Wado Yona & Kay for being our brother/sister/friends.

Yona - at Indian Stuff

THE GIANT PAPERWEIGHT
On the South Dakota and Wyoming border a range of mountains, the Black Hills, rises above the Great Plains. This mountain range is Sacred to traditional people of many nations. It is called the Paha Sapa. The old people believed the Paha Sapa was never to be disturbed by human beings. In 1873 a military expedition including the Seventh Cavalry led by Colonel George A. Custer discovered gold in the Black Hills.

The gold called miners from the eastern states. Since then gold, uranium, and other rare metals have been found in and stripped from the Paha Sapa. Traditional people have always fought mining in the Black Hills. For more than a hundred and fifty years war chiefs like Crazy Horse and Gall and recently Indian political activists including Russell Means and John Trudell have opposed the desecration of these holy mountains. Custer and the Seventh Cavalry paid for that discovery with their lives at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. That was the Indian’s final victory. The Paha Sapa has been assaulted at Washington D.C.’s whim. The final indignity to the sacred mountains began in 1925.

That year Guzon Borglum, an American sculptor, was commissioned by the Federal government to design an epic monument as a memorial to the best of American ideals. The government picked a site in the Black Hills to build this monument. The federally approved spot was called Mount Rushmore. Borglum believed that the best America had to offer was represented by four presidents: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. In 1925 Borglum designed a monument and announced that he would carve it onto the face of Mount Rushmore. Four gleaming portraits were scraped, bulldozed, and dynamited into the Paha Sapa.

The memorial, finished in 1941, can be seen by tourists approaching the Black Hills hours before they arrive. This result, after sixteen years of near heroic labor by unemployed miners-turned-sculptors and by Borglum’s fanatical belief in engineering, defiled the Paha Sapa. Borglum’s work is both a work of genius and an epic piece of engineering design. Native people believe the monument – as impressive as it is – is a scar on the face of Mother Earth. It is noted that no federal officials bothered to ask tribal leaders if Borglum could go ahead and carve statues of four white men on their holy mountain. The four alien presidents were no heroes to Red people.

The Lakotah people filed court actions demanding that work be stopped on the memorial. Once the carving was finished other legal claims were filed asking for financial compensation for the theft of the heart of the Black Hills. Tribal elders stated that Borglum’s stone portraits desecrated the Paha Sapa, Sacred land.

In the 1970’s A.I.M. (the American Indian Movement) and other native political activists tried to take the Black Hills back from the federal government. This action was one of many that ended in the deaths of two F.B.I. agents, the deaths of several Indian warriors – including Anna Mae Aquash, a Micmac woman from Canada – on the Pine Ridge reservation. One activist, Leonard Peltier, has served more than a quarter of a century in federal prison accused of crimes the government prosecutor admits Peltier could not have committed. Another activist called Mount Rushmore a “big paperweight.”

One man’s shrine is another man’s cemetery, except that now a few white folks are also getting tired of having to look at this big paperweight curio. We can’t get away from it. You could make a lovely mountain into a great paperweight, but can you make it into a wild, natural mountain again?

I don’t think you have the know-how for that.

To see an alternative idea to honor our "Founding Fathers", go to the SONS OF THE EARTH website (local men's drumming circle) at www.orgsites.com/fl/sons and see the Page entitled Ethics:

or simply double-click: THIS MS Word file

WHEN MOTHER SHRUGGED

In the Beginning - the Hills

Stone
the very heart of stone
the heart of Creation
an egg in the center
of the Mother's heart.

Stone
a belly of stone
pregnant at the Center of the Earth
warped by the Mother's labor
forced toward the sky
the ever blue sky.

Stone
a dome of stone
the Mother's ribs
bared to the drying winds
of Creation.

Stone heights
crowded with spectral trees
cedar and juniper and spruce
ponderosa and lodge pole pine
alive and green and nearly black at their base.

