Cultural Heritage and
Sacred Sites: World Heritage from an Indigenous Perspective 15 May 2002 -
New York University
Presentation by Delphine Red Shirt (Transcript from audiotape by Marie-Danielle Samuel. Lakota words
not confirmed and *at times missing) Delphine Red Shirt, is an
enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe from Pine Ridge, South Dakota.
She is an author of two books: Her first book, a memoir titled: "Bead on
an Anthill: A Lakota Childhood" has been translated in German. Her second
book: "Turtle Lung Woman's Granddaughter" is an autobiographical story
told by her mother in Ms. Red Shirt's native language, Lakota. Ms. Red
Shirt is currently an adjunct professor in English at Connecticut College
and linguistics this fall at Yale University. Ms. Red Shirt is a columnist
for Indian Country Today, the nation's leading American Indian News
Source. She is a voice for Lakota people. She served as the Chairperson of
the NGO Committee on the World's Indigenous Peoples in 1995-96. She is
currently President of a nonprofit organization seeking to establish a
preparatory high school for Native American students, to be located near
the Black Hills of South Dakota, where the school has repurchased 560
acres of land.
When my Black Hills Money comes in
we will never sell these sacred
hills: a Lakota perspective. My name is Delphine Red Shirt. I was born
and raised in Nebraska and grew up on the Pine Ridge reservation in South
Dakota. My first language is Lakota. I am bilingual. I learned to speak
English in kindergarten. So again I speak primarily Lakota, my own nation,
my own culture. What I came to do tonight, I came to ask UNESCO and the
convention concerning the protection of the world cultural and natural
heritages to consider this proposal to include the all federal land
located within the Black Hills of South Dakota, a place rich with
Indigenous cultural history as a Sacred Site, specifically the connection
Indigenous peoples feel toward their homeland.
You are all visitors here in the United States, you are all immigrants,
visiting or living here to the Indigenous peoples' present. To the
Indigenous peoples' present, this is home. This is the place where we have
survived and we still feel a connection to these lands. It is important to
understand that, in order to appreciate the indigenous culture that exists
within the borders of the United States. These cultures are rich and
occupied in the past larger land bases that the government acknowledges.
These lands we, as Indigenous peoples, cannot and do not forget. They are
in our blood memory, what Scott Momaday calls blood memory. And we still
pay tribute to their sacredness for our own survival. The Black Hills are
such a place for my people, the Lakota. If you travel west past the
Mississippi and the Missouri rivers, and most New Yorkers don't think that
the United States exist past the Mississippi river, you will find my
homeland in the Great Plains region of the United States. That is my
homeland. There I feel connected to the land, "*
." we call it, to the
four sacred directions that we pray to each day, to the sky and the earth.
So when I, as an Indigenous person, rise in the morning, I face the first
light wherever that light appears. And I travel often, so I look for it. I
open my hotel room window and I look for the first light. When I see it, I
greet it first to the west, "wiyoh peyata", and then to the north "waziyata"
and then again to the east and then to the south, and then to "*
.", the
sky and "*
" the earth. It is the way we pray, we connect to the four
elements and to the sky and to the earth.
