Pilgrimage II, Day 3 - Hope in the Face of Tragedy

Pilgrimage II, Day 3 - Wounded Knee, America’s Shadow

The site of the Wounded Knee massacre is desolate. A handful of vendors seek to sell dreamcatchers, swarming around newly arriving visitors holding their wares, swearing to their authenticity and value. A couple of thin dogs roam the parking lot where the large red signs lay out the details of the horrific events which played out here in 1890. At the bottom of the sign, a spray painted protest demands LAND BACK.

There is a sadness about this place, a heaviness which is palpable. This is where America’s Shadow is unable to hide. As desperate as it is, this is a place all Americans should visit, a story all Americans must learn. The wounds are still fresh in this place. There are stories to be told and heard, grief yet to be expressed.

 

Pilgrimage II, Day 3 - Whispers of the Dead

The cemetery at Wounded Knee lies atop a small hill overlooking the massacre site. We would later be told by a tour guide at Red Cloud School that Indians bury their dead on hills to replicate a more ancient practice of platform burials, removing their bodies from predators on the ground and placing the deceased closer to the sky where the relatives could speak to them.

The cemetery is still an active burial site and American flags for the upcoming Memorial Day observance could be seen at a number of graves. The Lakota were a warrior people. Ironically, these latter day braves would serve in the same military that decimated their peoples over time, the Wounded Knee Massacre one of the darker moments of that sad history.

In the center of the cemetery is a granite monument to the dead containing some of the names of the massacre’s victims. All of the names are male adults though women and children were among the dead, their resting places elsewhere among the graves here in mostly unmarked burial sites.

I spent a good bit of my time here praying. A lament flowed from me unbidden. I could feel the immense grief all around me, the unhealed wounds, the pain of the Lakota people whose generational trauma plays out in a number of pathologies from diabetes rates to suicides. But it also plays out in the disowned darkness of the soul of an America who has never come to grips with its immense and complex Shadow. Whatever else this is, it is a part of our story as a people. We are all implicated by the depravity of the events which occurred here.

I hear my own words within: I am sorry. This was wrong. We must repent. This can never happen again. But I also know that before anything remotely resembling healing can occur, we must first own our Shadow.

These words cannot touch the yawning black hole of pain and degradation that is still present in this place. But being aware of it and willing to be present with that discomfort is a first step.

 

 

Pilgrimage II, Day 3 - When Art Speaks Pride and Hope

In Pine Ridge, South Dakota, at Maȟpíya Lúta (formerly Red Cloud School) an art project has provided a means for its Lakota students to insist upon the dignity they deserve and express the hopes they hold. A summer art program provided them cameras to create images they found powerful, a darkroom to develop negatives which then used photo-sensitive cloth to create large quilts displaying their visions.

The result is stunning.

There is a reason authoritarian systems almost immediately shut down artistic expression and schools willing to look critically at their own societies and imagine a better world. Maȟpíya Lúta reminds us why both are essential to a healthy people.

 

Pilgrimage II, Day 3 - The Holy in Its Many images

At the MAHPÍYA LÚTA (Red Cloud School) on the Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation, a chapel at the campus center offers a vision of the Holy in which two different cultures meet. Founded by the Jesuits and staffed in part by Franciscan sisters, the 135 year old school, once a Catholic residential school, offers a cultural immersion approach to education in which its lower grades are currently taught in the Lakota language. The goal is to have the entire K-12 taught in Lakota by the time the current 8^th graders graduate.

This cultural richness is also reflected in the Holy Rosary Chapel. Images of the Virgin Mary and the Stations of the Cross are distinctly indigenous. The stain glass windows bear Lakota symbols. And the circular confessional shares the round shape of the nearby sweat lodge. Both spaces provide purification to those who enter.

Our tour guide, a graduate of the school and now its public relations officer, described herself as a Lakota Catholic. Not either/or, both. I wonder how many of us can relate to this blending of all of who we are as human beings in the expression of our faith.

The image of the Creator is everywhere we look if we are willing to see it. That it would be portrayed through the cultural lens of those create sacred spaces is hardly surprising. And when two cultures come together to engage such undertakings, the result is often quite beautiful.

 

Pilgrimage II, Day 3 - An Unlikely Shrine

Just outside Alliance, Nebraska, the passerby might note an unusual collection of familiar objects. At first glance, it looks much like the Stonehenge monument on the Salisbury Plain in England. But this isn’t the Motherland. And these aren’t sarsens or bluestones standing erect and balanced atop one another.

This roadside attraction is called Carhenge and the entire display was created out of old automobiles. At a very basic level, it’s a shrine to our consumer culture’s love affair with the automobile. With all due respect to its creator, it does actually replicate the placement of its inspiration’s stones including its orientation to the solstices. But who would have guessed you’d run into this in the middle of the rolling hills and cornfields of Nebraska?

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 Harry Scott Coverston

 Orlando, Florida

  frharry@cfl.rr.com

 hcoverston.orlando@gmail.com

 If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

Those who believe religion and politics aren't connected don't understand either. – Mahatma Gandhi

For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d?  - Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. - Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993)

       © Harry Coverston, 2025

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