Detours of Intention: Lost and Found in the Holy Land

Abstract

Detours of Intention:Lost and Found in the Holy Land Tom Fate (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution The first thing I noticed humming west through South Dakota on Interstate 90 was the thirty-foot high teepees made from cement pillars. I’d seen them before. They mark the public bathroom stops, but also remind you that you are now in “Indian Country.” A state planner somewhere probably thought they would trigger nostalgic visions of Sitting Bull or Crazy Horse in tourists on their way across this barren table of grassland to visit Mount Rushmore. [End Page 101] But driving further west, the strategy becomes more clear. Most of the roadside billboards––marketing everything from fast food to amusement parks to real estate––feature iconic images from Plains Indians culture: teepees, buffalo, the medicine wheel, drum circles. Presumably, these images of the Lakota Sioux people can spark a quite marketable curiosity in visitors like me, a curiosity that anthropologist Renato Rosaldo once called “imperialist nostalgia”: an odd, romantic longing for the culture that my ancestors nearly destroyed. I first recognized this feeling in myself many years ago, when I was invited to attend a Sun Dance on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation––the central religious ceremony of the Lakota. My expectations didn’t align with what I experienced those few days on the Pine Ridge: most of the dancers were recovering alcoholics, the sweat lodges were covered with carpet remnants rather than buffalo hides, the sacred cottonwood tree was retrieved in a flatbed truck rather than on horseback, the eagle feathers were purchased rather than gathered, the drummers and singers used tinny microphones and cheap amplifiers that echoed with feedback, many of the dancers slept in nylon dome tents instead of teepees, and so on. I had still imagined a “traditional” Indian––as if tradition didn’t evolve. This mindset is just one way a middle-class white guy deals with his heritage—the near genocide, and theft of Native American land. And while I’m not directly responsible for that debacle, as a beneficiary, and as a writer, I am accountable—able to give an account, one more well-intentioned version of “the truth.” That was partly why I was on my way back to the Pine Ridge––to listen for stories, for a new truth. Another reason, though, was to visit an old mentor: Francis White Lance, a Lakota medicine man. I would soon bring a group of college students to the Pine Ridge and Francis had agreed to mentor them as well, so I wanted to reconnect with him. Francis and I first met twenty-five years ago when I was in grad school in Chicago and took a field study course on the rez: “Lakota-Christian Dialogue.” Like Nicholas Black Elk, the renowned shaman from the Pine Ridge, Francis had also studied both traditions—with Gilbert Yellow Hawk, a Lakota medicine man, and at an Episcopalian seminary. [End Page 102] The “dialogue” course met in Francis’ small wooden home. In the first session someone asked him how the Lakota viewed all the Wasi’chus (white people) who kept coming to the Pine Ridge to help and study them. “Most of us hate white people, and with good reason,” Francis said. Then, as our discomfort bubbled up, he broke into a smile. “But don’t worry, I might forgive you.” This tension––between what we presented, as well-meaning students who sought to study Lakota culture, and what we re-presented as the descendants of those who nearly destroyed it––was always there. It still is. And it will be when I bring my own students here. Click for larger view View full resolution An hour later, I pulled off the interstate and into one of the cement teepee rest stops to use the bathroom. The parking lot was bustling with young families. Most of the cars had out-of-state plates. And it was June, so I presumed they were on vacation and on their way to the number-one tourist attraction in the state: Mount Rushmore. The granite sculpture of the four presidents—each of whose head is sixty feet high—has been...