On Second Thought: the SACRED LANDSCAPES issue

A PUBLICATION OF HUMANITIES NORTH DAKOTA

ON

04.18

2ECOND THOUGHT

the

SACRED LANDSCAPES issue

1

CONTENTS

02 Remembering the

Cannonball River

By Dakota Goodhouse

10

10 Grandfather Land

By Liselotte Erdrich 18 My Soul in the Sacred

Landscape of Creation A Conversation between Brian Palecek

and Rev. John Floberg

24 Summer Night-Dakota

By Janelle Masters 26 The Time Has Come To Do

Our Part

By Lillian Crook and Jim Fuglie

18 32

32 On Hallowed Ground

By Darren Thompson

Upon reaching or entering the zone of a sacred shrine, an ancient and wonderfully subtle sense of reverence is called forth, asking for silence and respect. If we heed this signal, and rest with it patiently, we may find ourselves rewarded with a gift of knowing. — FREDRIC LEHRMAN, The Sacred Landscape

RENAMING THE HUMANITIES

BRENNA DAUGHERTY GERHARDT

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

It is with great please that I introduce to you Humanities North Dakota!

ON SECOND THOUGHT is published by Humanities North Dakota.

Dakota Goodhouse, Guest Editor To subscribe, please visit: humanitiesnd.org

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this magazine do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or Humanities North Dakota.

Cover photo by: Thomas Gerhardt

This isn’t our first makeover.

When we were founded in 1973, we launched as The North Dakota Committee for the Humanities and Public Issues.

In 1981, we changed our name to North Dakota Humanities Council. This year, we chose to rebrand as Humanities North Dakota because most of our constituents and many of our elected officials believe we are a state agency. Humanities North Dakota is not a state agency and does not receive state funding.

We are an independent 501(c)3 nonprofit dedicated to serving the citizens of North Dakota by providing opportunities for lifelong learning.

While our name has changed our mission remains the same: to provide people opportunities to engage with and debate life-changingideas because democracy demands wisdom and vision in its citizens.

Our Founding Fathers believed in the importance and power of the humanities to change people’s lives. Indeed, our nation’s history has been a great adventure in ideas. Humanities North Dakota continues this proud tradition.

|

SACRED LANDSCAPES |

REMEMBERING THE CANNONBALL RIVER

by Dakota Goodhouse

T

he Lakota people keep their collective memory alive in pictographic records called winter counts. One such winter count, the

Brown Hat Winter Count, reaches back to what ethnologists and historians might call “myth-history,” to circa 901 CE. This history reaches back hundreds of years and recalls the arrival of the horse in 1692, the first horse-stealing raid in 1706, intertribal conflict, contact with traders, smallpox, star falls, eclipses, comets, sun dances, white bison hunts, conflicts with soldiers, treaties, the arrival of settlers, the boarding school and reservation era, and human survival.

If the Cannonball River were excluded from primary resources like journals, maps, and winter counts, our North Dakota history would be poorer for it. There is a continuous cultural occupation of this Missouri River tributary reaching back to circa 1300 CE through the tribal histories of the Mandan, Arikara, Cheyenne, Yanktonai Dakota, and Hunkpapa Lakota.

The Cannonball River has many names. The Dakota call it Íŋyaŋ IyÁ Wakpá (“Talking Stone River”) or Íŋyaŋwakağapi Wakpá (“Stone MakesFor-Themselves River”). The Mandan people call it Pasąhxte’ (“Big Creek”). The Hidatsa know it in their language as Aashihdia (“Big Creek”). The Cheyenne refer to the Cannonball River as the “River of the Rocks.”

According to the authors of the Dakota Access Pipeline Class III survey report, they admitted to no tribal consultation. They didn’t need to consult with any tribe because the pipeline did not physically cross 2

|

SACRED LANDSCAPES |

any reservation border. The report doesn’t mention much in the way of history and culture. What is mentioned can’t be shared, because it may lead to the destruction of the resource.

What it doesn’t say needs to be shared. The report does not mention the flood of 1825 opposite the mouth of the Cannonball River—thirty lodges, or about 150 to 180 people, drowned. There was no mention of the last camp of Wanéta, The Charger, on Beaver Creek either. Wanéta was a major historic figure in the War of 1812: he fought in three conflicts in Ohio, met President Van Buren, met King George III, and led as many as seven hundred Dakota-Lakota under Colonel Leavenworth’s command of the Missouri Legion in 1823 in the first-ever US military campaign on Plains Indians against the Arikara. A major historic figure?

A former US president and an English king certainly thought so.

These few things were brought to the attention of an individual at the North Dakota State Historical Preservation Office on March 1, 2016, along with where he could find this information. The following day, that individual responded that this information could also be found in the British Museum Winter Count, in London, England.

The north and south banks of the Cannonball River are rife with physical evidence of historic and cultural occupations of people who are still here. This physical evidence of village remains and midden mounds are complemented by surviving oral tradition; there are various mentions in historic journals from British resources (e.g., Welsh explorer John Evans) to American resources (e.g., fur trader Manuel Lisa, Corps of Discovery, etc.). As to whether or not the Arikara, Cheyenne, and Mandan Indians ever interred their deceased in the vicinity of the Cannonball River mouth, it is absolutely preposterous to say that there are no burial grounds nearby—to say so would be to suggest that no one ever died in any of the cultural occupations. Alfred Bowers’s Mandan informants told him that their ancestors buried their deceased “in earlier times.”

The Sitting Rabbit map of the Missouri River, from the North Dakota–South Dakota border to the North Dakota–Montana border, was commissioned by Orin Libby in 1906. At the time, Libby was the secretary of the State Historical Society of North Dakota (SHSND). Libby sought out Sitting Rabbit, a Mandan Indian man, to capture the geography of the Missouri River as the Mandan knew 3

|

SACRED LANDSCAPES |

it. Sitting Rabbit didn’t disappoint in his efforts. In fact, the Mandan Indian villages at the mouth of the Cannonball River, both the north and south bank villages, are called the “Big River Villages.” The Mandan Indian name of the Cannonball River is the “Big River.” This precious map is still in the collections of the SHSND and is available for public viewing on the North Dakota Studies website.

According to Colonel A. B. Welch’s Seven Fires (Dakotah History), sometime around 1750 the Šahíyela (Red Talkers; Cheyenne) were compelled by the Lakota to cross the Missouri River at the mouth of the Cannonball River. The Šahíyela were hard-pressed to either make peace with the Lakota or be exterminated, so they embraced their old foe and became allies.

A great intertribal adoption, cemented by marriages, was arranged. But not all the Lakota were keen to make an ally of a former enemy.

The Brown Hat Winter Count (aka Baptiste Good Winter Count; Sičáŋǧu, “Brulé”) in the winter count collections at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, has been made available in its entirety online. This winter count recalls 1762–63 as the “people were burnt winter.” The entry details a great prairie fire that caught up to their village.

Many people and horses were killed in this fire. Survivors themselves were burnt on their legs and made it through this trial by jumping into Long Lake; survivors became referred to as Sičáŋǧu, meaning “Burnt Thighs.” This band of Lakota had fought the Cheyenne in the Cannonball area.

The Cheyenne had retaliated by crossing the Missouri River at the mouth of the Cannonball River and tracking the Lakota along Long Lake Creek, where they set fire to the plains. The late Albert White Hat Sr. (Rosebud; Sičáŋǧu) recalled the oral tradition of the Sičáŋǧu as taking place in the Bismarck region. The conflict that resulted in the formation of the Sičáŋǧu began at the mouth of the Cannonball 4

River. The identity of one of the tribes of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ (the Seven Council Fires; “The Great Sioux Nation”) tied to this location is significant.

A map at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the only evidence of John Evans’s travels (his journals may have been destroyed or lost), provides the only testimony of his journey on the Upper Missouri River. This map was referenced and annotated by Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery. Evans recorded on his map a series of streams, many unknown to him by name; one of the outstanding streams he recorded was the “Bomb River,” or the Cannonball River.

The Corps of Discovery mentions the Cannonball River as “La Bullet” on October 18, 1804. Referencing Evans’s map, Captain William Clark walked that evening in search of the remarkable places mentioned by Evans but couldn’t find them—though by then, the Corps’s campsite was north of the mouth of the Cannonball River. Co-captain Meriwether Lewis noted on this same date that the cannonball-shaped concretions were “of excellent grit for Grindstones” and had his men select one to “answer for an anker.”

The Pictographic Bison Robe at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University details the intertribal conflicts among the Arikara, Mandan, Hidatsa, Hunkpapa Lakota, and Yanktonai Dakota in the Heart River and Cannonball River area along the Missouri River during the 1790s. This same robe details one of many conflicts between the tribes of the Upper Missouri River that concluded in the 1803 Battle of Heart River, which saw the expansion of the Hunkpapa territory. This conflict is remembered in the Drifting Goose Winter Count (aka John K. Bear Winter Count) as Tȟa Čháŋte Wakpá ed okíčhize, or “There was a battle at Heart River.” The expansion of Hunkpapa territory is significant. This territorial boundary is recognized in the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty.

Ensign Nathaniel Pryor, a sergeant of the Corps of Discovery during the expedition, recorded on September 9, 1807, that the Arikara and Mandan were at war. The Mandan had killed two Arikara at the mouth of the Cannonball River.

Testimony of the conflict at Cannonball River was delivered to Pryor at the Grand River by the Lakota. Pryor’s previous experience with the Arikara and Lakota made him aware that the best policy was to place every confidence in their word; they had no reason to lie.

Manuel Lisa, a fur trader of the American Fur Company, recorded that tensions were high on the northern plains among tribes who were pro-English trade, those who were pro-American trade, and American Fur Company trappers in the fall of 1812. The Crow and Lakota had killed American trappers; the Hidatsa had stolen American Fur Company horses; the Arikara had indiscriminately killed both English and American trappers; and the Cheyenne had robbed and whipped American Fur Company trappers on the Cannonball River.

Botanist John Bradbury made a journey to the Cannonball River in 1811.

Bradbury noted in his journal “late in the day on June 20, the valley of Cannon-ball River, bounded on each side by a range of small hills, visible as far as the eye can reach; and as they appear to diminish regularly, in the proportion of their distance, they produce a singular and pleasing effect. The Cannon-ball River was muddy at this time; but whether it is constantly so or not, I could not learn.

It is here about one hundred and sixty yards wide, but so shallow that we crossed it without swimming. We camped on a very fine prairie, near the river, affording grass in abundance, nearly a yard high.

The alluvion of the river is about a mile in breadth from bluff to bluff, and is very beautiful, being prairie, interspersed with groves of trees, and ornamented with beautiful plants, now in flower.”

|

SACRED LANDSCAPES |

The Cannonball area, according to Elizabeth Fenn, represents “the oldest Mandan cultural horizon.”

Among Bradbury’s findings was a species of flax he identified as Linum perenne. The Lakota know the native blue flax as Čhaŋȟlóğaŋ Nabláǧa (“HollowStem To-Blossom-from-Within”) and employ the seed in their food stock. Bradbury returned again to the Cannonball River on July 7, 1819, for the express purpose of procuring additional botany specimens.

The Blue Thunder Winter Count, the No Two Horns Winter Count, and the High Dog Winter Count, all of which are in the collections at the State Historical Society of North Dakota (the High Dog Winter Count is on display at the ND Heritage Center & State Museum), all recall a devastating flood in the spring of 1825. The High Dog Winter Count remembers the flood as Mní wičhát’tÁ, or “Many died by drowning.” The Blue Thunder Winter Count remembers the flood as Mní wičhát’tÉ, also translated “Many died by drowning.” According to the High Dog Winter Count, this fatal winter camp was opposite of the mouth of the Cannonball River, and the site is

remembered as Étu Pȟá Šuŋg t’Á, or “Dead Horse Head Point.” The Steamboat/Thin Elk Winter Count, in the collections of the Buechel Museum at the St. Francis Indian School on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota, records that it was thirty lodges of Yanktonai Dakota who drowned in the Horsehead Bottom flood. This flood story and location is also recorded in the Medicine Bear Winter Count, located in the Hood Museum at Darthmouth College in New Hampshire.

