repair work and improvements on the church. Although we are here now primarily to study Lakota culture and rez life, not to address poverty issues, I realize that the more I learn, the more I know I cannot ignore the needs of those living here.
We have come to visit Fr. Francis Apple, a Lakota man and rector of the Wi Wicahpi (Sun Star) Anglican Church in Kyle. Over the course of a weekend, we would visit health care facilities, a Wacipi (Pow-wow), a WiWacipi (Sundance), and a Sunday service at Wi Wicahpi. At some point that weekend, Fr. Apple draws me a diagram of a prayer method based on the Cangleska Wakan (medicine wh
eel). A quartered circle contains four items: cosmology, the two-legged animals, the four-legged animals, and the winged animals. In this method, we (the two-leggeds) are only one item in a prayer for the entire universe. We are not above creation, and we do not own it, any more than the cattle on Pine Ridge. We are part of it.The next day, as I sit under the arbor of a WiWacipi ring, mystified by this foreign way of worship, I attempt to observe the ceremony. What truly demands my attention, however, is the sense of accord: with those around me, with a history that is not my own, with the earth I sit on and the life in the forest around me, but most of all with my Creator. In truth, I have hit on something perhaps a bit unexpected: the presence of the Lord’s Spirit. I know, then, that however strange the WiWacipi might be to me, it is truly worship, and demands my respect.
It would later occur to me that through these experiences, the Lord was pushing me to see myself as a part of something, a greater whole: that I am not just God’s child, but also a part of His kingdom. I cannot separate myself from the rest of humanity, no matter how foreign to me, for they are my kin. In email correspondence, for instance, I frequently address Fr. Apple as Tunkasila, or Grandfather.
Just as relatives share with one another, the gifts that the Lord has given us on this earth are not ours to own, nor to keep for ourselves. I have reached the decision that if I treat the Lakota of Pine Ridge as my relatives, I cannot ignore their needs. To know the impoverished in this way is to know that one must serve them. Therefore, I frequently tell myself that my possessions, my money, my ability to hold a job and put food on the table—these things are not and never were truly mine. They are on loan from the poor.
Mitakuye Oyas’in
