Tatanga Ishtima hinkna Įyá Waká: Sleeping Buffalo and Medicine Rock and Assiniboine Dislocation and Persistence

Abstract

Tatanga Ishtima hinkna Įyá Waká:Sleeping Buffalo and Medicine Rock and Assiniboine Dislocation and Persistence Joshua Horowitz (bio) On the crest of a ridge near Cree Crossing of the Milk River is a group of glacial boulders which from a distance resemble a herd of sleeping buffalo. They were held sacred by the Indians and one in particular was thought to be the leader. It is now part of this monument. … The tribeshave legends of the herds' origins, and long before the white men came sacrificed possessions to the Sleeping Buffalo. a person reading these words, inscribed on a plaque that was created by the National Register of Historic Places in 1995 and placed at a National Park Service site called the Sleeping Buffalo and Medicine Rock on Highway 2 in northern Montana, for the first time might assume the buffalo and local Indigenous peoples have vanished from the area. As the plaque mentions briefly, these two boulders were relocated from their original site, where they once sat among a herd of buffalo rocks at a place that Assiniboine people call Cree Crossing.1 What the plaque does not state is that they were moved at various times in the twentieth century, eventually being confined to the current site in the 1980s and then inducted into the National Historic Registry in 1995. As a result of settler displacement, the rocks survived three forced migrations. Settlers first removed them from their original resting place during a development project on private property in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.2 At that time, they were placed in a local city park. Then, twice later, in the late twentieth century, they were moved again to open locations along the interstate highway. An additional plaque at the site quotes a local Indigenous view of the two rocks. On it, Pat Chief Stick is quoted as saying, "These rocks are sacred, just like our old people. The mountains, the rocks, earth, water, all the mountains, all the ecology, and Indian religion. They are all connected."3 An important distinction between these two excerpts is that Chief Stick uses present tense, whereas the previous quote describes "Indians" and their [End Page 123] practices in the past tense. Local Indigenous peoples continue to revere the Sleeping Buffalo and Medicine Rocks. ________ Sites such as the Sleeping Buffalo and Medicine Rocks, held sacred by Assiniboine people and other local Indigenous peoples, have helped to keep bodies of cultural and environmental knowledge alive despite colonization, settlement, national borders, and reservation systems. Sleeping Buffalo and Medicine Rocks' original location during the prereservation era was important not only to the Assiniboine but also to other tribes such as the Cree, Blackfeet, Chippewa, Gros Ventre, Crow, Northern Cheyenne, and Sioux.4 Assiniboine people's well-being depends on their abilities to interact with the Makoche Wakan (Sacred Mother Earth), including rocks, springs, plants, animals, stars, and the weather. For the Assiniboine, sacred sites inform how they see themselves as a community belonging to a homeland. Heard primarily through Assiniboine voices, Assiniboine relationships to places retain significant cultural and historical meaning, as well as remain sources of medicine and spiritual power. The relationships between sacred sites such as the Sleeping Buffalo and Medicine Rocks, with animals such as the buffalo, and between Assiniboine people demonstrate a mutual interdependence and parallel histories, as both Assiniboine people and these two sacred rocks faced similar consequences of American and Canadian colonization, settlement, relocations, and confinement. Subsequently, Assiniboine people express a responsibility not only to their own sense of community but also to the lands they inhabit, to animals, and to sacred sites. Assiniboine people's relationships to places remain integral to their own sense of existence as a distinct people. By focusing on the Sleeping Buffalo and Medicine Rocks as an example of a central and important Assiniboine sacred site, I illustrate how dispersed Assiniboine communities across several reservations share a sense of commonality, kinship ties, and identity through their relationship to ancestral lands. Sacred sites link Assiniboine people between communities and their relationships to places, animals, plants, weather, stars, rocks, and water, despite the geopolitical constructions of reserves in Canada and reservations in the...