This information is repeated for the same year in the Chandler-Pohrt Winter Count at the Detroit Institute of Arts Museum in Michigan.

Prince Maximilian von Wied-Neuwied travelled into the interior of North America during the summer of 1833.

Wied-Neuwied has written probably more about the Cannonball River than any visitor before or since. An excerpt from his journal is shared here: On the north side of the mouth, there was a steep, yellow clay wall; and on the southern, a flat, covered with poplars and willows. This river has its name from the 5

|

SACRED LANDSCAPES |

Every society needs these kind of sacred places because they help to instill a sense of social cohesion in the people and remind them of the passage of generations that have brought them to the present.

singular regular sand-stone balls which are found in its banks, and in those of the Missouri in its vicinity. They are of various sizes, from that of a musket ball to that of a large bomb, and lie irregularly on the bank, or in the strata, from which they often project to half their thickness when the river has washed away the earth; they fall down, and are found in great numbers on the bank. Many of them are rather elliptical, others are more flattened, and others flat on one side, and rather convex on the other. Of the perfectly spherical balls, I observed some two feet in diameter.

The Long Soldier Winter Count entry for 1835–36 recorded an Arikara camp on the Cannonball River. The Hunkpapa Lakota went to the Arikara camp to trade for wagmíza (corn). The Arikara, not wanting the Lakota around, perhaps owing to the part the Lakota played in the Arikara War of 1823, killed six of the Lakota. A copy of the Long Soldier Winter Count is available for viewing at Sitting Bull College in Fort Yates, North Dakota.

In September 1863, General Alfred Sully lead an assault on the Siouan encampment at Whitestone Hill as part of the punitive campaigns organized by General John Pope to make Americans feel safe following the 1862 Minnesota Dakota Conflict, and to open the frontier for settlement—in particular, to open the frontier for veterans returning from the Civil War. Sully’s command killed as many as 200 (mostly women and children) and took 156 prisoners (mostly women and children). Survivors, those who escaped Sully’s assault, turned west and crossed 6

the Missouri River at the Cannonball confluence.

A second entry on the Long Soldier Winter Count cites a conflict at the Cannonball River between the Lakota and Assiniboine in 1862–63. Twenty Assiniboine came on the warpath; there was a battle there, and they hid behind the cannonball-shaped concretions. The winter count’s entry tells us that the Assiniboine were surrounded and fired upon. The fox image that overlays the Assiniboine tells us they fought with guile.

“Chief Big Head’s [Pȟá Tȟáŋka] family crossed the Missouri River at Many Horse Head Point [Étu Pȟá Šuŋg t’Á, or “Dead Horse Head Point”] in an effort to escape General Sully,” says Wastewin Young, former tribal historic preservation officer for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. “The young mothers,” she continues, “carried their babies under cover of night across the Missouri River. They plugged their noses so that their crying wouldn’t give their position away to passing soldiers.”

According to Young, Chief Two Bear and Little Soldier often established winter camp on the east bank of the Missouri River, opposite the Cannonball confluence.

On July 29, 1864, after spending two weeks hastily constructing Fort Rice, General Sully took his command of 2,200 soldiers, which included a detachment of Winnebago Indian scouts, and ascended the Cannonball River on the south bank— his punitive campaign on the Isáŋyathi Dakȟóta anew. Known or unknown, Sully also marched against the Thítȟuŋwaŋ Lakȟóta (Húŋkpapȟa, Itázipčho, Sihásapa,

|

and Mnikȟóžu) and Iháŋktȟuŋwaŋna Dakȟóta, two Siouan groups who had nothing to do with the 1862 Minnesota Dakota Conflict. Sully received a dispatch from Fort Rice at midnight on July 22 that the Dakȟóta were on the Knife River.

The next day Sully’s command crossed the Cannonball River near present-day communities of Porcupine and Shields, North Dakota.

A third entry from the Long Soldier Winter Count indicates that the Húŋkpapȟa were camped at the Cannonball River in 1866–67. Gall was taken by soldiers that winter to Fort Berthold, where they stabbed him. Gall was left for dead and the camp moved on.

What makes this tale remarkable is that Gall walked to the Húŋkpapȟa camp at the Cannonball River and recovered.

In 1878, the Huŋkphápȟa chief Ištá SápA (“Black Eyes”) met with William Wade, a cattle rancher on the Cannonball River, and shared this about the terrible 1825 flood: ...we camped on this bottom land just below here...it was the Wolf Month [February] and it had been warm for a long time. One night the water started coming in over the ground from the river and before we could get to higher ground we were surrounded by water and ice chunks. Our only chance was to get to high ground before we would all be covered up with water. We tried to carry our tepees and supplies but finally had to leave them and many of the women were drowned trying to save their children. Most all our old people drowned and many others. Most all our horses went under and you can still see their heads (skulls) laying [sic] along at the foot of the hills after so many, many years. Two Bears (Mato Nopa) a Yankton chief [sic], saved the lives of several women and children by carrying them from camp to the higher ground.

William Wade’s daughter Mamie met her share of pre-reservation Dakota and Lakota people. Among them was Annie

Skye. Skye relayed to the younger Wade that smallpox struck the Lakota in 1837.

They were camped at the mouth of the Cannonball River when “out of a clear blue sky smallpox hit them. After the death of several of their number, who were put to rest up on platforms suspended in trees, they decided to move away from this infested locality.”

Harriett Skye, Annie Skye’s granddaughter, offers a contemporary perspective on current events near the Cannonball River: I believe that as long as they remain peaceful and unarmed, and each day they are there, is a win. This kind of action confuses those who would come in with their guns and armor because their intent is to kill. They arrested people who were praying, but the powers that be know that the world is watching, but more importantly, know that our Ancestors are watching because they fought and died so we could be here. This struggle is everyone’s struggle to maintain our clean water. Water is life.

Harriett Skye, who holds a PhD in ethnic studies from the University of California, Berkeley, was inducted into the North Dakota Heritage Center’s Native American Hall of Honor in September 2016.

Elizabeth Fenn, a historian and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People, writes that the Huff phase—an occupation located between the Cannonball and Heart Rivers from about 1300 CE to 1450 CE—was when and where the Mandan became the Mandan. The south Cannonball site during this phase was unprotected—there were no palisade walls nor defensive moats surrounding the village there. The fortifications at the north Cannonball site during this same phase may well represent a key transformation in plains village life, as drought caused strife in the Missouri River valley. This may have been cause for the Mandan to move closer together and build fortifications for safety.

SACRED LANDSCAPES |

But we need archaeological study to sort these things out.

By the time Mandan moved north from the Cannonball area to the Heart River around 1450 CE, they had embraced the key trait that made them Mandan: the Okipa ceremony, with its multi-day reenactment of their own rich history.

The Cannonball area, according to Fenn, represents “the oldest Mandan cultural horizon.”

The late Vine Deloria Jr. essayed that for many Americans, “the first and most familiar kind of sacred lands are places to which we attribute sanctity because the location is a site where, within our own history, something of great importance has taken place. Unfortunately, many of these places are related to instances of human violence. Every society needs these kinds of sacred places because they help to instill a sense of social cohesion in the people and remind them of the passage of generations that have brought them to the present. A society that cannot remember and honor its past is in peril of losing its soul. Indians, because of our considerably longer tenure on this continent, have many more sacred places than do non-Indians.

“A second category of sacred lands has a deeper, more profound sense of the sacred. It can be illustrated in…[when] Joshua led the Hebrews across the River Jordan into the Holy Land. After crossing, Joshua selected one man from each of the Twelve tribes and told him to find a large stone. The twelve stones were then placed together in a monument to mark the spot where the people had camped after having crossed the river successfully. In the crossing of the River Jordan, the sacred or higher powers have appeared in the lives of human beings...the essence of the event is that the sacred has become a part of our existence.

“It is not likely that non-Indians have had many of these kinds of religious experiences, particularly because most churches and synagogues have special 7

|

SACRED LANDSCAPES |

rituals that are designed to cleanse the buildings so that their services can be held there untainted by the natural world.

Non-Indians simply have not been on this continent very long; their families have rarely settled in one place for any period of time so that no profound relationship with the environment has been possible.”

Deloria concluded: “The third kind of sacred lands are places of overwhelming holiness where the Higher Powers, on their own initiative, have revealed Themselves to human beings. We can illustrate this point in the Old Testament narrative. Moses spent time herding sheep on Mount Horeb.

One day to his amazement [he] saw a bush burning with fire but not being consumed by it. Approaching this spot, Moses was startled when the Lord spoke to him. ‘Put off thy shoes, for the place where thou standest is holy ground.’ This tradition tells us that there are places of unquestionable, inherent sacredness on this earth, sites that are holy in and of themselves. These holy places are locations where people have always gone to communicate and commune with higher powers.”

Ray Wood, renowned expert in Plains Indian cultural and archaeological sites on the Upper Missouri River whose firsthand field experience goes back before the dams of the 1950s, interprets the data from the John Evans 1796 map in regard to the Cannonball River locality that what Evans recorded as “Jupiter’s Fort” is without a doubt a prehistoric Mandan village.

According to Wood’s findings regarding the north Cannonball site, “Not only was it a defensive setting, but the village was also fortified by a curving ditch that isolated a level upland spur from the adjoining upland. The village today is badly disturbed by plowing, but from the air one can clearly see the fortification ditch and the numerous bastions protruding from it. Little wonder that Evans referred to it as a fort.” In his Prologue to Lewis & Clark: The Mackay and Evans Expeditions, Wood captures the number of remarkable Indian village sites north of the Cannonball River.

8

As part of the Dakota Access Pipeline review process, the North Dakota State Historic Preservation Ofiice conducted a follow-up survey west of Highway 1806 and found that no significant sites were destroyed. The physical evidence, or lack thereof, cannot be disputed. According to the chief archaeologist’s published note, he and his associates were looking west of Highway 1806, perhaps because Standing Rock tribal historian Tim Mentz conducted his own survey and called attention there with his findings. The north Cannonball site and the mouth of the Cannonball River, the confluence of history and culture, is east of Highway 1806.

In 1999, the Cannonball Ranch was inducted into the North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame. It’s one of the oldest ranches in North Dakota. According to the Hall of Fame, the ranch served as a gathering point as early as 1865. The ranch included a hotel, a general store, a ferry crossing, a steamboat landing and fueling station, a military telegraph station for Fort Rice, and a stage line to the Black Hills in the 1870s and ’80s. The ranch also included two houses, a barn, a blacksmith shop, a bunk house, an ice house, a laundry, and a tennis court. The North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame’s strict criteria for eligibility to be recognized is that a ranch must have been “instrumental in creating or developing the ranching business, traditions, and lifestyles of North Dakota’s western heritage and livestock industry.”

In contrast to what’s happened in North Dakota, in 2010 Walmart planned to construct a supercenter near Wilderness Battlefield (a Civil War battleground in Orange County, Virginia), and people invested in the history of that site grew concerned. Eventually, enough people held that ground as sacred and historical that plans for the supercenter were dropped in January 2011. Coincidentally, Walmart and state officials had argued that nothing significant occurred on that site.

The sum of the north bank of the

Cannonball River—with a million years of geological history and seven hundred years of continual occupation, intertribal conflict, smallpox, botany, trade, steamboat traffic, US military history, and early ranching—have made that location significant.

Spiritual pilgrimages were conducted on the plateaus located on the north bank of the Cannonball River, what John Evans called the “Hummit.” There are little to no traces of these vision quests, and there shouldn’t be. People went to pray, not to leave evidence. In September 2016, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, the Most Reverend Michael B. Curry, made a pilgrimage of his own to the Cannonball River camps and town. He listened and prayed with the community there. Curry’s visit calls to mind Psalm 99:9, “Exalt the Lord our God, and worship at his holy hill; for the Lord our God is Holy.” The mystery of creation can be seen there today as the early peoples beheld it.

The Cannonball River, and specifically the north Cannonball site and its importance to the first nations and to North Dakota, must be taken into account for its religious or spiritual significance, its role in intertribal conflicts, its role in the 1837 smallpox epidemic that struck the Húŋkpapȟa at that location, its role as the starting point in General Sully’s 1864 punitive campaign, and for the historic Cannonball Ranch.

