above: The Wakarusa (aka Haskell-Baker) Wetlands. The Army Corp of
Engineers plans to build a highway through the wetlands near Lawrence,
Kansas. The wetlands are considered a sacred place partly because of
their proximity to a boarding school opened in the 1880s. Native
children, forced to live away from their communities, used the
wetlands to perform ceremonies and to bury the dead. “This construction
will irreparably damage the environmental, scientific, historical,
cultural and religious resources of the wetlands,." says Jackie
Mitchell (Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation).
By Jake Page
One summer a long time ago, my wife Susanne and I sat on the top of an
unprepossessing cinder cone that rises a few hundred feet above the
flat landscape around the town of Woodruff, in northeastern Arizona. We
sat with five Hopi priests who were praying, smoking and depositing
prayer feathers in a little wooden shrine among the boulders. We had
been profoundly privileged to join the Hopis on a pilgrimage they have
made every four years or so since before memory to eight outlying
shrines that denote the land that the Hopis feel spiritually
responsible for, a vast area in northeastern Arizona. The elders had
asked us to go on this pilgrimage to “document” it for National
Geographic so the world would know of the Hopis’ responsibilities.
The priests prayed for the land and for the well-being of all living
things that dwell there. Later they told us the pilgrimage had clearly
been successful. Almost everywhere we had gone, it had rained the next
day. So much rain fell around Grand Canyon Village after we passed
through there that authorities had to close all the roads for 24 hours.
But the place where we sat on Woodruff Butte that sun-filled day long
ago no longer exists. A bulldozer scraped off the top of the privately
owned volcanic remnant in the 1990s. Much of sacred Woodruff Butte was
ground up and is now part of the pavement of Interstate 40. What might
well be the longest-running pilgrimage route in North America has had
one-eighth of its stops lopped off.
Sadly, this is not an isolated act—there is a long history of heedless
despoliation of sacred Native lands. Indeed, for most Native peoples of
this continent all land is sacred, and much of the ancestral lands of
the tribes are now smothered by cities, housing tracts and highways or
fouled by strip mines, chemical plants, clear-cut forests and polluted
streams.
Tens of thousands of such holy places are gone, but thousands no doubt
remain—modest little shrines here and there like those on the former
Woodruff Butte—hidden in canyons, sitting atop high mountains and
fronting our oceans. They include whole mountains, like the San
Francisco Peaks north of Flagstaff, Arizona; entire mountain ranges,
like the Crazy Mountains in Montana; as well as lakes, tiny springs
still running in cities, and ancient burial sites. Many are under
attack, and in few such places is the serenity typically associated
with sacred ground guaranteed. Many of them are on public land, and,
while recent laws direct managers of public lands to be respectful of
the Native peoples’ usage, the lands must often be shared with other
visitors bent on other activities, from recreation to mining.
Volcanic Spires
Tribes
including the Arapaho, Crow, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Lakota, and Shoshone have
had cultural and geographical ties to Devils Tower long before European
and early American immigrants reached Wyoming. The Lakota name is Mato
Tipila (Lodge of the Bear). Photo by John Fiscus/Chief Pilot of The
Flight Academy.
Devil’s Tower in northeastern Wyoming, for example, is a gigantic neck
of volcanic stone, the sides of which look like they were scraped by
the claws of a giant bear. Rising more than 1,200 feet, it is a
national monument and also a sacred place for numerous Plains tribes.
They go there to pray, gather plants used in their ceremonies and
connect with their ancestors and their history. It is also a wondrous
challenge for rock climbers, who ply its striated sides in the summer
like so many flies on a kitchen wall. For years the tribes petitioned
the National Park Service to set aside June as a time during which the
climbers would voluntarily leave the place to the tribal people on
their annual pilgrimages. Most of the climbing community (but not all)
has acceded. So here is a bit of progress, a sign of courtesy. True
progress, however, would include a name change—Bear’s Lodge has been
proposed. Tribal histories associate the place with bears, and the
Plains people know just who the devil is. From the Native point of
view, calling it Devil’s Tower is about as respectful as calling St.
