There's a wonderful shop in Rapid City, SD, called Prairie Edge, just on the main square. It sells everything from trinkets to jewelry, to native American headdresses, art work, beads, tomahawks, painted buffalo skins, native flutes even imitation wooden AK47s. When I was there, it was full of tourists speaking a variety of languages all focused on buying appropriate gifts and memorabilia to take back home. The more I walked round, however, the sadder the place became. Stopping on the stairs to the upper floor, my eye was caught by a small 19th century facsimile photograph of rifle carrying Westerners perched precariously on an enormous mound of buffalo skulls. A woman came up behind me. "Sad isn't it," she said. "The whole place is sad," I replied.
The deliberate attempt by white men to destroy the original inhabitants of the prairies by killing off their food supply was a type of genocide. The hunter gathering culture of the plains had no answer to the guns and firepower of the new colonial settlers and the survivors were gradually cordoned off on reservations. Native American culture is now a sanitized tourist attraction providing some employment. Ironically Rapid City is fiercely white and fiercely resistant in the defense of their property against foreign brown skinned invaders. While I was there, a shop opened in a Mall selling Trump memorabilia. There was a biker shirt with the face of the President superimposed against a background of The White House announcing "Finally someone with Balls." Shame, decency or guilt are not words in the white Republican South Dakotan lexicon.
Rapid City is busy putting up statues of all the Presidents on street corners to attract tourists and teach everyone about American history. They look silly. The Black Hills, the prairie and the open skies are much more powerful symbols echoing with a natural beauty which transport you through time. The Lakota have not been wiped out as intended. They are patient people. They await the prediction of Crazy Horse that, "In Seven generations when all the colors of mankind gather under the sacred tree of life, the earth will become one circle again." Their children are learning and gaining strength. They have a statue designed by a white man being carved from the rock which will point out across the prairie, a bigger statue than any Presidents and a tribute to a courageous and visionary leader who was stabbed in the back by a government soldier and who pleaded for his people to be left alone to carry on their way of life.