Our Mother's stone ribs
bursting above prairie grass
and primal Buffalo herds
hunted by dancing dire wolves
on time's First day.

the Paha Sapa - the Center of the Earth

Earth's Red children
knew their Mother's stone belly
belonged to Her alone
full of the spirits
of Creation.

Eagle
flew above the Mother's ribs
and seeing other horizons
Eagle gave sight
to Earth's children.

Earth's First children
worshipped their Mother's stone belly
and Her children belonged to only Her
one part of the hoop
that was the arc of Creation.

Bear
walked the flanks
of the Earth's belly
and Bear taught Earth's children
to search their hearts.

Earth's Red children
lived on their Mother's stony sides
and were at home
singing the songs
of Creation.

Coyote
told the stories of Creation
and digging in the Earth Herself
Coyote taught Earth's children
to laugh.

Earth's First children
loved their Mother's stony womb
the beginning of beginnings
full of the Mother's life
the stirring of Creation.

Buffalo
saw horizons and Creation's center
found laughter in the stone
and fed the Mother's children
on wisdom.

Earth's First children
knew their Mother's stone belly
and knowing her they loved her
and were as one
in the hoop of Creation.

Earth's Red children
named the place
the Center of Creation
their Mother's stone womb
the Paha Sapa.

The Winds Blow

There are days when the sky is no longer blue
and the waters are still
and the wind has forgotten how to blow
there would be another vision
of Paha Sapa.

In the First summer
of Columbus
the winds changed
clouds were blown ashore
and the sky turned no longer blue.

Creation was changed
for a time
Red blood ran on the Mother's breast
and Earth's children were forced
from their Mother's sacred paths.

Winds were choked
and rivers ran with heart's blood
the sky was no longer blue
and Creation
felt the birth of change.

At First there was coffee and sugar
glass beads and red trade cloth
silver bells and milk-cows
and bridles for mystic elk-dogs
young men learned to ride.

Coffee turned to whiskey
and red trade cloth was twisted into nooses
while silver bells were recast into lead bullets
and mystic elk-dogs became horses
to ride into ambush.

One by one
by band by tribe by nation
Earth's Red children
were made to witness
the birth of change.

First the Taino and the Arawak
the Miami and the Massachusett
the Haudenosaunee and Abenak and Tocobaga
were forced
from their Mother's sacred paths.

Mountain men
became whiskey sellers and Buffalo hunters
became regiments of blue-backed horsemen
before the town-builders and plowmen
tore the Mother's skin.

The only good Indian -
our mothers were raped and our sisters were sold -
is a dead Indian,
and our children learned
to hate themselves.

In eighteen and sixty eight
while the winds could still whisper,
rivers could run
and the sky was still blue
Earth's Red children
were made signatory to a promise.

A promise was sent from Washington
that the Paha Sapa - the Black Hills
now called Wyoming territory
was forever Indian land.

And would be forever
as long as the rivers ran
The skies stayed blue
and the wind whispered
above the prairie grass

Paha Sapa was Red land.

The only promise that was ever kept
was signed long before
and that promise was
to make every good Indian
a dead Indian.

Treaties were broken
while documents moldered ignored,
whiskey was traded while lands were stolen,
and Buffalo herds were magically turned
into mountains of rib bones.

Long Hair paid an installment on the Paha Sapa
to Ta'Sunke Witko at the Greasy Grass.
Wovoka danced the Ghost Dance
and cavalry bullets
shredded painted linen shirts.

Earth Mother's Lakota children
Santee and Brule
were buried at Pine Ridge
in long graves
gouged from her skin.

The prairie winds' whispered songs were stopped
rivers forgot to run
sister sky was no longer blue
and Earth Mother's Red childrenp
hawked baskets by the side of the road.

Borglum's Bad Sculpture

The Superintendent
of the South Dakota Historical Society
conceived almost full-blown
a plan for an eternal shrine to America's democracy
to be cut from the Paha Sapa.

So, Gutzon Borglum came to the Black Hills
with an army of stone-cutters
an army of jack hammers and rope slings
and a grant from the people of America.