The Cannonball River and all its attributes are important to all North Dakota citizens, to new citizens, and most importantly of all, to the future. Let us put our minds together to educate ourselves and one another about the things we hold dear, and to resolve to respect our story, our histories, and our sites of significance.

Keúŋkeyapi. That’s what they said. l DAKOTA GOODHOUSE is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. His research has appeared in the Smithsonian’s The Year the Stars Fell and other publications. Visit his blog at, thefirstscout.blogspot.com.

The North Dakota Humanities Council is now...

|

SACRED LANDSCAPES |

GRANDFATHER LAND

Sioux-Chippewa Peace Conference, Fort Abercrombie, August 1870. The author’s great-grandfather, Joseph Gourneau Jr., wears a white gown in the center of the photo. State Historical Society of North Dakota, State Archives, 2018-P-012-00009

10

|

SACRED LANDSCAPES |

by Liselotte Erdrich

I thought it was his name, until the word for grandfather sunk in. Mooshum was the father of my Grandpa Pat, spoken of in a certain way that conveyed such reverence, presence, that I presumed him still alive on Turtle Mountain. There, my mother grew up in a solid, squared-oak log house built in 1880. Grandpa’s blacksmith anvil sat alongside the northeast corner for decades, the old homestead and fields hidden by dense stands of bur oak and quaking aspen, secluded from the road and modern times. I remember eating Grandma’s light bread, fresh from the Range Eternal woodstove, listening to the talk of grown-ups and my youngest uncle’s pet crow.

11

|

SACRED LANDSCAPES |

In 1956, when perhaps ninety-eight

years old, Mooshum was interviewed by Minot Daily News reporter Robert Cory, who wrote, “His biography, if fully written, would recount the history of the Indian people and all they have done, and all they have suffered, to make possible the life we North Dakotans have today.”

An unusual statement in the 1950s, when prevailing federal Indian policy chants and incantations— Emancipation, Relocation, Termination—could officially vanish Native entities finally, permanently, from the geographic conscience. House Concurrent Resolution 108 would dissolve tribal governments and reservations, end federal benefits and services, and otherwise abrogate treaties and agreements by which the government had previously acquired Indian lands. Some twenty million acres were ceded by the Chippewa under conditions of extreme duress following decline of the fur trade, bison hunt, and Red River cart freighting economies that had paved the way for settlement. Today’s Turtle Mountain people were the original workforce, expeditionary units and cultural brokers in those empire-building enterprises, indispensable then but literally starving by the final 1892 “Ten-Cent Treaty,” or McCumber Agreement, extinguishing Chippewa claim to nine million acres of the better land at ten cents an acre. “It was a transition first from the life of a hunter and trapper to that of commercial hunter and freighter, and finally to small farmer,” Cory said of a century seen by Joseph “Keesh-ke-mun-ishiw” Gourneau Jr., whose Indian name translates to “The Kingfisher.”

“Root hog or die,” Grandpa Pat called it, farming the unfarmable lands of Turtle Mountain. He, his wife, and children worked a one-horse market garden business over three decades, selling produce to hotels, restaurants, grocers, farmwives, never going on public assistance even in the 1930s. Mom’s childhood chores included garden work, snaring rabbits, herding cows, churning butter, and selling Grit newspaper while her brothers did hard labor, hunting, trapping.

Grandpa Pat and other tribal chairmen fought hard to defeat the termination proceedings, enlisting support of non-Indians wherever possible—politicians, newspapers, and public officials who could foresee devastating economic costs to the state and county. He had a persuasive manner and love of language, was multilingual, and made friends everywhere he went. Harsh sanctions had been proposed

12

for the tribal debt, which he eliminated by depositing thirty thousand dollars in the US Treasury that had been approved as his salary for the years of his chairmanship.

He worked as a night watchman at the Turtle Mountain Ordnance Plant during that time to support his family, taking on the chairman duties in the daytime until 1958.

Tribal historian, champion dancer, culture revivalist, the first person I ever knew who wrote a book, he was a goldmine. “They don’t make ’em like that anymore,” an elder told me. “That’s how our people were,” he added, after a thoughtful silence.

Swept along in the intergenerational struggle, Grandpa Pat nevertheless ensured we could know our collective history while assimilating, relocating, renegading all across the USA. In one rare 1970s long-distance phone call, he mentioned to my sister Adelheid that Sitting Bull rode away to Canada with his father’s long underwear after the Little Bighorn. “What!?” The Sioux camped across the river from Mooshum and his outfit, who were following the buffalo.

The Chippewa made a ceremony of gifts to send them on their way, “too risky to associate with.” That sixth-grader won first place in the Historical Research Essay Contest that year, sponsored by Red River Valley Heritage Society.

Mooshum was born at Red Lake, Minnesota, to a roaming band of hunters, on the eve of the upheaval (the 1862 “Minnesota Massacre,” then the 1863 Old Crossing Treaty, then the 1870 railroad, then the settlers). He was present where his father had to make his X mark, “Warrior of Pembina,” on the treaty ceding eleven million acres of the Red River valley: richest soil in the land, a wilderness of grass bounded only by the visible shores of glacial Lake Agassiz. The pipe smoked at Old Crossing was handed down through generations to my grandfather, whose father, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers had been occupied here since the 1700s by the fur trade, large-scale buffalo hunt, and commercial freighting on the Red River cart trails between Pembina, St. Paul, and Winnipeg. Chippewa were recruited as protection from the Sioux in establishing these venues. Their extreme exertions and inroads made settlement possible, but now they had to leave.

Mooshum was baptized by Father Goiffon, the Frozen Priest of Pembina (whose leg was amputated after a sudden blizzard in which he experienced auditory and visual hallucinations and began to eat his horse). He was the son of Kah-isig-iwid, or “Born-on-a-Pile,” Joseph Gourneau

|

SACRED LANDSCAPES |

Tribal historian, champion dancer, culture revivalist, the first person I ever knew who wrote a book, he was a goldmine. “They don’t make ’em like that anymore,” an elder told me. “That’s how our people were,” he added, after a thoughtful silence.

Sr. His grandfather was Little Thunder or Animikance, who acted as a double agent in the War of 1812, receiving medals from both the British and Americans while keeping the Chippewa out of the fray, and “well known through the whole country, in consequence of a desperate encounter he had with three Grisly bears” west of Pembina. He too was known as Joseph (Native pronunciation Sooza, Soozay, Soozayf). The great-grandfather of Mooshum was Old Wild Rice (Vieux Folle Avoine, Crazy Oats, Wild Oats, Old Manominee, Old Fallewine, Menominee as recorded in the Pembina fur trade journals of Chaboillez and Henry and pronounced in his family Gay-tay/Mahnoo/min, three words translated: “the old good seed”). This ancestor in 1800 led a brigade of forty-five canoes of warriors aiding Alexander Henry to establish a fur trade post on the Red River, and before that was he documented by Chaboillez to have hunted in an astonishing 1,400-mile circuit with his young men during the winter of 1797 to supply the Pembina post with food and furs.

Around 1970, during his annual summer visit to Wahpeton, Grandpa took us to visit the Fort Abercrombie historical museum. There he saw a photo of the 1870 Chippewa-Sioux Peace Treaty and instantly recognized the anonymous altar boy as his father. Mooshum appears in the center, flanked on either side by the two lines of warriors, a dark face in a white gown beside a pale face in a black gown: Father Jean-Baptiste Marie Genin, who signed his correspondence “Missionary Apostolic to the North West Territories.”

“In his youth he was altar boy for a missionary priest whose parish was larger than a diocese was today,” wrote Cory of the St. Joseph to Pembina to Fort Abercrombie to Fort Totten circuit where Father Genin conducted religious services. Genin also accompanied the Chippewa and Métis people on their months-long annual buffalo hunting expeditions. People received daily sacraments all along the trails and river valleys, across the plains and over the breaks and hills, following the herds. Mass was said every evening.

People were born, died, married, and buried. All of North

Dakota is sacred and a church.

Two-wheeled Red River carts, invented at Henry’s post around 1800, served as a freight line for the bison hunt and pemmican trade supplying the furbiz and subsequent development of the territory. “The hunts took his people all across northern North Dakota from the Pembina River into what is now Montana, and as far west as Fort Benton on the Missouri and the Milk River along the Canadian border.”

On one trip, Mooshum and four other boys were captured by a party of Crow whose scout, wearing a buffalo calf skin, had decoyed them over a hill. His father with two others rode into the Crow camp and demanded their immediate release. The Crow had heard of him, for he was “what is now called Police Chief to enforce tribal law—Ogitchitag, during the prime of his life . . . the Crows were aware that before entering into their camp, they (Ojibways) had the whole camp surrounded ready for battle.” Bison hunts were a highly organized venture (with sometimes hundreds of carts) governed by Plains Indian law, which dealt harshly with offenders, be they Chippewa or not.

Linda Slaughter, in Leaves from Northwest History, stated, “Father Genin was idolized by the Indians and halfbreeds of the northwest as no other man has ever been.”

Miraculous works were attributed to Genin, handed down in stories, including one about his altar boy fetching water far out on the thirsty plains, at the divine insistence of Genin. Probably this boy could find water when he had to.

Genin was credited for peaceful progress as civilization and military presence expanded west to Bismarck. According to Slaughter, whenever Genin approached a Catholic camp in the hostile region with his missionary flag carried “by an orphan Indian boy whom he had adopted, all the warriors in the camp would rush forth to meet him and falling upon one knee would fire volley after volley of salutes from their guns into the air.” This white flag with a red cross signaled a peaceful mission, like the original protection symbol declared at the 1864 Geneva Convention.

Father Genin the Legend was dissected by Terence Kardong, OSB, in Beyond Red River, citing church authorities 13

|

SACRED LANDSCAPES |

The author’s parents on their wedding day. On the left is Mooshum, second from right is Kookum.

who regarded him as a “renegade priest” and “pathological liar.” If so, Genin told the truth when he wrote to eastern newspapers reporting maltreatment of the Indian people by military authorities. Mooshum remembered meeting up with survivors of the Chief Joseph fight fleeing to Canada in 1877, and never forgot their miserable condition and suffering. Father Genin described how the Nez Perce refugees staggered into the camp of the buffalo hunters, where they received first aid and food. Nearly all were wounded; one had severed one of his hands and both feet to escape chains by which soldiers had bound him. His probably fatal action was attributed by Genin to the Indian dread of public hanging.

In winter 1887–88 Father Genin reported 151 people died of starvation at Turtle Mountain when rations were withheld by military officials pending the final treaty negotiations. In that terrible winter, Mooshum traveled by dog team to Mountain City to haul what flour he could get.

For his labor he was allowed one ten-pound sack of flour, which had to be rationed out among several families at home. The trader’s wife harshly rebuked her husband for wanting to supply more. Mooshum took a widow and twin babies by dogsled to Red Lake, where she had relatives.

He found a lone old bison bull in a snowbank, which kept them alive. In the spring he made two more trips to Mountain City with four-horse teams, to haul more flour to the hungry people at Turtle Mountain. He later became a trusted employee of the trader LaRivierre, being a hunter and freighter throughout the territory from the Red River 14

area to the Missouri breaks in Montana. In fact he was one of those freighters on the Mouse River trail, and on the trail between the Souris valley and Fort Buford, who hauled supplies through the valley where Minot stands, before there was a Minot.

He was a hunter for the big Hotel Wamduska which, having been built where the railroad did not materialize, became a lodge for wealthy sportsmen and those seeking a quickie divorce available in Dakota Territory. He and other hardy Chippewas carried the US mail along the northern tier and down to Bismarck. One thing Mooshum remembered vividly was when he first saw a train crossing the trestle in Minot in 1886. A mountain of buffalo skulls and bones was waiting for it. As with other such newly sprung towns on the Great Plains, buffalo bones were the first and only cash crop to be shipped from the railhead to carbon and fertilizer factories in St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit.

