HOME AGAIN, AND A LITTLE SMARTER

NEBRASKA SUNRISE

THE SAND HILLS

LAKOTA MUSEUM, CHAMBERLAIN, NEBRASKA

ST. JOSEPHS INDIAN SCHOOL AND MUSEUM

THE SACRED CIRCLE OF THE LAKOTA'S

SACRED CIRCLE OF THE SIOUX EXPLAINED

DUST STORM ON THE PRAIRIE

Thursday, 10:00 AM, Bayfield.  51 degrees F at the Ferry Dock, 48 on the back porch.  Wind SW, with occasional strong gusts.  The sky is clear, the humidity 52% and the barometer steady, at 29.59".
The snow is virtually gone, it has not rained, and it is becoming very dry, with a considerable danger of forest fires.  The crocuses are popping up.
   We arrived home about eight o'clock yesterday evening.  It was a quick, rather exhausting trip to Denver to visit family, but we had a fine time there, as well as both going and returning.
   Returning, we drove US Hwy. 83 north from I 80, at North Platte, Nebraska through the Sand Hills to I90 in South Dakota, and then on to Minnesota and Wisconsin.  We had intended to stop at some of the wildlife refuges in the Sand Hills but we saw very few migrating waterfowl so did not bother.  That gave us time to stop in South Dakota at the Akta Lakota Museum and Cultural Center of St. Joseph's Indian School in Chamberlain, which we have been wanting to do for some time.  This is an amazing not-so-small museum, filled with original Indian artwork and cultural objects, and which tells the history of the Akta tribe of the Lakota Sioux Indians.  The Lakota and other Sioux Indians are the fabled horse horse warriors and buffalo hunters of the Great Plains.  If you have the opportunity to visit, you will not be disappointed.
   The museum is affiliated with St. Joseph's Indian School, a Catholic residential school which for almost a century has served the Lakota Indians, offering a safe haven and good education for Indian children from poor or disfunctional families.  It educates them not only in a contemporary sense, but gives them back their own cultural identities, so often lost in the tumult of Indian transition to modern society.  An annual pow wow is held in September of each year, and we will try to get to one, and also tour the school campus.
   The Catholic Church has been very adept at emphasizing the positive aspects of pre-modern cultures, including religious beliefs and ceremonies, and co-opting them into Christianity.  The Sacred Circle of the Sioux Indians is celebrated here along with other relevant customs and beliefs, and a representation of it has been built onto the museum. The Sacred Circle celebrates the four directions, and the earth and the heavens.  It encompasses the future, the past, the animals and the seasons, Mother Earth and the Great Spirit, into a coherent belief and value system that was relevant to their pre-modern society and can remain relevant today.
   Traveling east in South Dakota and into southern Minnesota, one transitions from cattle and grazing lands into corn and wheat land, and upon entering the latter we immediately were enveloped in dusty clouds of topsoil blowing off the vast fields that have been fitted for planting, but are still bare.  In places the dust was so thick that visibility was very poor.  This went on intermittently for hundreds of miles.  It reminded both Joan and myself of the last days of the Dust Bowl era, in the 1940's, both of us remembering black clouds of blowing topsoil from desiccated Great Plains wheat fields that actually darkened the sun, and dirtied clean wash drying on wash lines as far as a thousand miles from the source. The native prairie sod should never have been broken.  But, there was neither individual nor collective wisdom enough in the 1920's to prevent the Dust Bowl of the 1930's and '40's.
   Yet again I remember  the Germanic complaint of my Milwaukee youth: "Ja, Ja, Charlie...Vee get so soon olt und so late schmart!"