Sixty foot faces
ripped from the sides of the Paha Sapa
stone portraits of four white men
slashed into the Mother's stone womb
and nobody asked the Lakota.

First

there was Washington who couldn't tell a lie
who marched into the presidency
over burnt Haudenosaunee towns
and might have starved his troops at Valley Forge
except for the Oneida
who fed them there.

Second, Jefferson

who disowned his slave children
and their black mother
and proclaimed inalienable rights
- for all free white men
and stole a constitution built on the five bound arrows
of the free Haudenosaunee
for white slave holders.

Third

Borglum carved Lincoln all of sixty feet tall
a log cabin boy made good
- the great emancipator
and the day after he signed the Emancipation Proclamation
Lincoln signed a second edict
condemning thirty eight innocent Santee elders to hang.

Then, Roosevelt

who could not bring himself
to shoot an old Bear
tied to a tree
but held no compunctions
about revoking treaties
by the dozens
or stealing acres
by the thousands
to turn our grandparents' graves
into National Parks.

These are the best America has to offer

these are the brightest
of America's stars,

and Borglum carved them
on the Paha Sapa.

No women were carved there

no Emily Dickinson
no Susan B. Anthony
no Africans sketched in stonee
no room for Frederick Douglass
none for Sally Hemmings
on this shrine to America's democracy.

None of Mother Earth's First children
were tattooed on her stone ribs
no Ta'Sunke Witko
or Molly Brant
no Tecumseh
or Anna Mae Aquash
or Red Cloud
or Peltier.

There were no Red children there.

It took Borglum
six and a half years
to desecrate the stone sides of the Paha Sapa
and turn Creation's belly
into sixty foot white totems.

It took six and a half years
to scar the Mother's stone womb
and gouge her sides
with graven effigies
on this captors' shrine
to their own democracy.

And so
renamed Mount Rushmore -
Paha Sapa stands above
the drying prairie winds
at the Center of the Earth
wrapped in red ribbons for the summer's tourists.

A heroic gallery of four white men
no heroes to Red children
glare down from the Paha Sapa
in alien reproof
to the Lakota.

Carvings of the best and brightest
were tacked to the Mother's flank forever
for all time
as glazed white streaks
scratched into eternity.

The Mother Shrugs

But I know another vision
a vision of Red days that have been
and Red days still coming
there is another vision
of the Paha Sapa.

I remember it this way
a vision - a dream
of healing the Mother's scarred belly
a second vision
of the Paha Sapa.

On another day
a day not too long from now
in the center of Creation
the Mother felt her Red children's tears
falling like rain.

On that day not too long from today
our Mother heard our sorrow
and She knew the day had come
to stretch her bones.

The Earth shrugged
and the Earth turned

Eagle flew above the clouds
while Bear dug with his long curved claws
into the Earth's center.

Our Mother shrugged her shoulders
and shook out her long living hair
to let it fly on the prairie wind
because those winds have not forgotten
how to blow.

Mother stretched her arms
and scratched her bones
where she itched
from Borglum's stone saws
and his pneumatic drills.

Earth cracked and tore
the frames of heaven
loose in the wind
you could hear Coyote laughing
as the boulders flew.

Like dust that clings to stone
effigy faces snapped and fell
dissolved into broken pieces of the brightest and the best of town destroyer
and liar
of land stealer
and Santee killer.

It took a few seconds or maybe even less
the echoes passed
and stone chips settled at the base of the Paha Sapa
because Mother had shrugged

Like a rain cleaning dust
from last winter's stones
alien faces were ground into past memory
and our mother's belly
stood proudly above the prairie grass.

Did you see it ?
Have you heard its echo
rolling above the dust
asked Buffalo
who stood as if forever.

The sky was as blue a sky as ever has been
the winds whispered the songs of Creation
the water smiled in its banks
Mother's Red children
kept safe at her feet until forever.

Paha Sapa - stone Center of the Earth

Heart of Creation
an egg in the Center of the Mother's heart
as one in the hoop of forever.