Penniless folk could get maybe eight dollars a ton from buyers. Frontier teamsters like Mooshum, hauling supplies to remote military posts and settlements, were able to increase their profits by gathering bones on the return trip.

Next year the price was way down but the Minot paper noted, “Quite a number of cowboys and half-breeds are on our streets nowadays. They are gathering bones and drawing them into town.” A sad substitute for the Red River hunt, but the cart trains squeaked and shrieked across the plains again, sustained by the buffalo one last time in the hour of need.

One hundred and three teams, about five hundred Métis, hauled bones into Minot on July 3, 1889—just in time for

|

the Fourth of July celebration. These people actually cleared the land for the plow by removing the bones littered all across the state.

Mooshum recalled the year 1876 particularly. He was a teenager with a party of Indian families who once wintered on the Souris at what was called “the wintering place” near the mouth of the Wintering River. The place was south of where the city of Towner now is. Fish and game were still found there, and it gave the party an early head start over the Pembina and St. Joe people on the long trek into Montana come springtime. By that time buffalo were disappearing in their former range, and it was a long way to the western hunting grounds. With the coming of springlike weather that year, his father sent him on horseback to the Wakopa trading post in Manitoba, Canada, on the near central north edge of Turtle Mountain to purchase a few needed items. He bought some tea, sugar, tobacco, a few other items and a little whiskey for medicine. He left Wakopa early in the morning, skirted the Turtle Mountain range westward to its end, and then southward on the edge of the hills on the west end. When he reached the middle part of the west end, he climbed a high hill and sat there on his horse enjoying the scenery. Off in the distance, he spied three horsemen coming from the southwest, members of the wintering party who had come to meet him. The three horsemen turned out to be his father, his uncle Kahishpah, and an older brother.

Later that year, when the hunting parties of Pembina and St. Joe had joined together in a big encampment on the Milk River in northern Montana, news of the Custer annihilation reached them. Sitting Bull made a one-night camp across the river from the hunters, at which time the ownership of Mooshum’s long underwear was transferred.

My grandfather said of Mooshum, The first thing to say is that he grew up as a man of integrity. He possessed great ambitions to accomplish deeds to make life easier to live under; he was the only member of his family capable to speak the English language good enough to be understood. All his brothers and sisters could barely speak a few words in the English language. Some of the advantages he acquired from speaking good enough English and French was when he had to deal with Traders, Missioners, and being a Commercial Hunter to supply meat to hotels and restaurants when the towns grew to be the size to have them. After the Turtle Mountain reservation was fully established in 1884, he kept wandering around as a hunter, trapper and bone picker until he was thirty-two years of age to help support his parents, and once in a while some friends or relatives. But before

SACRED LANDSCAPES |

He grew up a man of integrity. He possessed great ambitions to accomplish deeds to make life easier to live under. that and years afterward, he made his living as best he could on the plains and in Turtle Mountain. He hauled buffalo bones finally under contract, but the day finally arrived when he had to discard a large pile of bones which he did not yet deliver before bone use was stopped. His bone picking spot covered the area northwest of Minot and northeast of Williston, a little over halfway up to the Canadian boundary.

He remained deeply religious, which was the norm for his people, walking fifteen miles to Mass every day and taking his gun in case he found food out in the bush. As a boy he wanted to become a priest because of the impression made on him by Father Genin. Turtle Mountain had been a land of bounty as a hunting, gathering, and wintering spot, but could not support a large sedentary population all the year around. Fur and game animals were rapidly depleted. The people were destitute but remained patient and prayerful in the face of their increasingly desperate situation. Agent Brenner reported in 1883 that they did not wish to do anything to endanger their friendship with the US government while their affairs were still pending.

Another agent, F.O. Gretchell, wrote to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs describing the reservation and its people: Such is the place and such are nearly 2,000 of the people who are besieged in their mountain fastnesses by the peaceful army of the plow that has settled their erstwhile hunting grounds. Here they are held in worse than bondage while they are waiting, waiting, waiting for a settlement with the Government for the lands so settled by the plowman, waiting for a day that never comes, while their chances in the land that was their own is fading, fading away from them. God pity their patient waiting and appoint that it may not have been in vain.

Mooshum married in 1893 and settled down to become a family man and farmer on the Turtle Mountain reservation. He and Eliza had thirteen children, of whom 15

|

SACRED LANDSCAPES |

eleven survived infancy. He was known as a good farmer, in the small way possible for him to operate under limitations of the land allowed him, said Grandpa Pat: His life perhaps is parallel to that of many of his people, the pattern most of them have lived by. They saw and participated in the development of a vast, new territory. Their very mode of life hastened the day when they could no longer be tolerated in the face of a determined but selfish surge of civilization westward. With their main source of subsistence, which they helped to deplete, gone forever, the plum was ripe for picking. Picked it was, and father’s people were placed in two townships, two townships forgotten to a degree while civilization and progress marched on.

Mom recalled visiting Mooshum with her father, who conversed with him at great length as he sat in his rocking chair smoking his pipe, remembering the old days. She could not understand the Native tongue that was used; Grandpa was careful to use only English with his children. Every once in a while, Mooshum would stop talking and fill his pipe and smoke. Then he would resume the narrative, gesturing with his pipe toward Canada or Montana or Minnesota or whatever place he was telling Grandpa about. Although she longed to know what was being said, children were raised to respect their elders and never interrupt or seek attention. Also, if they were good, they might get a peppermint. Mooshum kept these in a brown paper sack in the little box next to his rocking chair, with his pipe and tobacco. They were the pink chalky type, purchased from bulk at the Big Store in Belcourt. At the conclusion of a visit, Mooshum would call the children over, one at a time by name, and give each a peppermint—just one. l

LISELOTTE ERDRICH has worked in Indian health and education programs since the 1980s and occasionally writes fiction, essays, and children’s books. Sacagawea (Lerner Publishing, 2003) received International Reading Association Children’s Choice and Teachers’ Choice Awards, National Council on the Social Studies Carter G. Woodson Award, and was a National Festival of the Book “50 States 50 Books” pick for North Dakota.

NOTES & SOURCES 1. The biographical sketch of Joseph Gourneau Jr. was in Robert Cory’s column “Tumbling Around These Prairies,” Minot Daily News, 1956, date unknown.

2. The tale of Father Goiffon is told in sources including Terence G. Kardong, OSB, Beyond Red River: The Diocese of Fargo One Hundred Years 1889–1989 (Fargo, ND: Richtman’s Printing, 1988), 30–31.

3. The Pembina canoe brigade roster is given in Elliot Coues, ed., New Light on the Early History of the Greater Northwest: The Manuscript Journals of Alexander Henry, Fur Trader of the North West Company, and of David Thompson, Official Geographer and Explorer of the Same Company, 1799–1814, 2 vols. (New York: F.P. Harper, 1897). The French, English, and Native names of the individual Ojibway are listed. Various observations on the Pembina natives and furbiz happenings are also found in Harold Hickerson, “Journal of Charles Jean-Baptiste Chaboillez, 1797–1798,” Ethnohistory 6, nos. 3 and 4 (1959).

4. Pat Gourneau papers, personal collection. These papers include oft-undated correspondence and writings on tribal history, politics, culture, linguistics, storytelling, family lore, and various other topics, as well as a series of tribal chairman newsletter columns for the Turtle Mountain Agency, commenting on current and historical events. The italicized passages are all from Pat Gourneau, and distinguished in text as a familiar voice still guiding this writer.

5. Patrick “Au nish e naubay” Gourneau, History of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, 6th ed. (Rolla, ND: Star Printing, 1974), 11.

6. Harold Hickerson, “Genesis of a Trading Post Band: The Pembina Chippewa,” Ethnohistory 3, no. 4 (Fall 1956): 299.

7. The story of Little Thunder, who survived a horrific shredding by three grizzly bears in present-day North Dakota, is told by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Personal memoirs of a residence of thirty years with the Indian tribes on the American frontiers: with brief notices of passing events, facts, and opinions, A.D. 1812 to A.D. 1842 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co, 1851).

8. Turtle Mountain agency quotes are in Verne Dusenberry, “Waiting for a Day That Never Comes: The Dispossessed Métis of Montana,” in The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America, ed. Jacqueline Peterson and Jennifer S.H. Brown (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 119–36.

9. Joseph Kinsey Howard, Strange Empire: A Narrative of the Northwest (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1952) includes the observations of Father Genin at the scene of the Chief Joseph tragedy.

16

“Perhaps the immutable error of parenthood is that we give our children what we wanted, whether they want it or not. We heal our wounds with the love we wish we’d received, but are often blind to the wounds we inflict.”

– Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

ideas festival

THE PURSUIT OF HEALTH & HAPPINESS Featuring Andrew Solomon October 13, 2018 Bismarck, North Dakota gamechangernd.com

|

18

SACRED LANDSCAPES |

|

SACRED LANDSCAPES |

MY SOUL IN THE SACRED LANDSCAPE OF CREATION A Conversation between Brian Palecek and Reverend John Floberg

BRIAN PALECEK: Can you give us the basic story of coming to North Dakota.

REVEREND JOHN FLOBERG: I was living in Fargo-Moorhead, but my work in youth ministry would bring me out to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, North Dakota, places I had not grown up in. It involved getting to know people in Cannonball, in Fort Yates.

I grew up in Minnesota, in a town called Hawley. Interestingly enough, when they published a history of Hawley, in its centennial year of 1972, it has the picture of General Custer coming through with his troops. When I was eighteen, I left home, I joined the Coast Guard, so I was out in western New York for the next four years serving on Lake Ontario. Water was always a big part of my life growing up in Minnesota in the lakes, or on Lake Ontario and Niagara River.

19

|

SACRED LANDSCAPES |

We all have to wrestle with the goodness of God, the justice of God, and the love of God.

BP: When you arrived here to the western part of North Dakota, how did you see this place? The geography of it, the history of it, the culture of it?

JF: Most people who come out here and are visiting us for a while, their first comment is about how beautiful it is.

How expansive the horizon line is, and how beautiful the prairie grasses are, but I realized that they were coming for a visit. I’m a Minnesota guy coming to change his life, and I look at the grass and wonder, Where are the trees? I look at the vast expanse of prairie and wonder, Where are the lakes?

I noticed the first three falls I was here, when I first came here in ’91, that I am missing the changing colors of the trees, and I realized that by the third year, that the trees go from green to yellow to dunn. There’s no reds, oranges, no vibrancy. And then I found that in the spring of the year and into June, I was finding color in places I was not expecting. The little cactuses. They would have pastel colors. Those little cactuses had to replace all of the vibrant colors of hardwood trees. I really missed that.

BP: When you first came here, were you sent here or did you choose to come here?

JF: In the Episcopal Church it’s both. I left Fargo, back in ’88, to go to seminary. My bishop wanted me to go to seminary in Chicago. I went to visit there, and I found out it took forty-five minutes to drive there into the seminary from the highway, and it was constant city blocks one after the other. I came back to meet with him and told him I couldn’t go there, that it was claustrophobic.

I found a seminary in Rochester, New York, that was on a hill. And it looked over this great expanse of land. I could see trees and colors in the fall, so I chose to go to seminary there. But when a person is coming out of seminary, if the bishop has a place that he can place them, that first call really belongs to the bishop. After that, a person can move within three years. And go find their own congregation based on an open call system.

For me, a year before I was to graduate from seminary, the bishop and I were sitting in his car, and he said to me, 20

“Next summer I want you to take the call at Standing Rock.” Because I had been working for the diocese before I went to seminary, I had a good sense of where I was being sent and the people I was being asked to serve. And so, that sense of call that clergy sometimes wrestle with wasn’t much wrestling for me. I accepted that placement, that call, pretty quickly. What was different here was that the bishop wanted me to stay a minimum of five to eight years.

That’s a long time for your first call. As it’s turned out, I spent twenty-five years instead.

BP: When you came, where did you live?

JF: I lived right there on the church property for fourteen years. It was only after we elected another bishop, his management of the diocese shifted things. In addition to Standing Rock, I was asked to work with our Native church in Dunseith, Fort Totten, White Shield, and our Sudanese church in Moorhead, Minnesota, and support them in their leadership, in their congregations.