Patrick’s Cathedral in New York the Windigo Wine Bar.
The first major recovery of sacred Indian space came in the early 1970s
when the elders of Taos pueblo in New Mexico enlisted the help of a
young U.S. senator, Fred Harris (D-Okla.), to regain ownership of Blue
Lake in the mountains above the pueblo. The lake was (and is) a place
of special ceremonies that the Taos people kept totally private, a task
made difficult because visitors to the Carson National Forest could
come and go at will. Unlike the Hopis in the 1980s, but like most
tribes at the time, the people of Taos had never felt free to explain
the nature of their ceremonies at Blue Lake. Nevertheless, Senator
Harris and his wife LaDonna, of Comanche descent, managed to enlist the
Nixon White House in the cause, and the bipartisan effort overcame
opposition in the senate. Blue Lake was removed from Carson National
Forest and returned to Taos control on Dec. 15, 1970, ushering in,
President Nixon said, a new era of cooperation instead of paternalism.
That, of course, still remains to be seen.
Recovering the Sacred
Recently, Zuni Salt Lake in western New Mexico narrowly avoided having
its shallow waters sucked out by Salt River Project, the nation’s
third-largest utility, which supplies water and electricity to Phoenix
and central Arizona. The spring-fed lake is the home of the Zunis’ Salt
Mother and the site for important initiations. It produces a
spectacularly pure salt that is essential to the affairs of the Zunis,
as well as Hopis, Navajos, Acomas and Lagunas. Even when some among
these peoples were at odds, once they set foot on the trails to the
lake, hostilities were forbidden. Anciently used, the trails remain the
Southwest’s version of the calumet. In the late 1980s, the U.S.
Department of the Interior returned the lake and 600 acres of
surrounding New Mexico desert land to the Zuni Tribe, a neutral zone
for use by all the Native people of the region. But Salt Mother’s home
was still not totally secure.
Eleven miles from Salt Lake, the tiny town of Fence Lake was slated as
the site of a massive coal mine by Salt River Project. In all, some 80
million tons of coal were to be dug from the ground, a process that
would also entail the withdrawal of more than 20 billion gallons of
groundwater from the region. Geologists hired by both Salt River
Project and the Zunis argued to a draw whether such a massive loss of
groundwater would drain Salt Lake, but the Zunis were not about to
leave it to chance. They reached out and organized a coalition of Hopis
and other Native groups, as well as several national environmental and
other organizations, which mounted so constant and intense a campaign
of opposition that on Aug. 4, 2003, Salt River Project threw in the
towel, giving up all the state permits and leases it had acquired for
the mine. As Anishinaabe writer and environmental activist Winona
LaDuke has commented, “Zunis are some tough Indians.”
Two months later, Zuni jubilation was put on hold, however. The U.S.
Bureau of Land Management opened up a large area near Salt Lake
for oil and gas exploration.
Are things getting better or worse for the sacred lands of Native
America? Does each success breed further successes? With each success,
Native people learn new techniques, new means of thwarting the diverse
array of claimants to their sacred spaces. They gain new allies. But
the jurisdictional, legal and administrative issues vary from place to
place, and the need for constant vigilance appears endless.
Perhaps not, however, at Rice Lake in northeastern Wisconsin. Up the
Wolf River from Rice Lake, in 1975 mining giant Exxon Minerals found a
55-million-ton deposit of zinc and copper. Thereafter, mining rights
changed hands several times, winding up in the hands of Northern
Wisconsin Resources Group LLC in 2003. For decades the Native people of
the area—Sokaogon Ojibwes, Menominees and Potawatomis, all wild-rice
people—had protested the mine, called the Crandon Mine, knowing that it
would unavoidably and severely pollute the waters of the area. It would
certainly ruin the production of wild rice, the collection of which was
a millennium-old sacred activity, along with ceremonies and other
communal efforts the people engaged in elsewhere in the watershed. As
federal agencies, the Native people, the mining company and the courts
tangled over the matter—much of it involved with the rights of Indian
reservations to regulate the purity of water coming onto their lands
from elsewhere—another solution presented itself. In October 2003, the
Mole Lake band of the Sokaogon Ojibwes and the Forest County Potawatomi
Community simply bought the land where the Crandon Mine would be sited,
and the mining company itself, using funds derived from casino
operations. The land will be split between the two tribes and set aside
for long-term sustainable development. And the rice harvest can, one
hopes, continue indefinitely.
