By Denise DePaolo

This month, ground will be broken in Rapid City’s Halley Park on the First Nations Sculpture Garden. The project aims to honor 20th Century luminaries from the Lakota and Dakota Native American tribes. Those selected to be honored represent a largely untold history, according to FNSG, Inc. chairman Elizabeth Cook Lynn. The retired professor, scholar, and author of 14 books spoke with 605 about the project and what it means to her people.

View: First Nations Conceptual Design

Who will be honored with statues in the sculpture garden?

When it comes to our history, everyone knows Crazy Horse, Crazy Horse, Crazy Horse. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but what we wanted to say is we are more than warriors. The war has been over a long time. So these are some people who we think deserve recognition.

Charles Eastman was the first physician. He was at Wounded Knee. He was the only Indian doctor there. He took care of the wounded. He was never a successful doctor, but that’s a different story. Vine Deloria has written something like 40 books about Indian law. He’s from Standing Rock. Oscar Howe is from the Reservation I’m from, which is Crow Creek. But he’s a Yankton. I happen to be Santee. And Black Elk. Those are the four people we’re honoring.

Why is it important to recognize these people?

First of all, it’s not a tourist attraction. It’s an educational art history project to honor 20th Century Indians. Lakotas and Dakotas, not Indians in general. We don’t care if anybody ‘gets it’ or not. Too many people in this place don’t know anything about Indians. What they know is we’re drunks in the street, we’re poor, or we’re warriors or something. They don’t know who we are, really. And that’s okay. All we want is for our children to know that they belong here. We’re not just vanished people. We do a lot of good things. We’re in art, we’re in medicine, philosophy and religion, politics.

Being in the highly-visible Halley Park, tourists and locals alike will see it. What do you hope they get out of it?

What we hope is they will see us as a part of the community. We’re people who teach, we’re lawyers, we’re rodeo riders, we play basketball. We want them to see us as part of the community. Really, the truth of the matter is in South Dakota — and I’ve lived here all my life — is that we do live separate lives. I know a lot of white people who’ve lived here for forever and they don’t know Indians. They never knew an Indian personally. The same is true of a lot of Indians. A lot of Indians live segregated lives out on the reservation and they don’t know any white people. So it’s an effort, I think.

Why is Rapid City a good place for a project like this?

This is an interesting town that’s afflicted by failing to remember its past. I think deliberately sometimes, but that’s just my opinion. A lot of towns don’t remember anything. They think that as soon as they arrived here on the boat, that was the beginning of the world. It’s not. There’s a whole indigenous world here that’s huge.

The Lakotas have a huge history here. They say things like, ‘We’ve always been here. We didn’t come here from somewhere else,’ and that’s going to be on the monument, too. ‘We did not come here from elsewhere,’ say the old people. We have always been here.

ECL
(Elizabeth Cook Lynn holds a miniature of the statue portraying artist Oscar Howe)

What makes Halley Park the right place for this remembrance? 

That’s kind of a touchy subject. You see, there’s a lot of land in Rapid City that’s treaty land. And that’s part of it. All the schools and churches built in this town are built on treaty land. We signed a treaty in 1868, the Treaty of Fort Laramie – which was a peace treaty. And that was part of it.

The building that is there was built in 1935. I was five years old. It was built with Indian money by the Department of Interior and it was an Indian place on Indian land and it was meant, I guess, to be a kind of a transitional place. A lot of Indians were here, living all up and down the creek. Rapid Creek. They were poor, they had no education, no jobs, they were a displaced people. So that’s what that place represents to Indians.

I don’t know if young Indians know anything about this. Kids that are 15, 16, even my grandson who’s 20-something he knows a little bit of this, but only because he listens to me. But there’s no place for these people to understand what the past is about.

And when I went to talk to the city about this place, they said – without a touch of irony, by the way – ‘Why don’t you put it in the Founder’s Park?’

We’re not the ‘founders’ of this town. We’re the indigenous people of this town. We didn’t found Rapid City.

But they didn’t like it and voted it down twice, the Parks and Rec people. I was really stunned, but then I went back to our board and we decided to press on. And so then we took it to the whole city council and they finally came around, but it took a year to convince these people this was a good idea. We wasted a whole year just mucking through all of this. Anyway, that is part of the 1868 treaty, that land. So is Sioux San and a lot of places here.

Here we’re going to have some big thing at one of the entrances about the 1868 Treaty of Ft. Laramie, then we’re going to give you the 20th Century history. And people probably won’t get that either, because its kind of a hidden history. 1877 is when Congress passed the bill that stole the Black Hills. That same year, they shot Crazy Horse. Assassinated leaders of the peace treaty. So I can understand why people in Rapid City don’t like it. It’s an ugly history, basically.

I guess that’s why a lot of public art doesn’t really tell you anything about history. Public art, if you see what goes on here, is a place for people to gather, have picnics, for people to come and swim. It’s beautiful. You have a bunch of flowers, shrubberies. Wonderful, but not a mention of history. Whoever put the presidents on the walks downtown wanted to say something about history, but there was opposition to that, too. 

Who will create the sculptures?

Marilyn Wounded Head is the artist. She’s from Pine Ridge. She’s a former teacher. She taught art at a college in Colorado for years, but she’s retired now.

How is this project being funded?

After we got an MOU from the city, which took a year or more, then we went and incorporated ourselves so that we could raise money. So we are a tax-free, non-profit, got 501(c)(3). So we are a tax-free charitable institution.

We have five board members who are members of the tribes, then we have an advisory board made up of about 30 people. That was one of the things that made us eligible for money from Shakopee, the tribe with the casino over in Minnesota. They only like to deal with tribes. We’re not a tribe. We’re an Indian organization. They said, ‘As long as you’re an all-Indian organization, you’re eligible for money.’ So they gave us some money. A lot of people have given us money, like Black Hills Power, people and organizations from Sioux Falls, California, and various other places. 

What can you tell us about the groundbreaking?

The groundbreaking is a very private thing. It’s going to be at the site and that’s when our construction people are going to begin. We’re not going to remove many of the trees, we’re going to build around them. So our groundbreaking – we call it a ceremony – is going to take place in the morning. It’s going to be prayers and songs in order to disturb the site. We cannot lift one shovelful of dirt out of there until we have the ceremony to the spirits that live there. I don’t want to give you the impression that this is a religious project, because it’s not. But, common sense just tells us that the spirits have to be recognized. It’s going to be a private, short prayer and recognition of the spirits, the place. But after that, our sign will be up.

To donate or learn more about the First Nations Sculpture Garden, visit www.facebook.com/Halleyparksculpture.org.

 

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