I couldn’t do that from the South Dakota border.

Going to Dunseith means that I’d be overnight in a motel. But if I’m living in Bismarck, part of my work for Standing Rock would be right there by going to the hospitals and doing visitations. My work at Standing Rock hasn’t changed in the miles that I drive, whether on or off Standing Rock.

BP: The congregations you serve tend to be minority congregations. How did that impact the way you see yourself here? What does it mean to be part of a sacred landscape?

JF: It actually came about by working with the Sudanese, who were completely out of their landscape.

What is it to be a people who have gone through displacement? If you’re still on your land, or if you are refugees on this land, Native people have been displaced— their lifestyle, their culture. And so have the Sudanese. So when I work with the Sudanese population, I’d bring into that conversation some things about how they adapt, and what they do with their culture as they’re adapting.

|

With the first generation of folks, there’s a strong emphasis about assimilating. There was a strong emphasis on assimilating the people on Standing Rock at around 1900. But then you come two or three generations down the line, and those generations want to regain what was lost in this new place, in this new way. So I encouraged the Sudanese not to lose their language, and not to be so concerned with learning English that the children not learn their parents’ language. Language gets tied too much to identity, and it’s tied to how you describe things, and how you describe and interact with the environment around you.

So when the Lakota people talk about the months, they have a descriptive way.

This is the month when the trees crack.

This is the way of passing on identity through language that connects you to the area that you’re from.

BP: You raise this idea of someone who is dispossessed or a refugee, or someone who has left home or community, like the Lakota people who are living at home, but are somehow undermined. Is there some theological or scriptural way that you might interpret those experiences?

JF: Some of the readings are uncomfortable. In my first go-around with the Old Testament, there are the Hebrew people who are dispossessing the people who have been living there. How do you make that preach? The answer is to talk about context, but it isn’t to give God or God’s people a pass. Because whether things happen personally or as a people, we all have to wrestle with the goodness of God, the justice of God, and the love of God. We wrestle with these things in the context of our lives.

People wonder how it is that they can go through difficult times and at the same time believe in a loving God. And people go through hard and difficult times that are caused by other people and wonder where is the justice of God.

BP: As I get to know you, Father John, you seem to have a real connection to your ethnic or indigenous roots in the Scandinavian world.

JF: Norway exclusively.

BP: As Americans, we think about these identity questions. I refer to myself as a European-American of Bohemian and Czech ancestry. I am an American. I take it seriously. It’s part of my life, and I am part of that world. I am also connected to that European tradition of people who came to America looking for a land of opportunity. I’m deeply rooted in the Czech Republic and Bohemia. Almost all of the people in my community in Kansas spoke Czech; we ate Czech foods, we thought about the Czech world. One of my sons now lives in Prague with his wife and daughter. This is a really important part of my life. Can you describe this Norwegian world, and how that impacts the way you see your life here?

JF: I can only speak for myself. Last year I was on sabbatical, and my family and I traveled to Norway for three weeks.

When we got into Norway, and when we got to my family’s farm, when I stood on those stone slab steps, and I looked out over the Numedal Valley, where my great-grandfather stood as a young man, my soul was at home. It was an experience I had anticipated but had never felt. I am a veteran. I’m a citizen of the United States.

I grew up knowing that I was Norwegian.

What is primary in my identity, is Norwegians who lived in Minnesota.

BP: Bring that “Norwegian-ness” to your Standing Rock experience. These are Indigenous people, and there you are now doing your work as a priest of the Episcopal Church.

JF: I had to figure out, am I here as a pastor, or am I here as a missionary? I scuttled the idea of being a missionary quite early. I saw other clergy come and

SACRED LANDSCAPES |

go. Non-Native people primarily, and they weren’t trying to be the pastor for their community. They were trying to build a congregation for themselves. There’s a fine line here. As an Episcopalian coming in here, as a person rooted in the Anglican tradition, our clergy, our focus, is going to be on the congregation. We see things geographically. All people within that geography are in the parish. People might be Roman Catholic. They might be United Church of Christ. They might be Baptist.

They might be Mormon. They might be traditional. But they’re all in the territory of which I am responsible. This is the touchstone with an Indigenous way of thinking, that it’s territory to which you relate, then it’s people within that territory who are your closest relatives, and you have responsibility for their welfare. You have a responsibility to know what their hopes and their dreams are and to relate to them, whether they are members of your congregation or not. This isn’t saying that I’m trying to take over the role of another tradition and steal their members. It’s that the whole of the Standing Rock Nation is what I’m concerned about, and our members within it.

BP: There is the biblical phrase that one should go out into the world and preach the Gospel to every creature. So there’s the sense that you’re supposed to go out and go places, at the same time in this pastoral world you’re here in this Missouri River Valley region. And there is a geography to it that you are caring for, and it’s a theological and spiritual way of interpreting that world.

JF: It’s also a matter of assisting the Christian Church that is particular there.

To engage the world with the faith that they have been developing. That this sense of catholicity, that the Christian faith has brought here, but then the Christian faith has become incarnate here. That what it means to be a Christian on Standing Rock, means to go back out again, and engage the whole of the Church, and the whole 21

|

SACRED LANDSCAPES |

of the world that still needs to hear the Gospel. But it should look and feel that it has integrity where it is.

I use the stave churches as an example. The stave church building was constructed primarily in Norway, but some other places as well. It is a building that when you see its outward form, you can see that it was inspired by the landscape around it, the trees. And so it has cascading roof lines. Some of them have changed over the years as they’ve had to remodel, but there’s this cascading roof line effect that looks like the pine trees.

As the Roman Catholic Church spread north, it came into contention with Celtic Christians. The Roman Christians wanted Scandinavians to build with stone. The Norwegian Christians know wood, and have built ships that have gone lots of places, and so used that technology to build their churches. So they created buildings that were at home with the people.

If you go into a stave church, any church in Norway, and you go in blindfolded, and you have no idea in the world where you are, when that blindfold is taken off, you will see that you’re in Norway, and you will see that you’re in a Christian building. Until recently, Native Americans have not looked like they belonged in the place that they are. The building, the design, was not from among the people, and not of the land. When people walk into St. James in Cannonball, and they are Native, there’s a sense that they’ve come home. Our ceiling is like a tipi, and it even has a canvas wrapped around it on the inside and has twelve timbers like the twelve lodge poles.

The church in Norway is a church of the landscape and of the people.

We’re starting to become that here. When Dakota Goodhouse made a winter count of the Gospel of Luke, and gave it to St. Luke’s Episcopal Church [in Fort Yates, ND], to my knowledge, it’s the first time that a Gospel has been translated into Lakota in a Lakota way. Not with words, but with pictographs. And the person who knows the story can point to the pictograph and tell the story in a way that is consistent with an oral tradition.

BP: Let’s talk about November 3, 2016. Can you describe what happened that day, and could you tell about the discussion of the Doctrine of Discovery?

JF: November the 3rd is connected to October the 27th, and September the 3rd. October 27th and September 3rd were two violent days in this conflict [the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Cannonball and Missouri Rivers confluence]. On October 27th, law enforcement came in and upended the 1851 Camp that was put onto the Cannonball Ranch.

September the 3rd was the day when dogs came in and attacked people while they were trying to protect land that a noted historian of Standing Rock had identified grave sites on and were being bulldozed. We had witnessed an escalation in their tactics in security and escalation of tactics with law enforcement. And we [the clergy] needed to disrupt that. We needed to de-escalate the tension and put the focus and energy back into being prayerful, peaceful, and nonviolent, and to follow the direction of the tribal council and its chairman, and elders, to be lawful.

22

|

I met with Chairman Archambault II; he said that he should have been the only one to be arrested. The count is over seven hundred. So I put out a call for clergy. I was hoping for a hundred.

Anything less than a hundred wouldn’t bring much attention about this. It wouldn’t be a disruptor. A hundred meant that I could take of logistics, but in a short time, we hit 524. We claim that number, because that’s the number of years since the Doctrine of Discovery was written.

BP: Explain the Doctrine of Discovery.

JF: A year after Christopher Columbus “discovered” the New World, the Pope wrote the Doctrine of Discovery giving permission to the Christian states of Europe to discover undiscovered lands, and to dispossess their people if they were found to not be Christian. If they were found to not be Christian, to enslave them. The next step was to convert them. It’s not just simply a church’s doctrine; the United States Supreme Court has used this to justify taking of land. The whole of the western expansion of the United States is based on the Doctrine of Discovery, and it became Manifest Destiny.

BP: What happened then on November 3rd?

JF: We had twenty-five faith traditions that came, making up that 524 people. Of the twenty-five faith traditions, eight of them are Christian.

These eight traditions, in their churchwide gathering body, voted to repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery on their own.

The ELCA [Evangelical Lutheran Church in America], the United Methodist, the United Church of Christ, and others were there. The Episcopal Church too, the Episcopal Church was the first of these denominations to repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery in 2009.

I was at that convention. People have been asking, “What’s next with this repudiation? What does this mean?” I called forward those denominations to have a representative who would read the World Council of Church’s repudiation.

Because most of us then would belong in the World Council of Churches. That would be an umbrella all of us could stand under and read this together. I wouldn’t be forcing the Methodists to read the Episcopal version of this. It would be one that we’d all come to together.

We gathered at the sacred fire at the camp in order to read that to the Indigenous people in that camp, of which there were over 350 flags flying. Eight different tribal groups, elders listened to the reading. After the reading, we handed them a copy of the Doctrine of Discovery as it is written in Latin. We said, “You may do with this as you wish.” And their wish was to burn it.

Someone called out, “Now are you going to give us back our land?”

In this case, we don’t have the authority to return land. We don’t have the authority to undo what’s been done.

But we have the responsibility to work for justice going forward and to assist Native people with the healing of their nations as they see fit.

BP: How would you describe your best vision for the future? For the sacred landscape, and the people that are part of it?

JF: On this day, the best word for vision to describe is respect. To respect the people of the land who are Indigenous. To speak for themselves, to not only say that you’ve listened, but the way in which the future unfolds, their approval is given in order for it to unfold that way. That it’s not simply consultation. It’s more than going to a council chamber and hearing them say “no,” and that is sufficient for having done our duty.

The Indigenous have regained their voice about the care of creation. It was

SACRED LANDSCAPES |

Pocahontas who went to London and couldn’t fathom how people could live in such filth. I grew up with a commercial of a sad-eyed Native man who canoed down a pristine river then into polluted waters, and a tear came into his eye. The image of a sad Native person is not the image of this day. Their image is one of resilience exercising their responsibility­—not power—to the land and the water, and to the seven generations, something that the dominant culture doesn’t understand.

I hear the argument that Native people should “get over the wrongs of the past.” I ask them if they remember who their great-grandfather is. Most people know who their great-grandfather is. That’s as far into the past as we’re going to talk about injustice. Is your understanding of human life and responsibility so short that it only matters what we’re doing right now? When a Native person is talking about seven generations, they may be talking about the past, the future, or now in the middle.

They are linking their great-grandparents to their great-grandchildren, and they stand in a place of responsibility in this place to link them.

On December 4, 2016, the chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe says that the way ahead is through forgiveness and reconciliation. That maybe we don’t have answers that are readily satisfactory to our souls about why the things are the way they are, but the future can be different from the way that things have been in the past. That’s reconciliation, but it’s through forgiveness. l

BRIAN PALECEK was born and raised in a Czech community in Kansas and came to North Dakota in 1967. He has taught English and humanities at United Tribes Technical College since 1987. Palecek loves going out to the community and doing programs for the curious, general public.

REVEREND JOHN FLOBERG is supervising Episcopal priest on the Standing Rock Reservation.

23

|

SACRED LANDSCAPES |

SUMMER NIGHT-DAKOTA

JANELLE MASTERS is a North Dakota native and a lifelong poet, having come upon the poetry of William Wordsworth at age ten in an attic. Since then, she has stored the beauty and anguish of the world in her inward eye and writes from that source.

24

|

SACRED LANDSCAPES |

And one night when I Was in high school I stepped outside And I looked up To see the sky filled up: With caverns and chasms of deep, dappled light Burgundy, gray, and silver leapt in the night Jade, sage, gold, in the west dark silken red Maroon, lavender, in the east black velvet like jet

We gazed into the skies We glimpsed paradise

Purple cliffs trimmed in candle light Green rays slicing the night

Heaven echoed in the breeze And it soughed through the trees

The northern lights, the aurora borealis But really so much more than that is

Was Joan of Arc again burning Was Jesus returning

This night they were prisms of thunder

We were overcome with the glory Of the universe over pouring

My soul saturated with wonder My mind and my body split asunder And that night a miracle occurred The earth became more than just dirt My mother in the house alone and crippled And had been so since I was just little That night I was imbued with power And I knew this, this was the hour I ran inside and swooped up my mother And carried her over the threshold like a lover

Then my mother strong as death Said with her silent breath She uttered these words The most powerful I’ve heard: Take me inside my dear take me inside It’s too much pain for me outside It’s not my body, not my bones Just take me back in so I can be alone For I am in such pain—it’s not the night air It’s the beauty...that I can’t bear.

And yea I have reached my eighth decade And the memories of the words don’t fade For all of my days I’ve searched for a way To get that deep inside And to feel that much alive

l

25

|

SACRED LANDSCAPES |

THE TIME HAS COME TO DO OUR PART

by Lillian Crook and Jim Fuglie

26

|

SACRED LANDSCAPES |

Under the torture Of 47 degrees below The air of McKenzie County Is pure As the soul Of Christ.

T

he North Dakota poet Paul Southworth Bliss stopped his car beside

the Little Missouri River on a cold January day in 1935 and wrote those words as the first verse of a poem called “Blue Heaven.”

It was considerably warmer on December 23, 2016, when we stopped our car beside the river, not far from where Bliss wrote that marvelous verse, and settled on a campsite for our annual winter campout in the North Dakota Badlands. There are plenty of places to sleep beside the Little Missouri River—if you don’t mind sleeping on the ground. The Little Missouri is 560 miles long, from its start near Devils Tower in Wyoming (just west of the Missouri Buttes) to where it flows—well, most of the year, it just trickles—into Lake Sakakawea in North Dakota.

We’ve driven the length of the river and hiked a good bit of it, partly out of fascination with the fact that the river rises in Crook County, Wyoming, and passes through the village of Camp Crook, South Dakota, both named for General George Crook of the famed American Indian Wars. The general may or may not be a distant relative of Lillian’s—we’re still seeking that out.

In all that distance, there are just a handful of places with mattresses to rent for an overnight stay. But to really get to know the Little Missouri River valley and the magnificent Badlands it has carved over millions of years, you have to float it in a canoe or a kayak, or roll up your pant legs and hike it. And then, at the end of a long day, you need to find a place to lay your head.

We’ve spent a lot of nights sleeping within spitting distance of the Little Missouri River. Some nights (and

some months) were better than others. We’ve slept there by ourselves, and together, and with hiking or canoeing friends. We’ve slept there with kids, with dogs, with a herd of bison trampling through our campsite, with coyotes howling, with a full moon and a new moon.

We’ve slept on bare ground with nothing above us but stars, and we’ve slept in a tent, in a camper, on top of our sleeping bag on hot summer nights, and buried under layers of blankets on cold winter nights. We’ve slept there in howling winds, and on nights when just the slightest breeze rustled the cottonwood leaves above us. We’ve slept there sober and not so sober, with aching legs exhausted from bushwhacking through the Badlands all day, and with arms so tired from paddling into the wind we can hardly raise ourselves in the middle of the night to answer nature’s call. We’ve slept on the west bank, the east bank, and on islands in the middle of the river.

And every one of those nights was better than any night sleeping indoors.

Most of the river valley is still the wild, wild West; primitive, with the only signs of civilization being second, third, and fourth generation ranches and rough gravel crossings their owners use during low water to make hay in summer and feed it to their cows in winter.

On that December night in 2016, we slept about twenty-five feet from the frozen Little Missouri River snuggled under layers of down sleeping bags, with warnings of the “blizzard of the year approaching” ringing in our ears. Turns out it was one of the best nights of our lives.

We were on the tail end of a three-day, pre-Christmas Badlands getaway, something we try to do every year

27

|

SACRED LANDSCAPES |

but don’t always achieve. The day before, we had explored the “Grand Canyon of the Little Missouri River” in the North Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, where the ranger told us, when we stopped at the visitor center, we were Visitors Number 6 and 7 to the park that day. Except for the small herd of bison that created a temporary traffic jam on the park’s scenic drive (luckily for us, we were able to make it all the way to the Oxbow Overlook, above the deepest canyon on the river), we pretty much had that stretch of the Badlands to ourselves.

After watching the sun set over the snow-covered river valley, we headed for, appropriately, the Roosevelt Inn in Watford City, about fifteen miles north of the river, for the night.

The Inn’s owners have turned the place into more than just a comfortable motel—it is a great Theodore Roosevelt museum unto itself, with hundreds of photos, documents, and artifacts lining the walls. We spent more than an hour looking at the display before supper at Outlaws’ Bar and Grill in downtown Watford City, a great small-town restaurant whose menu includes a fifty-four-ounce “long-bone ribeye steak” (“allow 45 minutes for cooking,” the menu says).

We awoke early the next morning and wandered back roads to Theodore Roosevelt’s Elkhorn Ranch, now a small island unit of a national park in a vast sea of grasslands, some thirty miles south of Watford City. We spent the daylight hours setting up camp, hiking, reading, gathering firewood, snacking, taking pictures, and just absorbing the Badlands and letting them absorb us, the sky as blue as blue can get, the ground covered with a blindingly white blanket of snow, about six inches deep, decorated by meandering tracks of river-bottom deer and the uneven pattern of jackrabbit tracks heading toward the tasty bark of creekside willows.

In all the hours we were there, about the only sounds we heard were a rancher feeding cattle with his loader late in the afternoon, the crunch of snow and ice underfoot, a few blackcapped chickadees, and a lone Townsend’s solitaire. Winter birds were scarce, perhaps already hunkering down as the barometer dropped in advance of the storm.

We had hoped to see a shrike, a bird Lillian, the birding expert, pointed out on our first winter visit there together almost fifteen years ago. The shrike that flew by us that day, Lillian explained, was probably looking for a field mouse that it would impale on a barbed-wire fence or a sharp twig in one of the ancient junipers as a sort of “cache,” to which it could return again and again for small bits of flesh to sustain it on cold winter nights.

No such luck on this trip. We had to settle for spotting some crows (a distant shrike relative), a few flocks of sharptails, and two golden eagles floating high above us on thermals, looking for their own food source, perhaps one of those jackrabbits leaving tracks in the snow.

After setting up camp on the frozen Little Missouri riverbank, we enjoyed a short sliding hike on the snow-covered river before parting company—Jim to gather firewood, and Lillian to clear her mind and sink deep into the soul-refreshing place she’s called the “center of her universe” since her childhood days on the family ranch on Deep Creek, a Little Missouri tributary a hundred or so miles south of our campsite. She had her ski poles and a fierce determination to trust her instincts in a landscape she knows well. She reconnoitered a wellknown river crossing where we could make our exit the next morning, all the while “reading the secret language of snow” (as described in the children’s book by our friend Terry Tempest Williams) and staying on the move to keep warm on a cold and short North Dakota winter solstice day.

Firewood gathered (not enough, as it turned out later, leading to an early bedtime as the fire ebbed), Jim sat down with a small glass of wine and his book of choice for the trip, Bernd Heinrich’s Ravens in Winter. The temperature hovered just below freezing with no wind, making it wonderfully comfortable for an hour of reading as the sun sank slowly toward the 28

There are many threats to our Badlands, and on Christmas Eve Day 2016 the sky just north of Theodore Roosevelt National Park was blackened by a huge plume of thick, dark smoke, coming from a site where nearly 200,000 gallons of crude oil had been spilled.

|

Badlands skyline, and lengthening shadows danced on the snowdusted buttes across the river.

Heinrich’s book is a delight, even though you’ll seldom see one of his ravens in western North Dakota—their first cousins, the crows, will have to do—and any Dakotan with Scandinavian roots will love how he reminds us Norsemen in his introduction that, according to Nordic legend, Odin, the lord of the gods, kept a pair of ravens perched on his shoulders. “They were Hugin (Thought) and Munin (Memory),” Heinrich wrote, “and he sent them out at dawn to reconnoiter the ends of the earth. At night they returned and whispered into his ear the secrets they had learned . . . Odin, with his universal knowledge, then advised the other Norse gods.”

Just as the sun was about to slip below the Badlands horizon, Lillian returned with her own secrets, including a tale of a chance encounter with the rancher and his hired hands out feeding cows, who must have wondered what on God’s green (now white) earth would a woman be doing out walking alone in the Badlands in the middle of no damn place, in the dead of winter. To make sure she was okay, the rancher stopped by our campsite on his four-wheeler just before dark, a nice, friendly North Dakota gesture.

Supper was some second-time-around thick soup, enough when reheated on our Coleman stove for two bowls each, with breadsticks for dipping, and wine for washing it down. There was no finer meal served nor appreciated anywhere in North Dakota that night.

The bed Lillian had made for us consisted of four selfinflating air mattresses, two atop two more, covered by a heavy cloth summer sleeping bag for a bottom bedsheet, and for our covers, two winter sleeping bags providing about six inches of down cover against the cold of the night, which turned out to be only in the low teens.

We slept like babies, but at 5 a.m., Lillian decided she simply could not lie there any longer, wanting to get up and see what the day in the Badlands—indeed, Christmas Eve Day—was to bring us. It first brought us hot coffee, which should have cleared both our heads and the sky above us, but it turned out a heavy ice-fog—precursor to the coming storm—had moved into the valley of the Little Missouri River, and it followed us all the way to town, where we had a hot breakfast.

We hesitate to end the story of this great trip on a sour note, but we’d be remiss if we left you thinking all was rosy in the Badlands that day. There are many threats to our Badlands, and on Christmas Eve Day 2016 the sky just north of Theodore Roosevelt National Park was blackened by a huge plume of thick, dark smoke, coming from the site where the Belle Fourche Pipeline Company had recently spilled nearly 200,000 gallons

SACRED LANDSCAPES |

of crude oil into Ash Coulee Creek, a tributary of the Little Missouri. We drove toward it and found the smoke was from the cleanup of the spill—they had set the land and the creek afire, as their way of removing the oil that had not already sunk into the ground or been trapped beneath the ice.

It was an ignominious end to what had been an otherwise marvelous pre-Christmas adventure, and as we sat atop the hill above burning Ash Coulee Creek, watching the most unlikely, almost unearthly, of all possible scenes spread out before us, we were reminded of the words of the great Roosevelt himself, who delivered these words at the 1908 Governors’ Conference on the Conservation of Natural Resources: We have become great because of the lavish use of our resources, and we have just reason to be proud of our growth. But the time has come to inquire seriously what will happen when our forests are gone, when the coal, the iron, the oil, and the gas are exhausted, when the soils have still further impoverished and washed into the streams, polluting the rivers, denuding the fields and obstructing navigation.

What would Roosevelt think, we wondered, if he were here to witness this scene? What would he think of us, as Americans, for letting it come to this? We have not done as he instructed.

It was evident, watching the black smoke of this massive environmental blunder rise before us, that we had not “inquired seriously.”

And it’s not just the Belle Fourche Pipeline Company’s spill into the Little Missouri’s tributary. It’s a gravel mine across the river from Roosevelt’s Elkhorn Ranch. It’s the proposed bridge bringing clouds of dust from a thousand trucks a day, just downstream and within earshot of that ranch. It’s the proposed oil refinery just a couple miles from the boundary of the national park dedicated to him because of his conservation efforts.

In the glow of a long-ago sunset, on the porch of that Elkhorn Ranch cabin on the Little Missouri River’s bank, the young man who would one day become our greatest conservation president wrote in his notebook, “We have fallen heirs to the most glorious heritage a people ever received, and each one must do his part if we wish to show that the nation is worthy of its good fortune.”

