Origins, Pt. 15

As the car passed through the dusty nowhere of Interior, South Dakota I saw a lone, old Lakota sitting in front of a boarded up wooden building. He waved at us as we passed onto the Pine Ridge Reservation. We headed due south through jagged badlands and short grass prairie dotted with rusted trailer homes, abandoned cars, and circling hawks. En route a pheasant came out of nowhere and was nailed by Shane who was driving. Out the back window I could see colorful feathers briefly twirl through the air before hitting the crumbling BIA blacktop. After about an hour of driving we arrived at Wounded Knee. To the northwest in Montana you find a National Park Service run battlefield commemorating the spot where Custer fell. Down here on the Rez, at a place where a couple hundred unarmed elderly people, women and children were slaughtered by the US Army a couple days after Christmas 1890, there were only handpainted signs to mark the turn off. We parked and walked to the top of the hill. A full-blood teen boy sat bored on the church steps wearing a red Michael Jordan t-shirt. We walked around the concrete marker denoting the mass grave. The wind was blowing hard in the bright mid-afternoon May sun. Otherwise, all was silence. You could see to far horizons in all directions. The land was ragged, open and poor. Actually, America's poorest county with the highest unemployment rate in the nation every time the statistics are updated. A woman came around the corner: "Would you like to buy this dreamcatcher?", she asked me. Without even thinking about it I handed over 15 dollars. She smiled and said, "I will say a prayer for you all". It went something like "Lord, look kindly on these young people. They tell us that the whites are not all bad. For in their eyes I see that they are here to learn." We turned and walked back down to the cottonwood tree where the car was parked. Shane said, "I feel like we really didn't belong there." Ryan and I concurred.