The Harassment of Bear Butte
It
rises some 1,200 feet above the surrounding land, a few miles from
Sturgis, South Dakota. It was here where the Northern Cheyenne received
their four sacred arrows and core teachings, and where the Creator also
gave the Lakotas their sacred teachings. It is much the same for the
Crows, the Kiowas and some 25 other tribes. On any given day, Native
people are present at Bear Butte, completing a pilgrimage, adorning it
with prayer flags, seeking visions. It is a state park (since 1962) and
a National Historic Landmark (since 1965). It is on the National
Register of Historic Places, and Summit Trail, a National Recreation
Trail, runs through it. As a national landmark, it is owed at least
some protection as a sacred place among Indians. All the other
designations operate against such protection, serving to attract
ever-larger numbers of tourists and visitors for recreation. The state
even built observation platforms at one time so tourists would have a
good place to ogle the Indian ceremonies that take place there.
above: Bear Butte International Alliance protests at the the beverage license hearing at the Meade County Commissioners Office. below: “I will never forget
the bad feeling in my heart when I saw the first building facing our
Sacred Mountain. It was like nothing I ever experienced,” says Jay Red
Hawk (Dakota) of Bear Butte International Alliance. “On June 24,
the 80 foot steel girders went up and I knew that from that spot, north
of the mountain, the pristine view of our holy mountain would be ruined
forever. Like some ghetto prairie pole barn, the three-story bar sticks
out on the plains like an unwanted growth.” Photos by Jay Red Hawk/Bear Butte International Alliance
Recently, the state park was persuaded to hire Indian interpreters to
explain the butte’s spiritual importance to the tourists, who are asked
not to interfere with Indian rituals. That’s nice, yes. But down below
the world keeps threatening, keeps pressing, keeps coming up with uses
for the butte and the lands around it that are in fact simply horrid,
if you consider that for countless thousands of Native people Bear
Butte is as holy a place as the Vatican is for Roman Catholics.
Sturgis is the epicenter of one of the largest biker rallies in the
country. Each August, as many as 500,000 people turn up on rumbling,
roaring Harleys. To see to the bikers’ and other visitors’ needs, a
local Sturgis man built a huge concert hall and an enormous beer bar
within shouting distance of Bear Butte. The bar might get shot down
because the town fathers granted the license illegally, some say. Or
the county (Meade) may finally accede to having zoning regulations, and
that might make it possible to zone bars and concert halls out of the
vicinity of Bear Butte. Or maybe it’s too late. Anyway, the whole mess
is now being adjudicated by the South Dakota Supreme Court.
Rock ’n’ roll vision quests? On its face this seems inappropriate, but
the law is a house of many mansions. In similar cases over the years,
some judges have agreed with Emory Sekaquaptewa, a Hopi jurist, who has
said, echoing the U.S. Constitution, “I have a right to believe in the
things I have been taught to believe in and this should not be
interfered with.” Other judges have ruled that multiple uses of such
places do not interfere with one’s beliefs, even if they do interfere
to one degree or another with some religious practices in some specific
spot. To altogether ban the non-Indian public from such places as the
top of Bear Butte, these judges say, would be tantamount to
establishing a religion, which the First Amendment to the same
Constitution forbids.
Among other things, this entire tangle calls for a major creative
effort to make the American legal system, which is based largely on
individual and property rights, somehow accommodate the communal,
nature- and place-based belief systems of many Native (and other)
people. It is interesting that Christians are beginning to invent
something called Creation Theology, which sounds a lot like what goes
on at Bear Butte. But lawyers, as we all know, reason from
precedent…and call that reasoning. It is possible, however, that the
ecological havoc in store for us from global warming will push the law
in this new direction, as private and public property vanishes under
the encroaching waves and ownership of all sorts of resources is
rendered moot.
