SACRED GROUND: THE INDIAN AND THE LAND

[Music] The earth, the sky, and all the living things which inhabit them were created long ago. [Music] The universe began when the creator breathed light upon the darkness. When the shifting void began to take shape within this light and the shadows which drifted began to move in direction. [Music] [Music] The water delivered the land upon the shore. Finally, the people rose from the dark caverns of the inner world and came onto the land. The universe was complete. I'm Cliff Robertson. The first people to come upon this land that we call North America were the American Indians. To them, this land was and is sacred. Sacred ground is the story of the North American Indians relationship to this land. [Music] It is the knowledge of my people that we come from the earth. We are on this land as part of the creator's great vision that all his living things are to exist in harmony. The tree, the bird, the child, the son, all have their rightful place upon this ground. To us, this land cannot be bought or sold. It belongs to all who inhabit it. Our life is a cycle. We are born of the earth and in death return to the earth. Joining our ancestors in the spirit world. There are many places across the land that to my people are special. At these sacred grounds, the Indian finds through communication with the ancestors, visions and meditation the meaning of his life. Before the western man saw this continent, it was a great wild garden filled with trees, grasses, and water. It was inhabited by creatures which leaped and darted among these growing things. Among these inhabitants was the Indian. Although he was as fleet of foot as some, he could not fly like the bird, nor did he have the strength of the greatest of mammals. But he was one among them. His difference was his intellect. He wondered at things which he saw and could not explain. The Indians ancestors first told the story of the creation and so it had come to him. The appearance of the universe in which he lives confirms his ancestors stories. There is an order within the universe. All things behave in relationship to all other things. The Indian himself is but a part of this order. Within this order, the Indian holds the enormous memory of the creation of the cosmos. Within this memory are the images and symbols of the universe which surrounds it. The Indian found his sacred ground instinctively where he built structures upon this ground in response to its sacredness and where these structures remain. We can identify his sacred ground without the aid of legend or myth. The most familiar of all his responses which are still evident to us are earth and mounds. Yo hey yo a hey yo. These mounds, which took painstaking labor, which required the lifting and shaping of tons of earth, which sometimes took years to complete, were built out of the compelling need of the Indian to honor and communicate with the great spirit. [Music] The sun was the principal object of veneration for the Indian mound builders. There was nothing which was more powerful than this heavenly body. >> The chief of the mound cities was brother of the sun. [Music] Upon the highest of the mounds, there rose a temple from which the chief conversed with his brother, the son. Facing east, the chief awaited each day with a song. [Music] When the sun stood on the horizon, the chief would wave his arm east to west, directing the sun on his journey for the day. [Music] Greatest of all the ancient mound cities was Cahokia, a city of 30,000, as elaborate as an Aztec kingdom. It existed at the place where the Mississippi and the Missouri converged. Between 900 AD and 1300 AD, this city prospered and grew under the beneficence of the sun. [Music] These mounds are all that remain of large mound cities which were once inhabited by thousands of people. By 1500 AD, Cahokia had disappeared. While the survivors of a dead city migrated to another ground, those who were deceased migrated into the realm of the ancestors. Death was the conclusion of one cycle of the Indian's existence. It was essential to the Indian that he bury the dead appropriately so that the dead might make the journey from this existence to the next. The dead were buried with their few but important possessions. And sometimes faithful wives followed their husbands into death. While the spirit of the dead ascended to join the ancestors, the bones remain below within the sacred ground, the blood of the ancestors returns to the earth so that it may nourish those yet to be born. Here in these shallow quaries of southwestern Minnesota, the color of the soft rock reveals vividly the ancestors blood. These rocks belong to all Indians. For it is the blood of all his ancestry. Here there is no contest among the tribes although they may be enemies. For the sacredness of this place gives it a moral neutrality. These layered rocks carefully pried loose provide the Indian with the material with which he can bring together the harmonious influence of the ancestors with his negotiations in the present world. Pipstone is one of the most sacred of all Indian places on the North American continent. Literally every piece pipe made is from this red sacred clay. Tribes as distant as the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific coast migrated to this place to gather clay for their peace pipes. Consequently, every peace pipe ever smoked between the Indian and with white men during the struggle for this continent originated from this little quarry known as Pipstone. [Applause] 10 bears, black kettle, crazy horse, red cloud, and high back wolf brought their lips to these pipes. The smoke rose to the spirits as they asked for peace. They asked for fairness. They asked to be left alone, left to ancient traditions. The pipes remain the symbols of their way of life. The blood of the ancestors cuped within its bowl. The memories and hopes of the Indian for peace. The Indians urge to live harmoniously with his fellow man was as strong as his need to live within nature. As all civilized men aspired toward peace, the Indian pursued this ideal. Nalas is the place where the Cheyenne go to renew their power which enables them to survive as a people. To the Cheyenne, this enormous be which rises out of the green and yellow prairie of southwestern South Dakota is Nawas, the mountain where the people are taught. It is here that they receive their power of the hunt, which gives them their sustenance and their power to defend themselves against hardship. He had to visit sacred ground. Only