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(photo: Jim Brandenburg) Out and About
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What we've blogged about in the past week:
» Climate Change Explained in Four Minutes
Need a basic primer on the history of climate change and 350ppm? Bill McKibben explains.
» "A Minor American Miracle": Orrin Hatch's Rockin' Hanukkah Song
A must-watch performance. And, a rather heart-warming back story from the senior senator from Utah.
» A Story of Sitting Bull's Signature
A brief clip of of archival audio from 1946. Worth the 3 minutes!
» Who Are We When We Are At Work?
"Purpose aims us toward the deepest and most transcendent reason for why we work, which offers a spirituality of communion."
» Six Americas
A Yale study identified "six Americas" when it comes to climate change. Where are you on the spectrum?
» Fact-checking Climate Change
An annotated page from our script shows the technical nature of producing last week's program — and getting it right.
» Hanukkah in the Heartland
One of our own shares her story about the importance of being more intentional in celebrating far from home. SoundSeen
(our multimedia stories)
Climate Change, a Moral Question [slideshow, 3:30]
In his interview with Krista, environmentalist Bill McKibben described receiving 1000s of photos — from people around the globe concerned about climate change. We wanted to see those images and faces — and selected some of our favorites. Upcoming Broadcasts:
The Wisdom of Tenderness (December 24)
For the Christmas season and the New Year, a rare conversation with one of the wise men in our world today — Jean Vanier. The philosopher and Catholic social innovator created a model of community, L'Arche, that embodies the ideal of power in smallness and light in the darkness of human existence. Transcripts
Words matter. We provide free transcripts for you to read and print.
» The Moral Math of Climate Change
with Bill McKibben
» The Spiritual Audacity of Abraham Joshua Heschel
with Arnold Eisen
» Presence in the Wild
with Kate Braestrup
» Learning, Doing, Being — A New Science of Education
with Adele Diamond Unheard Cuts
Hear what we left out of the program. Download mp3s of all of Krista's unedited interviews. Here are some of the latest:
» Bill McKibben
» Arnold Eisen
» Kate Braestrup
» Adele Diamond About Speaking of Faith
Hosted by Krista Tippett, the public radio program is heard weekly on radio stations around the country, bringing a wide range of intelligent religious ideas and voices into American life. Contact Us
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| ![]() | | This week on public radio's conversation about religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas:
Reimagining Sitting Bull, Tatanka Iyotake
Every December, the Lakota people remember the life and death of Sitting Bull. He was a leader, medicine man, and Sun Dancer of the Lakota — a vast linguistic group within the Sioux Nation that resided across the northern Plains. History has cast him primarily as a celebrity warrior — the man who defeated General Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876.
We explore Sitting Bull's spiritual legacy, which was long suppressed in American law, as a force for identity and healing among the living. We traveled to the Black Hills of South Dakota to speak with his great grandson, Ernie LaPointe. And with Cedric Good House of the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, where Sitting Bull died, we explore how different memories and meanings of history have been kept alive in ceremony and in song. A Painful History
I Better Understand Now
I can't say that I knew much about Sitting Bull when we began this research. His is the final name in a series we envisioned several years ago, of programs on the spiritual legacy of historical figures. We've delved into Albert Einstein, Reinhold Niebuhr, Charles Darwin, Rumi, Aimee Semple McPherson, and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel in this series. Producing these programs has been extraordinarily rich at times and at others extraordinarily hard. None of them has felt more complex or more daunting in the end than Sitting Bull, Tatanka Iyotake.
The word "elusive" also describes the process of approaching the facts of this man's life and the meaning of his legacy. That is in part because of the complexity of this legacy, and of the terrible history of the United States government's treatment of native peoples, of which the story of the Lakota on the northern plains is just a part. It is also a function of the relative privacy and largely oral nature of the historical record of Lakota culture.
Sitting Bull was a thorn in the side of the U.S. government that first gave the Lakota the Black Hills, then wanted them back after gold (Sitting Bull called it "shining dust") was discovered in them. He refused to negotiate or sign treaties with federal authorities — he didn't, decreeing from observation and experience that their word was not good — and certainly not to be trusted over lands that he understood as a sacred inheritance. General Custer's army attacked, and Sitting Bull's troops improbably prevailed. Thereafter and until the end of his life, he was pursued as public enemy number 1 by American journalists and politicians. I've read some of those reports; Sitting Bull was portrayed like the Osama bin Laden of his day.
After these weeks and months of being steeped in what feels like this hidden realm of American history, I feel confident about the truth of that paragraph I've just written. I know, at the same time, that it is nearly as simplified as those newspaper reports of Sitting Bull's day — one side of narrative made up of competing and utterly irreconcilable points of view. In the end there was, to be sure, violence all around. And Sitting Bull's own relatives and people were divided over his leadership and his resistance to any partnership with the federal government. Members of his own extended family were implicated in his death. This is a wound they carry even today, layered among the many wounds they have carried forward out of the settlement of the American frontier and into the present.
In the end, Sitting Bull's mistrust of treaties was vindicated by the history that followed. But he is not remembered in Lakota oral history principally for that, or for the victory at Little Big Horn. He is remembered for qualities of character that were invisible to press and politicians of his time yet that inspire and strengthen his people even now: humility towards the land, compassion towards living beings, and the ultimate sacrifice of his life on behalf of his people.
Of all I have learned that makes me ashamed of this history and my implication in it as an American citizen, I am appalled that it was not until 1978 — 1978! — that the American Indian Religious Freedom Act guaranteed the right of the Lakota and other tribes to perform their sacred rituals and ceremonies. And these were at the essence of Sitting Bull's life and legacy. Ceremony is the very element of Lakota spirituality and lifeways. Sitting Bull helped shape the vision quest and the Sun Dance. Yet even while his closest lineal descendant, Ernie LaPointe, was growing up, which is not that far away in our lifetime, his family lived in fear of speaking openly or performing these ceremonies.
It is very moving to hear from Cedric Good House, who lives on the Standing Rock Reservation where Sitting Bull died, how the vision quest and Sun Dance are now experienced as sources of healing, very much in the best spirit of Sitting Bull's memory. Cedric Good House brought his son to our interview and is carrying forward songs that kept different memories and meanings of history alive in the hardest of times. I interviewed them in late November. As we finished and said our goodbyes, Cedric wished me, "Happy Thanksgiving" — a blessing that warmed me and stayed with me for days, containing, as it does, such a long view of history in which true generosity can be obtained.
He also offered the image of the pilgrimage some of the Lakota will be making right now, this week, on horseback, in memory of Sitting Bull's death and life — from Standing Rock Reservation straddling the Dakotas to Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in southwestern South Dakota. This is painful history to know as my own. But I am grateful for it, and more complete. I'm delighted to know Sitting Bull by his real name, Tatanka Iyotake, and to witness his enduring teachings of humility, compassion, passion, and healing alive in our midst. I Recommend Reading:
Sitting Bull: His Life and Legacy
by Ernie LaPointe
+
Sitting Bull
by Bille Yenne
I consider these two books as complementary reading. Bill Yenne's biography is meticulously researched and gives you a detailed understanding of Sitting Bull's life within a larger historical and geographical context.
On the other hand, Ernie LaPointe brings the gift of simple storytelling to the page through the oral tradition of his family and culture. Reading one account gives a richer sense of the other, and through this we gain a better understanding of "parallel histories" in contemporary American culture.
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