Sopris Sun THE
VOLUME 1, NUMBER 22 • JULY 9, 2009
Finding Peace
Rebuilding sacred Lakota arbor helps locals heal and grow By Arjuna Ibarra Community Correspondent
Top: Builders from Colorado work on the sacred arbor at Pine Ridge Reservation. Photo by Arjuna Ibarra. Bottom: from left to right; Dan Reed, Arjuna Ibarra, Michael Mooney, Brandon Cohen, Steve Novy and Dennis Powell. Photo by Jane Bachrach
In 1904 President Theodore Roosevelt began implementing a policy of “benevolent assimilation” toward Native Americans and criminalized the Sun Dance Ceremony. He could not have foreseen that in 2009 a fellowship of 20 builders from Carbondale, Colorado, would arrive on the ancestral lands of the Sioux Nation to help build a shelter of peace and renewal for the Lakota People’s most hallowed rite. At the invitation of Lakota-Oglala Chief Steve Dubray, True Nature Healing Arts and Jaywalker Lodge came to Pine Ridge Reservation to help rebuild a shade arbor around a 50-foot sacred tree. Both of the Carbondale-based centers are committed to personal growth and healing in their community and beyond. From May 3-8, on a consecrated campground three miles from the town of Kyle, S.D., the sounds of carpentry teams, skill saws, pneumatic nail guns, hammers, and a 6,000-watt power generator could be heard drifting far into the windswept rolling prairie of South Dakota’s Badlands.
The men from Colorado say they are here to help make possible many more Sun Dance Ceremonies, as they have been practiced for millennia by the first people of the Great Plains of North America. Like the Lakota, many indigenous people around the world — including the Roaring Fork Valley’s Nuche, or Ute Nation — are still awed by the magic of the cosmos and the mystery of life. The Sun Dance is the most important spiritual ceremony of the Sioux Nation and one of the seven sacred rites handed down 18 generations ago by the White Buffalo Calf Woman. The Plains Indians’ high summer ceremony honors the power of renewal in creation, in the sun, earth and human community, and, not least, our inner self. Fire, earth, water and air activate the most profound and human dimension of the universe, which is the conscious celebration of an individual’s intimate relationship with what the Sioux call the holiest spirit of creation, or “Wakan Tanka.” “These builders around the sacred tree are already participating in the Sun Dance,” says
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