En Route to Lakota Understanding

Workshop shares cultural touchstones

Arts South Dakota partnered with CAIRNS, the Center for American Indian Research and Native Studies, for En Route, a three-day traveling workshop led by Dr. Craig Howe and CAIRNS educators on Native Lands and Arts June 24-26. The idea of being “en route” grows from the premise that peoples and places are interwoven in a complex relationship. The geographic focus of the workshop was a small portion of the traditional homelands of the Lakota people, including Mato Paha (Bear Butte), Cankpe Opi (Wounded Knee), Wasun Niya (Wind Cave) and Pe’Sla (Reynolds Prairie).

Photo shows the group at the Red Shirt Table Overlook in the Stronghold Unit of the Badlands. Photo courtesy of Dr. Craig Howe.

The intention of the workshop structure was to encourage critical thinking about the intersections of Lakota history, culture, land and art on the one hand, and non-Lakota perspectives of important places and events on the other. The goal is always for a more nuanced awareness of the broader historical and contemporary relationships between American Indians and non-Indians, through an experience of Lakota arts, land and culture.

En Route: a framework of respect By Altman Studeny

Altman Studeny is an artist living and working in Spearfish. His practice addresses questions of midwestern mythology and regional responsibility in cultural creation with a strong emphasis on fostering inclusiveness through collaborative art making. Studeny has worked as a teaching artist with the South Dakota Arts Council since 2008.

We picked up the printmaker Roger Broer somewhere alongside the highway out of Hill City. He was just standing there amongst the granite, waiting for our bus to come so that he might show us Pe’Sla, one of the seven sites sacred to Lakotas in the cosmological landscape of the Black Hills. The bus turned onto back roads and drove miles deeper into the close pine forest until the land unexpectedly opened up and we were there.

In his book God Is Red, author and historian Vine Deloria, Jr. delineates between European and Indigenous systems of belief along the question of time. In the Western tradition, there once was a time when everything was good—way back in the Garden of Eden—but the first of us did some bad things and so it goes: if we do the right things now, maybe those good times will come back. Native American religion, however, is on the whole tied more strongly to places—places that have borne witness to heroic deeds and foolish missteps from the era of Long Ago to today. Those sites and their long memories remind one how to behave and how to avoid misbehavior, how to bond oneself to the deep history of a specific ecosystem, and that the land itself was there before us and will be there long after we’re gone.

Dr. Craig Howe describes the Lakota based architecture of “Wingsprings,” which is home, retreat and the base for CAIRNS.

The power of En Route comes from standing in those locations that figure in the very story of creation itself and being reminded that they were also witness to the problematic narrative of American expansionism, to court battles for recognition of sovereignty throughout the 20th Century, through the reclamation of Lakota identity, and that they are still there to watch over the successes and struggles of our own complex moment. As an artist and one who cares about a more thoughtful, inclusive South Dakota, it heartens me to know that some 30 people got on a bus together of their own accord to challenge deeply held assumptions and strive for a more nuanced understanding of the state’s cultural heritage. As Dr. Howe stresses, one can not jump to Lakota star knowledge without first being able to name even a single tribal capital. En Route provides a framework of respect: how to be students rather than tourists.

Like the best sacred sites, Pe’Sla is unassuming—a few quartz boulders in an expanse of prairie. Some folks from the bus scattered tobacco, others tried to identify wildflowers, and Jackie pointed out where her grandmother taught her that timpsila grows. And then, of course, one comes to the rocks themselves: shining white and sitting where they’ve sat since the Earth heaved up and made the Hills as something new. Roger said they call down lightning—the ground was scattered with such shards as bolts blast off. “If you have a problem,” he added, “if you need something, tell it to the rocks. They’ll listen.”

He’s right, of course. How could they not?