And the List Goes On
Countless battles for Native sacred lands are under way throughout the
United States. In 2000, the Department of the Interior bought out a
pumice mine for $1 million that was defacing the eastern slope of
northern Arizona’s San Francisco Peaks, but the Forest Service is now
under pressure to permit snowmaking with reclaimed wastewater at
Arizona Snowbowl, a ski area on the mountains. According to Hopi
beliefs, the San Francisco Peaks are the home of the Hopi katsinas for
half of every year. When they are on these peaks, the Hopis believe the
katsinas rehearse the bringing of rain to Hopi fields 90 miles eastward.
Photo by Kyle Kirstner
In
1884, near Lawrence, Kansas, in the Wakarusa Wetlands, the Haskell
Indian school was built. Administrators took Indian children forcibly
from their families and tried to see that they were shorn of all signs
of tribal identity. Many children died from disease and suicide and the
harshness of the regime, and many of them were buried in the wetlands,
where students also would sneak in to perform ceremonies that could
help assuage their homesickness. The school is still in use, now called
the Haskell Indian Nations University. Many tribes, including the
Potawatomi, the Sac and Fox, and the Iowa consider this sad graveyard
of Indian children and the silent memories of their secret prayers and
ceremonies as sacred ground. They and a host of environmental and other
groups are actively opposing the construction of a highway straight
through the wetlands. Yet another highway, this one planned for a site
near Macon, Georgia, would slice into the ancient mound temples and
historic villages of the Muscogee people in Ocmulgee Old Fields.
“Unless we listen to the voices these winds are bringing us,” says a
local Muscogee, Stan Cartwright, “there’ll be nothing left of our
history for our grandkids to see.”
Power companies and real estate companies have been working hard to get
their hands on the lands around Snoqualmie Falls, 30 miles outside of
Seattle. The Snoqualmie Tribe has been fending them off with shrewd
efforts to enlist the local citizenry in their cause—to preserve the
falls, which is where the Moon created First Man and First Woman. Way
to the west, Native Hawaiians have bought some time via a court case to
continue their effort to prevent the University of Hawaii and NASA from
building six more astronomical observatories on the summit of Mauna
Kea, the mountain at the center of their creation story, which is
already home to 12 other observatories.
In Virginia, the Mattaponi River is threatened by a dam/reservoir
project called for by the Army Corps of Engineers. But as Mattaponi
tribal elder Carl Lone Eagle Custalow says, “This river is the
lifeblood of this reservation because it’s allowed our people, our
culture, to survive.”
In Utah, Utes and other Native people including the Hopis are fighting
off Bureau of Land Management schemes to drill for oil and gas on the
rims of Nine-Mile Canyon, sometimes called the “world’s longest art
gallery” for its 10,000-plus petroglyphs, along with the remains of
ancient villages dating back to Fremont Indian times 1,000 years ago.
“This is our church,” says religious leader Larry Cesspooch.
All over the United States, sacred Indian grounds—call them natural
churches if that makes it clear—are threatened. But also all over this
nation, Native voices are being heard—in organized protests, in
literature, in courts of law, even in corporate boardrooms. As Toby
McLeod, whose documentary film In the Light of Reverence has brought
widespread attention to this issue, points out, “Ten or 15 years ago,
no one outside of tribal circles had any notion of sacred Native lands.
Now the concept is widely understood. We have come a long way.” Even
so, he goes on to say, “it calls for eternal vigilance.”
No longer, it seems, will Native people quietly watch as their sacred
grounds are profaned and destroyed. These places will be sung of,
esteemed, litigated, defended. There is a powerful and just voice in
the wind now, and people of goodwill will listen to it and, if they are
of sound judgment, will join the chorus.
Jake Page is the co-author with his
wife, photographer Susanne Page, of the books Hopi and Navajo, and
editor of Sacred Lands of Indian America. He lives in Lyons, Colorado.
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