Terre Dawn Vocu, a 15-year-old junior at Little Wound High School on the Pine Ridge Reservation, is one of the few girls playing football in South Dakota. Photo from Native Sun News
Even Mustang fillies are tough
By James Giago Davies
Native Sun News correspondent KYLE –– Getting to Kyle takes time because access is restricted to reservation back roads. Back when there was a Department of War the feds appropriated a large swath of the northern border of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation for weapons testing. For years that area was restricted and the normal highway infrastructure never developed. The isolation of Kyle helped form deep relationships among the local clans. Mitakuye Oyasin, we are all related, that is what the Lakota say, and that certainly is the case with the large extended families calling Kyle their hometown. Lucy Giago Vocu went to the spirit world in 1987, but long before she did she married Tom Vocu, and by the turn of the 21st Century, that led to Terre Dawn Vocu, a junior at Kyle’s Little Wound High School, and one of the few females playing high school football in the state. There is an old, faded, weather beaten building in Kyle that fronts the main road, it was once a restaurant and grocery store, and while they were alive Lucy and Tom Vocu ran that place, but before that Tim Giago Sr. was a clerk and butcher there in the 1940s and it was pretty much the face of Kyle, the place all the locals stopped for eats and greets. Nothing there now but ghosts and memories, but just a stone’s throw away is Little Wound High School, and they have a pretty good football team, made the 2015 playoffs, despite playing all their games on the road because their home field was under construction. They also have a pretty good defensive back/wide receiver on that team, senior Tre Vocu, and Terre Dawn is his niece, and some years back, when she was in Sixth Grade, Terre Dawn decided she would try her hand at football. Her mother, