Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Summer 1997
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 3/4, Summer/Fall 1997, pp. 185-212.
Abstract
The Black Hills area is widely recognized as sacred in the context of traditional Lakota and Cheyenne belief systems. Questions arise, however, regarding the authenticity and historical depth of these beliefs.1 Some researchers assert that the concept of the sacred Black Hills is little more than a twentieth century scheme to promote tourism or part of a legal strategy to gain the return of Black Hills lands to Lakota and Cheyenne tribal governments.2 While many Lakotas and Cheyennes today express a strong spiritual link to the Black Hills,3 some historians have questioned whether today's beliefs about the Black Hills have historic precedents. Watson Parker questions whether the Lakotas could have developed a sacred geography in the relatively short time they occupied the Black Hills. Donald Worster concedes that the Black Hills are now widely regarded as sacred to the Lakota people, but asserts that the area was not viewed as holy ground prior to the 1970s.4
The position that the Black Hills held little significance to Indians is most frequently based on two sources: Richard I. Dodge's The Black Hills, written in 1875, and Edwin Denig's Five Indian Tribes of the Upper Missouri, written in 1854.5 Both assert that the Lakotas then living in the area made little use of the Black Hills, venturing in only to gather tipi poles. Dodge and Denig state that the Lakotas avoided the Black Hills because game was scarce, pasturage was insufficient for horses, and there were "superstitions" about evil spirits inhabiting the mountains. This information has been cited with little regard to the historical context in which it was compiled.
Denig reported that "much superstition is attached to the Black Hills by the Indian," incorrectly attributing this "superstition" to volcanic action causing smoke and loud noises in the interior mountains.6 While later writers mentioned loud, booming noises in the Black Hills, there is no evidence for any recent volcanic activity in the area, and the phenomenon remains unconfirmed and unexplained. Denig's informants told him the noises were the groans of a Great White Giant condemned to lie under the mountains as punishment for intruding into the Lakotas' hunting ground and as a lesson to all whites to stay out of the area, a story clearly meant to scare whites away from the Black Hills .. Denig himself had no personal interest in the opening of the Black Hills to white settlement, but seems merely to have been repeating what his informants told him.
Comments
Copyright 1997 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln