Oceti Sakowin and the Paha Sapa
story of the Seven Council Fires tells of seven traveling families, moving northward and westward looking for hunting grounds with lakes full of fish, forests full of game, and plains full of bison. (www.redcloudschool.org) This alternate cosmology still contains the idea of the Paha Sapa as a sacred place, but it is a place where the journeys end, not where all of life begins. In either instance, the mythic elements are used to elevate the Black Hills from simply a place of culture residence to a sacred place with spiritual importance tied to the very fabric of the Sioux society.
The presence of the white iconography of our culture's founding fathers along with the rhetoric of nationalism that still pervades the interpretation of Mount Rushmore by popular awareness today continues to inspire resentment among the Sioux. Charmaine White Face, a Lakota woman who coordinates the Native American group called the Defenders of the Black Hills, says, “It’s a sacred mountain that has been desecrated. It’s like a slap in the face to us—salt in the wounds—as if a statue of Adolf Hitler was put up in the middle of Jerusalem.” (www.smithsonianmag.com)
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