"Oglala Lakota medicine man Robert Cross stood in the snow outside the King Center at Metropolitan State College on Wednesday morning. He waved an eagle feather over a bowl of burning sage.

"What I'm going to do," Cross said in English before praying in his native language, "is ask that anything negative be taken away. There's a lot of nonsense going on here."

Now, there was an understatement.

But nothing was more confusing than the spectacle of a Sioux spiritualist leading a crowd of 60 people around Metro State, exorcising the school's conservative demons with a smoldering bowl of what smelled exactly like pot."

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