Project Lakota is under the care of St. Louis Monthly Meeting. Statement of Leading:
Project Lakota will promote relations between Lakota people and F/friends. This will include supporting housing, land, tatankah (bison), ceremonies, and other appropriate activities.
If you feel led to donate, send your check to:

St. Louis Friends Meeting (Place "Project Lakota" on memo line)
Attn: Diana Pascoe
7 Clydehurst Drive
St. Louis, Missouri 63119

Report from Pine Ridge Submitted by Pam Timme

Carrie Melin, my daughter Christina and I had the privilege of spending the first part of August 2005 volunteering for Project Lakota at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.  Once again, I would like to thank OPFM for contributing to our travel expenses.

Project Lakota was started in 2000 by Candy Boyd, Greg Woods and Candy’s daughter, Maya Suffern.  Its purpose is to raise funds to buy materials for housing construction and rehabilitation for the Lakota Nation (at the Pine Ridge Reservation) and to provide scholarship money for volunteers traveling to Pine Ridge.  It is under the care of the St. Louis Friends Meeting.

Some of the not for profit organizations Project Lakota has worked with include Self-Help Housing (Partnership for Housing), Tiwahe Tipi Okolakiciye Tiospaye (Family Home Organization), and Habitat for Humanity.  Self-Help Housing is a program in which the families who will live in the homes help to build them.  The houses in this program are built in a construction lot on the reservation, and when finished are moved to their final location.  Tiwahe Tipi is a tiospaye (family group/clan) housing cooperative to build log cabins in and around the town of Oglala.  Habitat for Humanity is on the reservation and builds a house approximately every three years.  Project Lakota also works with individuals not connected with the above organizations that have housing needs.

My lasting impression from this trip was of the sense of continuation of the Lakota Nation and culture in the face of over a century of disasters and oppression.  I heard some people speaking Lakota in their everyday lives, saw them taking pride in and participating in traditional dancing, singing and drumming at the pow wow, saw traditional prayers being given, and listened to humorous remarks, ghost/spirit stories and family history stories.

Background Information

The following is a very brief overview of the complex and tumultuous history of the Lakota (western Sioux) over the last 150 years.  (For more detailed information, please see the book and movie list at the end of this report.)  The Lakota people originally lived over a large territory which included portions of what today are North and South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Colorado and Nebraska.  They depended on the buffalo (tatanka), which roamed these plains, for food, shelter and clothing.  The Black Hills, or Paha Sapa, which are sacred to the Lakota, were at the center of this land.  In response to a successful military campaign by Lakota leader Red Cloud against western forts along the Bozeman Trail, the United States had promised much of this area to the Lakota in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868.  But, unfortunately for the Lakota, gold was discovered in the Black Hills in 1874 and the treaty was broken.  A century later, in 1980, the United States Supreme Court stated, "A more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be found in our history.”  In addition to invasion of the Lakota’s territory by miners, soldiers and settlers, the buffalo had nearly been exterminated.  By 1893 it was estimated that there were only 300 buffalo left in North America out of an original estimate of at least 30 million.  By 1876, the U.S. ordered all Lakota bands onto reservations.  Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull led the resistance which culminated in the destruction of Custer’s Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876.  By the late 1880s some Lakota were living on reservations while others were attempting to live in their traditional manner.  The “ghost dance” was being performed by many western tribes including the Lakota in hopes of returning America to its pre-European state; the government was trying to suppress this threat.  In December, 1890 a band of 350 men, women and children led by the elderly and ill Big Foot were on their way to Pine Ridge, seeking safety.  They were intercepted and disarmed by U.S. soldiers near Wounded Knee Creek (now part of Pine Ridge Reservation), and most of them then massacred.  The bodies were left to freeze in the snow for three days, and then buried in a mass grave.  Black Elk, a Lakota holy man, said, “I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from the high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.”