Well, we’ve got some work to do, each of us, to do our part, to show that we are indeed worthy of our good fortune. Maybe, if we start right now, it’s not too late. l JIM FUGLIE and LILLIAN CROOK both grew up in southwest North Dakota. Fuglie is a former North Dakota Tourism Division director and Crook a retired academic librarian at Dickinson State University. They are retired and live in Bismarck. More about their work is available at redoakhouse.com.

29

BEING HUMAN IS A GIVEN. KEEPING OUR HUMANITY IS A CHOICE.

Have you ever imagined a world without the guidance of history, the wisdom of our greatest literature, the understanding of different religions, the ability to communicate in other languages, the engagement of citizens in the democratic process, or the ethical foundations of our legal system? These pursuits form the humanities, and without them we would not know who we are or what we stand for.

Donate and help Humanities North Dakota create a more thoughtful and informed world.

RECENT DONORS Purpose: $500-$999 The Tap Room Laughing Sun Brewing Co., LLC John S. Heinen Jack & Kristen Paris Lifelong Learning: $100-$499 Bethany Andreasen Elizabeth Birmingham John R. Boekelheide Brad & Georgia Brakke Char Brekke Jim & Loah Clement Marilyn Foss Kara Geiger Ron & Joyce Gerhardt Melissa Gjellstad Kenneth J. Glass Stewart W. Herman Thomas & Katie Hutchens Eric L. Johnson Corby & Sherry Kemmer Nancy Koupal Thomas & Michelle Matchie John & Rebecca Petrik Sonja Prestangen Nita Ritzke Richard M. Rothaus Ken Schmierer Michael Sturdevant Iris Swedlund Ryan & Nicole Taylor Curiosity: $99 and below Alice J. Anderson Brian Bartz Erika Bolstad Laura Buchmann Pamela K. Burkhardt

30

William R. Caraher Daniel Christ Ann Crews Melton Lillian Crook Dora Diepolder Fintan L. Dooley Elizabeth Sund Ron & Barbara Engle Henry & Genevieve Fleck Brenna & Tom Gerhardt Crystal Gilson Marijean Gissel Christine & Daniel Gubbels Marie D. Hoff Erin Huntimer Christie Iverson Sharlene Klegstad Arvid & Darlene Knutson Paul H. Koetz Bonnie Krause Suzanne Lebsock Elton & Dolores Leppke Jay B & Carol Lindquist Madeline Luke Shirley R. Meschke Gerald & Jean Newborg Jane E. Nissen Liv Paulson Leslie W. Peltier Shirley Quick Karen Ryberg John Sakariassen Kayla A. Schmidt Mike & Kathy Schneider Arne & Gayle Selbyg Elaine Speare Three Rivers Arts Council Eileen Walsh Robert & Laurel Weigelt Alex & Emily Yamamoto

BECOME A MEMBER Since 1973, Humanities North Dakota has supported schools, libraries, museums, churches, colleges and universities, and other nonprofits across North Dakota that advance lifelong learning. Last year we funded programs serving over 40,000 people in 38 communities. We play a vital role in ensuring humanities programming reaches all North Dakotans, expanding and transforming lives. But there is more to be done, more people to reach. To meet a growing demand for programming across North Dakota, we need your help. ​ Humanities North Dakota is not a state agency, and we do not receive state funding. Our programming relies on the generosity of our members.

Join our community of lifelong learners. Become a member of Humanities North Dakota today! Our giving levels reflect our core values.

Wisdom $25,000 and above

Truth $10,000-$24,999 Meaning $5,000-$9,999

History $2,500-$4,999 ​ Ideas $1,000-$2,499

Purpose $500-$999

Lifelong Learning $100-$499

Curiosity $99 and below

ENDOWMENT FUND In addition to our general fund, Humanities North Dakota has established an endowment fund specifically for our organization at the North Dakota Community Foundation (NDCF) to provide long-term support for our programs and mission. An endowment fund is a permanent fund. The principle in the fund is never spent. Instead, the interest earned on the fund is available every year to provide resources for our projects and programs.

There are several ways to make a permanent gift to our organization’s endowment fund: HELP TODAY Write a check Transfer stock and avoid capital gains tax on your appreciated asset.

Give real estate Donate equipment Donate agricultural produce Take advantage of the IRA Charitable Rollover HELP TOMORROW Establish a Charitable Gift Annuity through NDCF to support our endowment fund Leave a gift in your will Make our endowment fund the beneficiary of your life insurance policy or retirement account

800-338-6543 info@humanitiesnd.org humanitiesnd.org

31

|

SACRED LANDSCAPES |

ON HALLOWED GROUND

by Darren Thompson

32

|

I

n the latter part of 2016, the world watched oil pipeline drama unfold near the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation in North Dakota. With so much public

exposure, it invited the general public who—for the most part— has little or no knowledge of America’s First Peoples, their treaties with the federal government, their culture, or their history to participate in a conversation that has been long overdue. And while the long-fought battle continued well into 2017, it no doubt opened the eyes and ears of many to the rights that tribes retain.

SACRED LANDSCAPES |

Social media was filled with hashtags voicing water is life (#mniwiconi, #waterislife), honor our mother (#honorourmother), and oppose the building of an underwater crude oil pipeline (#nodapl). Activists documented police brutality, cited false reporting of the press, and voiced that they were protectors (not protestors). Police went to the press with claims citing violence, illegal activity, mistreatment by outside agitators, and—even—abandonment by the US federal government. It was a daily war by both sides to tell the narrative to a seemingly helpless public.

33

|

SACRED LANDSCAPES |

At its core, the conflict near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation is about a sacred landscape. Of course, it is also about treaties, law, the environment, and the need to be independent of fossil fuels, but that is another conversation, and I will leave that to lawyers, courtrooms, judges, environmentalists, and energy development experts.

What is a sacred landscape? No doubt, there is no one answer, and it is as complex as defining culture, but all cultures have an approach to defining sacred. Nonetheless, I will attempt to address the question in the best way I know how and will cite examples that compare general public knowledge in American culture to examples significant to the Indigenous peoples of America.

Most people associate the word “sacred” with religion. In most cases, it applies to something that is unseen or untouchable, and something that has happened long ago. The religious view of the sacred is a perspective on a culture’s collection of thoughts and practices that function as a basis for the community’s social structure. In the United States, this would apply to the Declaration of Independence and the place it was signed, or the US Constitution and the place it was signed. For many Native people, this includes a “motherland” or a location where their people emerged or have existed for generations.

When tribes were approached to sign treaties with the federal government in the 1800s, it was important to leaders that the people could continue a way of life that their forefathers had done since time immemorial.

A significant, if not most important, way of life included prayer, which in many Native cultures includes all of creation. Yes, that includes you and everything your eyes can see in the natural world. Many tribes retained rights off their reservation lands, which can include traditional hunting or harvesting grounds and places of significance.

These places of significance are memories of a people that have thrived among Mother Earth.

When exploring language or linguistics, there are stark differences toward land or what naturally exists in all cultures and languages. I’m an enrolled member of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Ojibwe from Wisconsin, and I realize my homeland is far from North Dakota, but not so much my people. The Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa is the lone band of Ojibwe in the Dakotas. The Ojibwe people represent one of the largest tribes in North America and have one of the world’s most difficult languages to learn. The Ojibwe language describes much of what the eye sees in natural settings as animate—having a spirit. In other words, much of what one sees, hears, feels, or experiences is alive and has a purpose entirely on its own from an Ojibwe perspective. In the Ojibwe language there is no such thing as an atheist or a “non-believer” as everything is related to spirit, and furthermore, it is all related to a greater spirit—Great Spirit. There is no difference between natural and supernatural, seen and unseen, or physical and metaphysical. In other words, everything is related and part of the greater force that exists in creation. In a real sense, everything in creation is sacred.

I’m a small business owner in Rapid City, South Dakota. I’m a musician. Ni pipigwe. I’m a flute player. I perform and demonstrate wind instruments indigenous to North America and share their stories and songs to hundreds of thousands of tourists from all walks of life at the world’s largest monument in progress—the Crazy Horse Memorial in the Black Hills of South Dakota. When I’m not performing, I contribute to several American Indian publications that include powwows.com, Native News Online, Native Peoples Magazine, News from Indian Country, Indian Country Today. I’m also the media coordinator for the Black Hills Unity Concert. The goal in all of these efforts is to contribute and share a narrative that is representative of American Indian people and their success, as well as some of their challenges. It is a neverending task, but I take it with great pride and honor to share some of what I know about the knowledge, culture, and history of the Ojibwe people.

My travels to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation began before the heightened clashes with law enforcement during the later summer months of 2016. My first visit was while hosting a British author hoping to document his travels as a European to several Indian reservations in the Dakotas. On my journey, I met a number of individuals who worked for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe including LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, the tribe’s Clean Water Act 34

|

coordinator. During a scheduled meeting, LaDonna spoke to our British guest about treaties, laws, environmental impact statements, historical trauma, and oil pipelines. It was during that meeting that I discovered LaDonna hosted a small encampment on her private land anticipating the building of an underground oil pipeline near the reservation boundaries.

Since Europeans have arrived in North America, their interest in the land has been economic. To this day, we see that economic interests far exceed interests of most things and places considered sacred. The freedom of religion clauses in the US Constitution do not provide much protection for sacred places. This country’s forefathers came from Christian nations and held their concept of sacred land where their religion was born. It’s almost as if places of sacred significance are only in the Old World, and religious experiences stopped happening when people crossed the ocean. Although defendants of American culture and history can disagree, the majority of places of sacred significance in this country widely recognized by the masses are places that convey accomplishments by people originating from Western cultures.

Plymouth Rock is no doubt recognized as a symbol of American history and is revered by many as sacred. Sites and people associated with the American Revolution are places of significance to the people of the United States of America. The examples are plenty, but most sites are human-made structures built after the arrival of Europeans, not entire landscapes.

The concept of preserving entire landscapes isn’t a foreign concept in the United States. Many of our national parks were pristine locations where countless tribes resided for millennia, but are now enjoyed by tourists from all walks of life, from all corners of the globe. A few locations include the Grand Canyon National Park, where several tribes have reservations within the park, and the Black Hills National Forest, both entire landscapes where the US Government stripped American Indian tribes of their claim to ownership.

It wasn’t until 1978 that American Indian people were permitted to pray in places of significance in the United States as a result of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act. Due to government oppression of American Indian culture and language, most ways of life were driven underground, and many never returned. In 1978 some American Indian people began to defend the land that has been sacred to them since time immemorial. With changing administrations on both state and federal levels, the cooperation and understanding of protecting places of sacred significance to America’s first peoples vary. In all reality, the problems associated with acknowledging public law associated with protecting sacred lands exist more on a local level and happen more often than we might be aware.

Since this country has separated itself from its Church, the highest places of significance that are recognized by this country on an official level (protected, funded, etc.) are those classified in the National Register of Historic Places and national parks. Although there are more than 2,500 landmarks recognized by the US National Historical Landmark Program, the majority of landmarks

SACRED LANDSCAPES |

It’s almost as if places of sacred significance are only in the Old World and religious experiences stopped happening when people crossed the ocean.

relate to American history and include very little of the more than 560 American Indian tribes that have existed in this part of the world for countless generations. Each American Indian tribe has its own history, its own distinct relationship with creation, and its own approach to what is sacred. Defining and defending what is sacred isn’t well supported in the United States, leaving sites that are sacred to America’s First Peoples lacking complete protection under US law.

American Indian peoples aren’t entirely hopeless, however. Several sites classified by the National Register are considered sacred by Native people.

Indigenous peoples who practice their religion or ceremonies at a site hold a special and sacred attachment to that particular site. For example, Bear Butte in the Black Hills of South Dakota, Medicine Mountain in Wyoming, and Chaluka Site in Alaska are all places where many Native people pray and hold ceremonies on a regular basis and have done so for countless generations—and are all locations on the National Register of Historic Places. No matter how much time passes, the people will always remember, they will always hold what is sacred to them, and there are countless other locations only known to tribes that are sacred to them. And with more than 560 tribes in the country, there is a lot of work to be done.

