The site of Pe’ Sla has been privately owned since 1876, but indigenous people have always been free to worship there. All that could change on August 25, when the land is set to be auctioned off.
Editor's note: Pe' Sla sits on 1,942 acres of land in the Black Hills of South Dakota. It is sacred to the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota Sioux people, who consider it the center of the world. At 10:00 in the morning on August 25, Pe' Sla is scheduled to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. If this happens, these indigenous groups may lose access to their sacred land and conventional development (think ranches and roads) is likely to begin. The Sioux are now working to raise money so that they can buy the land themselves. Here, activist and author Winona LaDuke explains what it feels like to hold this land sacred.
As the wind breathes out of Wind Cave in my face, I am reminded of the creation of humans and my own small place in this magnificent world. Wind Cave National Park is named for the Cave itself, called Washun Niya, or the Breathing Hole of Mother Earth, by the Lakota people. In this creation story, it is from here that they emerged to this world.
It is a complex cave system. According to scientists, we may only have a sense of 5 percent of the cave’s volume and breadth, and likely even less of its power. In the vernacular of some, this might be known as the “known unknown.” To most indigenous peoples, there is an understanding of the “great mystery.”
So it is that in 2012, a time of change and transformation in American politics—and also according to the Mayan calendar—we come face to face with the smallness and the greatness of humans in the Black Hills. A most sacred place, Pe’ Sla, the center of the Lakota Universe, is up for sale, and values and questions clash.
Lakota scholar Chase Iron Eyes explains how indigenous people see this sacred place:
Pe’ Sla, to the Lakota, is the place where Morning Star, manifested as a meteor, fell to earth to help the Lakota by killing a great bird, which had taken the lives of seven women. and Morning Star’s descent created the wide-open, uncharacteristic bald spot in the middle of the forested Black Hills. On American maps this is called Old Baldy. … The Morning Star placed the spirits of those seven women in the sky as the constellation “Pleiades” or “The Seven Sisters.”
Yet, on August 25, the Center of the Heart of Everything That Is will come up in on the auction block at Rapid City’s Ramkota Inn. It is destined to be diced into five 300-acre tracts, where developers plan to build ranchettes and a possible road through the heart of what has been, until now, a relatively un-desecrated sacred site. The land is owned by Leonard and Margaret Reynolds, who grazed cattle there and allowed native peoples open access.
“We didn’t even know it was going to be sold,” Debra White Plume, a Lakota from Manderson, tells me. “We heard nothing about it until we saw the auction announcement.”
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