Understanding
"Sacred" Sites.
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Many
people wanted to virtually join the protest. Andrew Cullen/Reuters
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In recent weeks, protests against the building of the Dakota
Access Pipeline across North Dakota have escalated. Native American
elders, families and children have set up tepees and tents on a
campsite near the pipeline's path in the hope of stopping its construction.
Dave
Archambault Jr., the chairman of the Standing
Rock Sioux Tribe that is leading the efforts to stop the pipeline,
summed up what is at the heart of the issue. In a two-minute
statement before the United Nations' Human Rights Council in
Geneva, he said that "oil companies are causing deliberate destruction
of our sacred places."
As a Native American scholar of environmental history and religious
studies, I am often asked what Native American leaders mean when
they say that certain landscapes are "sacred places" or "sacred
sites."
What makes a mountain, hill or prairie a "sacred" place?
I learned from my grandparents about the sacred areas within
Blackfeet tribal territory
in Montana and Alberta, which is not far from Lakota tribal territory
in the Dakotas.
My grandparents said that sacred areas are places set aside
from human presence. They identified two overarching types of sacred
place: those set aside for the divine, such as a dwelling place,
and those set aside for human remembrance, such as a burial or battle
site.
In my forthcoming
book "Invisible Reality," I contemplate those stories that my
grandparents shared about Blackfeet religious concepts and the interconnection
of the supernatural and natural realms.
My grandparents' stories revealed that the Blackfeet believe
in a universe where supernatural beings exist within the same time
and space as humans and our natural world. The deities could simultaneously
exist in both a visible and invisible reality. That is, they could
live unseen, but known, within a physical place visible to humans.
One such place for the Blackfeet is Ninaiistako or Chief Mountain
in Glacier National Park. This mountain is the home of Ksiistsikomm
or Thunder, a primordial deity. My grandparents spoke of how this
mountain is a liminal space, a place between two realms.
Blackfeet tribal citizens can go near this sacred place to perceive
the divine, but they cannot go onto the mountain because it is the
home of a deity. Elders of the Blackfeet tribe believe that human
activity, or changing the physical landscape in these places, disrupts
the lives of deities. They view this as sacrilegious and a desecration.
Sacred places, however, are not always set aside from humanity's
use. Some sacred places are meant for constant human interaction.
Anthropologist
Keith Basso argued in his seminal work "Wisdom
Sits in Places" that one purpose of sacred places was to perfect
the human mind. The Western Apache elders with whom Basso worked
told him that when someone repeated the names and stories of their
sacred places, they were understood as "repeating the speech of
our ancestors."
For these Apache elders, places were not just names and stories
their landscapes were living, sacred texts. As these elders
traveled from place to place speaking the names and stories of their
sacred text, they told Basso that their minds became more "resilient,"
more "smooth" and able to withstand adversity.
At different national and international venues, Lakota leader
Archambault has stated that the Lakota view the area near the potential
construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline as both a "sacred place"
and a "burial site," or as both a place set aside from human presence
and a place of human reverence.
Lakota scholar Vine Deloria Jr. described
the "sacred stones" in North Dakota in his book "The
World We Used to Live In" as having the ability of "forewarning
of events to come."
Deloria described how Lakota religious leaders went to these
stones in the early morning to read their messages. Deloria shared
the experiences of an Episcopal minister from 1919.
"A rock of this kind was formerly on Medicine Hill near
Cannon Ball Sub-station.
Old Indians came to me
and said that the lightning would strike someone in camp that
day, for a picture (wowapi) on this holy rock indicated such an
event.
And the lightning did strike a tent in camp and
nearly killed a woman.
I have known several similar things,
equally foretelling events to come, I can not account for it."
Deloria
explained that it was "birds, directed by the spirit of the
place, [that] do the actual sketching of the pictures." The Lakota
named this area Inyanwakagapi for the large stones that served as
oracles for their people. The Americans renamed it Cannon Ball.
Historians, anthropologists and religious thinkers continue
to learn and write about Native American religious ideas of
places. In so doing, they seek to analyze complex religious concepts
of transformation and transcendence that these places evoke.
However, despite their contributions to the academic interpretation
of religion, these understandings do not often translate into protection
of Native American places for their religious significance. As legal
scholar Stephen Pevar tells us:
"
there is no federal statue that expressly protects
Indian sacred sites.
In fact, the federal government knowingly
desecrates sites."
In the past year we have seen protests over the potential desecration
of sacred places at Mauna Kea in Hawaii (over the construction
of another telescope on a sacred volcano), Oak
Flats in Arizona (over a potential copper mine on sacred land)
and now at Standing
Rock in North Dakota.
William
Graham, a former dean of the Harvard Divinity School, wrote:
"Religion
will long continue to be a critical factor
in individual, social, and political life around the world, and
we need to understand it."
The intimate connection between landscape and religion is at
the center of Native American societies. It is the reason that thousands
of Native Americans from across the United States and indigenous
peoples from around the world have traveled to the windswept prairies
of North Dakota.
But, despite our 200-plus years of contact, the United States
has yet to begin to understand the uniqueness of Native American
religions and ties to the land. And until this happens, there will
continue to be conflicts over religious ideas of land and landscape,
and what makes a place sacred.
Rosalyn R. LaPier is a visiting assistant professor at Harvard
University.
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