Back to NewsThis month is a great time for us to pause and give thanks as we honor our Native American community. South Dakota is the only state to practice non-observance of the federal holiday of Columbus Day by recognizing Native American Day. We are thankful for the loving relationship and shared hospitality over the years. Chief Spotted Tail of Rosebud was instrumental in the calling of the Presentation Sisters to Dakota Territory in 1880. He requested the Bishop of Omaha for Catholic Sisters to teach the Native American children. Bishop Martin Marty was the newly consecrated Bishop of Dakota Territory at the time. One of his first official acts was to invite the Presentation Sisters from Dublin, Ireland, to take charge of the Native American Mission School being built along the Missouri River, near the present Lake Andes. The Native Americans brought blankets, pillows, food supplies and offered a friendly welcome and assistance as we settled into the area. This assistance and hospitality of the Native Americans was a significant aspect to the sisters and our success of settling and thriving in the Dakotas. In the later years, we had a presence in Eagle Butte and at Presentation College during the time there was a Lakota Campus.
In the spirit of sharing this rich history and our long partnership with the Native Americans, we are excited to join together with the Center for American Indian Research and Native Studies by bringing and sharing the traveling “Lakota Emergence” art exhibit to the Aberdeen, South Dakota, area community. The exhibit will run the month of October at the convent and is free and open to the public to enjoy. The exhibit includes 16 vignettes that will recount the Lakota emergence through narrative and original artwork created by a Lakota artist specifically for this project. The exhibit presents the traditional belief that the ancestors of the Lakota people emerged to this world through what is now known as Wind Cave in southwest South Dakota. It depicts that “Wind Cave was and always will remain a landscape of special significance in Lakota cosmology”.
Dr. Craig Howe, executive director of the Center for American Indian Research and Native Studies who is the exhibit curator said, “We do a lot of work trying to mitigate racism, and so, one idea was to do an exhibit not with that as its intention but with that as a possible outcome,” “The hope is that people are excited about this narrative. It is linked to a particular shared place in our state, the Black Hills. All of us know that landscape, Indians and non-Indians. The exhibit foregrounds this traditional narrative about that place.”
An online version of the exhibit may also be view at:
http://www.nativecairns.org/CAIRNS/Emergence_Vignettes.html