Our origin story says that we come from the He sappa, the Black Hills,
located in the western most part of the state of South Dakota. The Black
Hills are forests of yellow pines. The highest peak rises 7, 242 feet
above the plains. That is my home. Our origin story tells us that we
emerge from the Black Hills, from a cave there known as Wind Cave National
Park. Interestingly, Wind Cave National Park contains the world's six
longest caves and we Lakota say that is where we originated from, perhaps
as long ago as 11,000 years. Think about that! 11,000 years
The He sappa
or Black Hills of South Dakota are a cultural landscape familiar to many
Northern Plains Indigenous peoples but particularly for my people, the
Lakota. We are the Indigenous peoples whose leaders Crazy Horse, Red Cloud
and Sitting Bull fought for the return of these lands taken by the federal
government. The He sappa or the Black hills are hills formed by granite
and limestone, 110 miles by 40 miles. They sit alone in a peculiar
isolation on an otherwise flat and empty plain. They rise out of the
plain. It is here that Lakota people, perhaps for 11,000 years, sought
shelter from the artic wind in winter and waited for the red buffalo grass
in the springtime "*
.". In these hills the young men sought visions in
the early summer on the hillsides of these sacred hills, in late summer
and early autumn, the Lakota women and children harvested berries and
other foods and our medicine men and women harvested medicinal plants and
herbs from these hills. We followed the bear, the "matho" and whatever the
bear ate, we picked as well because that was our medicine. It was in these
hills that our people and other northern plains Indigenous peoples lived
in harmony and balance with nature and everything good that came from the
natural environment in these hills The people still continue to this day
to make pilgrimage into the Hills to gather herbs and plants for medicinal
use. Tradition, ritual and prayer continue in these He sappa for my people
as well as other indigenous tribes located around the periphery of the
Black Hills. It is a place that we Lakota call the heart of everything
that is, it is a place that we as Indigenous peoples perceive and
rightfully so as sacred, "Wakhan", sacred.
Within the Black Hills is Mt Rushmore, considered the world's greatest
mountain carving. Ironically Mt Rushmore does not in any way acknowledge
the Indigenous peoples that have lived there for centuries in the Black
Hills. Archeological digs within the sacred Black Hills confirm 11,000
years of human habitation and migration in the area at a site in the Black
Hills called Pine Bluff near Hot Springs, South Dakota. Pine Bluff extends
for miles and includes thousands of stone tipi rings, Indigenous burial
grounds, prehistoric trails and bison jumps. The bison or buffalo has been
a sacred animal to us. These bison jumps confirm the hunting of this great
animal for 11,000 years. This area in the Black Hills has the largest
wooly mammoth bones in the world. It is designated a national natural
landmark, but it, in no way, gives special consideration to Indigenous
peoples who still reside within a hundred miles of the site.
My hope is that, if it is designated as Sacred Site by the world community
thru UNESCO, Indigenous Peoples will have freer and greater access to this
site for cultural and spiritual renewal. We, as Lakota people, have fought
thru the court system in our own country and were awarded in 1980 by the
US Supreme Court which ruled on a treaty signed in 1868 which included the
Black Hills as part of a reservation for our people, that is until gold
was discovered in the Black Hills. The US Supreme Court concluded in 1980
that the Black Hills region was taken from us illegally by an 1877 Act of
Congress. In that decision the Court said that the 1877 Act ignored the
stipulation of the Fort Laramie Treaty that any session of the land would
have to be joined in by 2/3 of the adult males, and the Supreme Court
awarded us 105 millions for the illegal taking of the Black hills from us.
We continue to this day to reject the payment of the 105 millions which
has now grown considerably. Although we live on the Pine Ridge Reservation
and on most Sioux reservations
we, in Pine Ridge, live in the poorest
county in the United States, we are not interested in the money awarded by
the Federal Government. We are interested only in the return of the land,
it is to us an ancient spiritual area. And I urge the world community thru
UNESCO to include in the World Heritage list the Black Hills, the He sappa,
so that we, as Lakota and other Northern Plains intertribal peoples, can
regain access to the federal land located within the Black Hills. And I
say federal land, we are not interested in privately held land at this
point. So that we may really use these lands for our use, for our rituals
of renewal and survival.
The mention of the school in the Black Hills: We purchased 560 acres of
land so we may establish a preparatory school, the second of its kind in
the nation without church or government funding so that we can re-teach
the cultural values to the Northern Plains peoples, to their children,
including language.
I feel very fortunate to know my language intimately. I can speak it
conversationally, I can think in it if I choose, I can pray in it. I
learned it because my grandfather who lived with us could not speak
English so we as children had to learn both languages.
Now I feel it is up to me to pass that knowledge on to the younger
generations, because a culture cannot exist without a language. It is how
you define your god. We say in our language "*
", that is our god.
"*
." is "that which moves, moves", it is the energy in all living
things. I would like to say that Einstein was a Lakota. With that I would
like to again urge the world community thru UNESCO to include on the World
Heritage list the Black hills, the He sappa. "*
." Thank you.
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