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On a chilly mid-October day, Pourier, the First Peoples Fund president, and her colleague Lynette Two Bulls, a cultural leader from Montana, drove through sleet and snow in the Black Hills to ground a reporter in Lakota values. On the way to Black Elk Peak, a sacred site, we passed Mount Rushmore, regarded by many tribal people as a desecration of the most sacred lands. As we neared the Peak, a barricade blocked the main road. “We should have driven through it,” Pourier said wryly. “It’s our damn land!”
At Mato Paha, or Bear Butte, the grasses took on autumnal colors and fog hugged the summit. Tree branches were swaddled with prayer offerings: bright cloth bundles as far as the eye could see, filled with traditional tobacco. Many had been placed there before Sun Dance ceremonies, a summertime practice involving days of fasting that was banned by the federal government and went underground until passage of the 1978 Indian Religious Freedom Act. Two Bulls lit a prayer offering, the fragrant smoke curling with the wind. It didn’t take long to absorb a key teaching: Art and beauty are all around us.
Nurturing Talent in Kyle
Keith BraveHeart was one of many artists whose insights informed the Artspace. During his childhood in Kyle, he sketched the landscape and the people around him and showed a natural talent for art so promising that a teacher raised gas money to help him attend the Oscar Howe Summer Art Institute 300 miles away at the University of South Dakota. It is named for the artist (1915-1983) who broke the clichés of Indian art with an abstract style called “Dakota Modern.”
Today BraveHeart, a tribal Arts Laureate, is on the faculty of Oglala Lakota College and is a working artist. Storytelling imbues his painting of a 1950s blonde vacuuming a buffalo hide, oblivious to the searing history of skinned buffalo outside her window. Others, of Lakota leaders, often bear the graphic icons for Bluetooth and Wifi.
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