From that time through part of the 20th century, many Lakota children were forced to go to schools where they were prohibited from speaking their language or practicing their religion.  Religious ceremonies, such as the sun dance, were banned and other attempts at forced assimilation were made.  In the early 1970s, a civil war-like atmosphere developed on Pine Ridge Reservation. Two hundred AIM (American Indian Movement) members and traditionals, in protest against injustices, treaty violations, and the corrupt tribal council head, Dick Wilson, occupied the Wounded Knee site for over two months.  They were surrounded and besieged by FBI agents, but their supporters slipped through ravines at night with food and supplies.  For the next three years, there was much violence against AIM supporters on the reservation by Dick Wilson and his supporters, called “GOONS”.  Today, Pine Ridge Reservation includes the second poorest county (per capita income) in the country.  (The poorest county is also in South Dakota, and is home to the Crow Creek Sioux Reservation.)  There are high rates of unemployment, alcoholism, car accidents, suicide, diabetes and infant mortality.  Life expectancy is among the lowest in the Western Hemisphere.  Housing is substandard and overcrowded.

Leonard Crow Dog, a Lakota spiritual leader and author of the book, Crow Dog:  Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men, said, “Whites say not to blame them, they aren’t involved.  It’s their ancestors who did wrong.  But they should be involved.  They are living on our land.  We are still third-class citizens.  We are still invisible.  Indians are in jail.  Indians are starving.  You should take some responsibility, not for what was, but for what is.  We can’t put all of you back on the Mayflower.  So we’ve got to live with one another as best we can.  I look upon my white friends who have for so long supported me as brothers and sisters.  I don’t look at the color of their skin.  Many young wasichus have come to Crow Dog’s Paradise, often staying for weeks or months.  I feed them and give them shelter.  There are many good, understanding white men and women.  The only trouble is, there’s not enough of them.”

Our Experiences at Pine Ridge

Carrie, Christina and I left for South Dakota on Monday, August 1.  It took us two days to drive each way, we worked for seven days, and we took two days off to sightsee in the Badlands and the Black Hills.  When we drove up to the campground, Candy welcomed us with a smile and the silent applause sign and we pitched camp before it got dark.  The camp, on the shores of Lake Oglala, was very pretty.  There was a shelter for supplies and cooking, a solar heated shower, two outhouses, and a canoe.  There were connections for RVs up the hill from the tent area, and there were several RVs parked there most of the time we were there.  The owner of the campground had four grandchildren who lived with their mother on the property.  They came down to the campsite to visit us often, and were very cute and fun.  Greg Woods and his friend Caleb Paul, from Earlham, joined us at the campground for a few days.

We arrived at Camp Oglala with a load of 34 backpacks and 2 boxes of school supplies courtesy of Illinois Yearly Meeting.  Many individuals donated the items, and the kids at IYM packed the backpacks with school supplies as a service project.  We brought most of the backpacks to Loneman School, which goes up to the 8th grade.  We also gave some “little kid” backpacks to Ingrid One Feather, who teaches kindergarten.  We saved four backpacks to give to the kids at the campground.  They were very excited to get them.

We worked on two homes.  The first was a log cabin.  Our job was to scrape black mold off the outside walls with bleach and then caulk and paint the walls.  Black mold has invaded the area in recent years, and can cause medical problems and even fatalities in infants, the elderly, and people with pulmonary problems or damaged immune systems.  It was hot, dry, dusty work!  The second house we worked on was part of the Self-Help Housing program.  There were two houses on the construction site when we got there; one had just been completed and we got to watch it being towed away down the road toward its final destination. We worked inside the second house, putting compound on drywall seams and around the window frames.  It was a little cooler by then – down to the 80’s.  Since there was no bathroom or outhouse at the construction site, we drove about a mile to the Oglala Lakota College to use their facilities.  The college was quite impressive – it had a small but beautifully done museum exhibit on the history of the Lakota.