there could he communicate with the world above which had given his ancestors visions in the past and which held them for his future. For the Cheyenne, as other Indians, visions advised and guided them. They helped them order their life, reconcile misfortune, and predicted the ways they should follow. But the great visions did not come to the Indian readily. He had to journey to find them. He had to follow the steps of an ordeal before the great visions came to him. The Cheyenne come to Nalis because it was here that their legendary hero Sweet Medicine received the sacred arrows which gave the Cheyenne their powers. Each year following in the steps of Sweet Medicine, chosen Cheyenne journey across the prairie to this be. A young brave's ordeal is shared by his father and his grandfather. Together the men will ascend the but carrying with them the sacred buffalo head and the sacred buffalo robe. These two will help draw the vision. The buffalo head and the robe are symbolic of the vision they seek. [Music] [Music] The physical journey, the climb is but a part of the ordeal. [Music] The men must prepare themselves to receive the vision. They must also satisfy rituals to become one with their surroundings. They must join the wind, the sky, and the rocks which hold the sacredness of Nawas. [Music] Once these labors have begun, they will fast until the vision comes to them. [Music] They see suspended in the heavens a great golden plane the color of the sun. In the center of the plane roam a great herd of black buffalo. Encircling the buffalo are the people. All the Cheyenne who have ever lived and died and all those yet to be born. It is the vision the Cheyenne have sought. It tells them that their land is bountiful and that they are protected from all their enemies. Their ancestors and their children join them forever. They endure. Visions are sought by the Indian throughout his life. They are the means by which he receives his spiritual direction. Visions reveal to him the wisdom of the past, the potential of the future. They tell him what he must do. Visions are the teacher. The people are taught. On the high plateau of Arizona, there is a canyon into whose crevices are drawn the elements of the Navajo universe. The place is the center of the Navajo's existence, where wisdom and serenity reside with the spirits of the ancient ones. For the North American Indian, the center of the universe is the place where he can exist in contentment, responsible to himself and to the world around him. For the Navajo, this place is Canyon Disha. The architecture of this canyon, the steep walls, the shaded tunnels, the sharp pinnacles are the Navajo's physical world. The things which move through this architecture, the wind which grazes the cliffs, the light which invades the tunnels, [Music] the shadows which move around the pinnacles are the spirits of the ancestors who reside there. Long ago they carved their cities beneath great overhangs which roofed them against weather, shadowed them from enemies. The Navajo, a wandering people, came into Canyon Da after the original people had left their cities to the wind. They found evidence of a civilization left vacant, awaiting their arrival. They had inherited a whole and complex former world. They had come among the Anastasia, the ancient ones, and there they would remain. [Music] [Music] [Music] The spirit of the spider grandmother who in Navajo legend wo the web which enabled the chosen ones to climb up from the worlds beneath to this world stands sentinel at the head of the canyon. She remains indestructible. The wind encircles and moves on through the caves where the other ancients reside. Canyon Dish is the center of the Navajo's universe because it is here where his ancestral history joins with his physical world. Perhaps here at Canyon Dish, we find the strongest example at present of the continuing relationship between the Indian and his sacred ground. Here he understands his place among all his people in his relationship to his universe. In time, perhaps as their creator prophesied, all the Indian people will return to their lands and will begin their lives a new. The hard running winds of the plateau infest these canyons with the oldest, most particular sounds of the earth and sky. One imagines that the voices of the ancient ones and those of the present will carry here forever. We have been but momentary visitors to these places where the Indian dwells. places where not only his lifetime is spent, but where his entire history, all of his past and all of his future dwell. Perhaps we've been guided toward a realization that the Indian and the ground are the same. He's born of the earth and he returns to the earth. The cycle of his life is like the cycle of the sun. That is why when conquering cultures forcibly removed the Indian from his origin, the anguish and disorientation he felt was devastating. The cruelty was even greater than we supposed. On the quiet streets of Laanta, where these homes now sit, hundreds of brilliantly colored teepeees once stood. This small eastern Colorado town is where the Santa Fe Trail turns south. With the wagon tracks of the white man already embedded along its banks, thousands of Indians met at this place on the Arkansas River for one last time of fasting, ceremony, and giftgiving among themselves. It was the place where the last great peace council between the plains Indian tribes was held in 1840. It was a great reunion >> and it was farewell. >> The ground held all these tribes upon its arid plateau and the river curve to embrace them for one last time before their departure. Today, citizens of Lanta live within this great bowl of nature. They feel the wind, dread the winter, and delight in the arrival of spring. In their awareness of the natural world in which they live, they begin to share with the Indian an understanding of the ground. In their relationship to the land, the difference between the white man and the Indian is that the white man wishes to be dominant upon the landscape. The Indian is but one of the many living creatures within a universe of living things. The white man is moved by nature, as is the Indian. But when the wind blows through a forest, the Indian does not hear its sound. He hears the voice of a spirit which speaks to him. Now, finally, we've become conscientious in our efforts to preserve those very things which the Indian fought to save not so very long ago. We've learned from the wisdom of an older people the value of the earth, the sacredness of the ground.