Leaders and communities continue to fight to defend what is sacred to them in all corners of Indian Country. If we look deep enough, we see issues regarding American Indian sacred and burial sites throughout the United States. However, these issues aren’t reported to a public so dependent on mainstream media that the mantra has become, “if 35

|

SACRED LANDSCAPES |

we didn’t hear it, it didn’t happen.” This leaves many underrepresented communities at a disadvantage politically, economically, and socially. But back to the conversation of what is sacred—we have learned that there isn’t any easy way to define or defend what is sacred in the United States from a legal standpoint. But from a cultural standpoint we see that there are some examples cited here in the United States that relate to European cultures and, of course, the Indigenous peoples of America.

The reality is our country has the ability to realize that places are significant to the well being of a people and their way of life and our country has the power to recognize and protect certain places—and certainly does when it comes to its own history.

Because there are so many tribes and cultures, it is impossible to sweep an entire group of people into defining what is sacred to them. If there is one thing American Indian tribes have in common it is that they have all been wronged in some way by the federal government and can cite almost exactly who, what, when, where, how, and why offenses were committed.

We remember, and in the past several years many tribes have started commemorations to honor times of trauma and to begin the healing process. With so much cultural diversity, the best approach in understanding what is sacred to a people is to go to the source itself, which requires respect, patience, communication, and building of trust for the best interests of the public. Would it hurt the public in saving places of sacred significance to a people that has called America home for millennia?

I cannot speak for other tribes and their religious or spiritual practices; not only is it disrespectful, but it misinforms people who may not be aware that tribes are different and have very different histories, experiences, and ways of life. And in all reality, I cannot even speak for my own tribe, as I do not have authority to do so. But I can speak from my own personal experience, which just so 36

|

SACRED LANDSCAPES |

It was no surprise that more than 300 tribes sent respresentatives, supplies and support to help the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in its fight.

happens to be among the Ojibwe people of Lac du Flambeau. I attempted to put things in perspective that relate to my cultural background as there are some common approaches to places of significance to a people who all revere our source of life, the earth. There is a saying among the Ojibwe that the earth does not belong to us, but that we, the Anishinaabe (the people), belong to the earth. As I grew older and traveled to more communities in Indian Country, I’ve heard other sayings that I know people from back home would agree with such as Mitakuye oyasin, Hózhóogo naasháa doo, and ohneká -unho?t^. The last saying, water is life, is a saying many peoples have been saying for generations, and recently many people throughout the world became familiar with and are now shouting in streets and protests throughout the world—Mni wiconi. Many tribes consider all of creation sacred, but of course some parts more sacred than others. Earlier I discussed an aspect of the Ojibwe language that through speaking the language, the speaker acknowledges that all is related to the speaker, and are also dimensions of a person’s identity.

These sayings are more than sayings, however—they are a philosophy spoken through language and action. Many tribes, including my own, conduct a ceremony for water, for land, for people, for creation. People learn the meaning of water is life through a series of prayers, songs, and words of a spiritual leader who carries the knowledge and wisdom of his forefathers so that we may pursue a balanced life while on earth.

I take my cultural identity very seriously, and I realize I live in a very different time than when my ancestors looked upon creation, but I like to reflect that I am merely a part of creation and what happens to the earth will happen to me. Throughout my adult life I have worked as the assistant tribal liaison of the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, for Native American Tourism of Wisconsin, and for the National Congress of American Indians.

I have learned that there isn’t a single tribe that does not have protecting sacred sites and repatriating sacred and cultural items to their people as one of the most important issues they face today. Both through my upbringing and my professional experience, I have witnessed that much of what is sacred is threatened, and that the majority of the general public doesn’t have many clues of how to approach these very precious issues.

Living in the Black Hills, I am always among many Lakota and Dakota people, and they treat me with great respect. I have found their approach to prayer, to living life is very similar to my own people—balance is the core of the universe, and we as humans must always remember the earth is a source of life, not a resource to be exploited.

So when clashes began in the later part of the summer of 2016, it was without hesitation I joined the many hundreds of people protesting the building of the Dakota Access Pipeline. It was no surprise that more than three hundred tribes sent representatives, supplies, and support to help the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in its fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline. With the current route of one of the largest oil pipelines to cross under one of the largest water systems in the country, with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe being the first community to be affected, Indian Country and its allies answered the call that the time to stand up for Mother Earth is now. And although it is difficult to list an entire river system as sacred, which no doubt it is, the fact of the matter is to question how much life depends on the Missouri River. The margin of error is too great, and all we hold special, sacred, green, and good in this world could surely be threatened by a mere malfunction of a pipeline.

Respecting sacred places acknowledges an accumulated knowledge of many generations. The Ojibwe language can explain why we must respect the earth and take responsibility for caring for the land, water, and its resources. I 37

|

SACRED LANDSCAPES |

believe it is the antidote to global climate change and environmental destruction. The Ojibwe language is where my people turn for philosophy, history, science, medicines, stories, and spirituality.

There is no easy way to define what is sacred from an Indigenous perspective, especially in the United States. The documents that bind this country together state that there will be a separation of state and religion (freedom of religion), and we are now seeing that religion has almost no influence when it comes to things of economics, but of course has influenced other aspects of policy and law that have shaped our country’s identity. Manifest destiny was both a religious creed and a US policy that removed hundreds of American Indian tribes from their ancestral homelands. Ultimately when deciding to protect a land because of claims of sacred significance, there are sometimes economic factors that are weighed in the decision. Reverse roles and imagine if people had to plea to preserve Plymouth Rock or Liberty Hall and justify its importance. With a new administration now signaling approval to drill for oil in the nation’s national parks, it leaves us all to wonder, What is important to us?

There could be arguments, of course, as to who can claim the landscape and whether or not it is sacred, but the future of our species depends on us taking responsibility for all living things and all the eye can see. The lands where America’s first peoples remain have lost a great deal, but as generations move forward, they are beginning to reclaim their heritage and understand the meaning of the lands of their ancestors, that Mother Earth is the source of life, not a resource to be exploited.

In closing, I would like to share a story I heard while growing up that I share at the conclusion to all of my performances. I hope it has some meaning.

If you take away all of the four-leggeds, those that walk on all fours, from the Earth, life on Earth would not be able to sustain itself. If you take away all of the winged relatives, those that have wings and feathers, from the Earth, life on Earth would not be able to sustain itself. If you take away all that is green from this world and that grows from the Earth, the plant life, away from the Earth, life on Earth would not be able to sustain itself. If you took away water, and all those that live in water, from the Earth, life on Earth would not be able to sustain itself. If you took away man from the Earth, life on Earth would flourish. l

DARREN THOMPSON (Ojibwe/Tohono O’odham) is a Native American flute player and writer from the Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe Reservation in Northern Wisconsin. He contributes to Native Peoples Magazine, Native News Online, Native Max Magazine, powwows.com. For more information visit, darrenthompson.net.

Bismarck Tribune, Blair Emerson, December 12, 2016 | http://bismarcktribune.com/news/ state-and-regional/n-d-law-enforcement-officials-completely-and-utterly-abandoned-by/article_ c3ca5f55-2e3e-5eae-aaa7-ce6561ef73a8.html 2 Oshkaabewis Native Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 1995 3 Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association (485 U.S. 439 1988) 4 Public Law No. 95-341, 92 Stat. 469 5 “We are all related” in the Lakota, Dakota language 6 “In beauty I walk” in the Diné/Navajo language 7 “Water is life” in the Oneida language 1

38

There is a saying among the Ojibwe that the earth does not belong to us, but that we, the Anishinaabe (the people), belong to the earth.

think outside 2018

A THOUGHTFUL APPROACH TO OUTDOOR ADVENTURE IN NORTH DAKOTA

FIND YOURSELF GETTING LOST Created by philosopher and North Dakota native Tayo Basquiat, THINK OUTSIDE seeks to connect people with both ideas and the beauty of our natural landscape. Through guided discussions around campfires during the evenings and outdoor adventures during the day, we hope to build a community of adventurers who come to know both themselves and the beauty of the Peace Garden State. Join us as we bike, hike, and kayak this summer.

Lewis & Clark Trail, July 7-8 Maah Daah Hey Trail, July 13-15 Missouri River, July 20-21 Pembina Gorge, July 28 Fort Ransom State Park, July 29 Visit humantiesnd.org to find your next adventure

What gives your life deeper meaning and purpose?

How do we want to be governed and live in community?

Our Founding Fathers believed in the importance and power of the humanities to change people’s lives. Indeed, our nation’s history has been a great adventure in ideas.

Humanities North Dakota was created to continue this proud tradition. Our mission is to provide people opportunities to engage with and debate life-changing ideas because democracy demands wisdom and vision in its citizens.

Formally, the HUMANITIES are the disciplines of HISTORY, RELIGION, PHILOSOPHY, LITERATURE, ANTHROPOLOGY, LAW, AND ETHICS. Taken as a whole, they seek to understand what it means to be human. For individuals, they are the tools used to explore the meaning and purpose of life. For societies, they help define how we want to be governed and the values we want enshrined in civic life.

humanitiesnd.org

HUMANITIES NORTH DAKOTA WELCOMES CORBY KEMMER

Greetings!

In January I was privileged to join the Humanities North Dakota team as development director.

These early months have been exciting, eventful, and educational as we build a strong development infrastructure for not only today but for years to come. Our Founding Fathers believed in the importance and power of the humanities to change people’s lives, and it’s an honor to be part of an organization that continues this proud tradition.

I take great pride in my profession and am passionate in building genuine relationships by taking the respectful time to learn about each donor, supporter, and friend, their backgrounds, what they care about, and what inspires them. I am enthusiastic in interacting with donors and matching their interests with the mission of Humanities North Dakota. Did you know Humanities North Dakota is not a state agency, does not receive state funding and since 1973 has initiated programs across North Dakota to provide opportunities to engage with and debate life changing-ideas? Until recently, I didn’t.

Your support can assist with transformational programs such as the GameChanger Ideas Festival, Think Outside and We the People that reach into communities across our great state.

My development career began in my hometown of Mayville, North Dakota and my college alma mater, Mayville State University in 2002 where I met my wife, Sherry, a Bismarck native. My career would next take me to the University of Minnesota Crookston as director of development and alumni relations. In 2015, Sherry and I, our daughter, Jordyn, and son, Colin, returned to North Dakota to make Bismarck our home.

I look forward to working with you in support of Humanities North Dakota.

Sincerely, Corby

We have ways of making you think.

HND Board of Directors

Staff

CHAIR Carol Kapaun Ratchenski, Fargo

VICE CHAIR Richard Rothaus, Bismarck

Bethany Andreasen, Minot Elizabeth Birmingham, Fargo Ann Crews Melton, Bismarck Marilyn Foss, Bismarck Melissa Gjellstad, Grand Forks John S. Heinen, Dickinson Eric L. Johnson, Grand Forks Leslie W. Peltier, Belcourt Ken Schmierer, Ellendale Elizabeth Sund, Minot Iris Swedlund, Velva Sarah Vogel, Bismarck

Brenna Daugherty Gerhardt, Executive Director Kenneth Glass, Associate Director Corby Kemmer, Development Director Kayla Schmidt, Program Coordinator Freddie Campbell, Intern

Humanities North Dakota is a partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The humanities inspire our vision of a thoughtful, respectful, actively engaged society that will be able to meet the challenge of sustaining our democracy across the many divisions of modern society and deal responsibly with the shared challenges we currently face as members of an interdependent world.

800-338-6543 info@humanitiesnd.org

humanitiesnd.org

HUMANITIES NORTH DAKOTA 418 E. Broadway, Suite 8 Bismarck, ND 58501

NON-PROFIT ORG US POSTAGE

PAID

BISMARCK, ND PERMIT NO. 433

“Those who believe their suffering has been valuable love more readily than those who see no meaning in their pain. Suffering does not necessarily imply love, but love implies suffering.”

– Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

ideas festival

THE PURSUIT OF HEALTH & HAPPINESS Featuring Andrew Solomon October 13, 2018 Bismarck, North Dakota gamechangernd.com