And what did we do for fun?  We went to the pow wow four evenings in a row.  It was quite an experience.  People brought their own chairs and sat in a large circle around the dance area.  Drummers and singers provided the accompaniment for the wonderful dancing.  The drumming circle gradually moved around the circle throughout the evening.  There were food and craft boots surrounding the circle.  There was also a rodeo and a skateboard contest elsewhere on the grounds.

We also went to the groundbreaking ceremonies for a casino expansion.  A medicine man performed a ceremony, and we were all treated to a meal of buffalo and fry bread.  We also had a good meal the night we were invited to the home of Mercy Iron Crow, whose home had been built through Self-Help Housing a few years ago.  On another day we went to Wounded Knee, walking through the cemetery and the little museum with displays about both Wounded Knee I and II.  We also went to the badlands that day, a Sunday, and ended the day on a remote high mesa called Sheep Table Mountain, where we had Meeting for Worship.  From where we sat we could see the Black Hills in the distance, and rain falling, far away, in a circle all around us.  On the last day we took a trip to the beautiful Black Hills, where we had the pleasure of seeing many buffalo and other wildlife.

If you would like to learn more about the Lakota people, the following is a list of books and movies which I have either read or which have been recommended to me.  I have put an asterisk next to books and movies that I own; I would be happy to lend them out.  (I would not recommend any of the movies for younger children, due to violence.)

Books

Black Elk Speaks,* as told through John G. Neihardt

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West,* by Dee Brown

Crow Dog:  Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men,* by Leonard Crow Dog and Richard Erdoes

Lakota Woman,* by Mary Crow Dog

Mount Rushmore:  An Icon Reconsidered, by Jesse Larner

On the Rez, by Ian Frazier

Waterlily, by Ella Cara Deloria

I also read a very interesting book about the most recent Native American group to live in the Chicago area, before their forced resettlement west of the Mississippi River in the 1830s – The Potawatomis:  Keepers of the Fire,* by R. David Edmunds.

Movies

“Dances with Wolves”, a fictional story of a Civil War soldier who joins a Lakota tribe.

“Incident at Oglala”,* a documentary about the Leonard Peltier case of the 1970s

“Skins”, a fictional movie set in Pine Ridge about two close-knit brothers, one a tribal policeman and the other an alcoholic.

“Thunderheart”, a fictional treatment based on the real-life shooting of two FBI agents at Pine Ridge in the 1970s.

One of the books I read in preparation for the trip, On the Rez, by Ian Frazier, had an intriguing theory on the American ideal of equality:  “Surrounded as we are today by pavement, we assume that Indians have had to adapt to us.  For a long time much of the adapting went the other way.  In the land of the free, Indians were the original “free”:  early America was European culture reset in an Indian frame.  Europeans who survived here became a mixture of identities in which the Indian part was what made them American and different than they had been before.  Influence is harder to document than corn and beans, but as real…Indian people today sometimes talk about the need to guard their culture carefully, so that it won’t be stolen from them.  But what is best (and worst) about any culture can be as contagious as a cold germ; the least contact passes it on.  In colonial times, Indians were known for their disregard of titles and for a deep egalitarianism that made them not necessarily defer even to the leading men of their tribes.  The route this trait took as it passed from Indian to white was invisible…However the transfer happened, in a few generations it was complete; the American character had become thoroughly Indian in its outspokenness and all-around skepticism on the subject of who was and was not great…As surely as Indians gave the world corn and tobacco and potatoes, they gave it a revolutionary new idea of what a human being could be.”

If you would like to find out more about volunteering or fundraising for Project Lakota, contact Candy Boyd at (314) 623-7829 or candyboydwrite@yahoo.com.  Donations for Project Lakota can be sent to “Project Lakota, c/o Diana Pascoe, 7429 Brunswick Ave., St. Louis, Missouri, 63119.  Please make checks payable to “St. Louis Meeting” and put “Project Lakota” in the memo line.

Submitted by~ Pam Timme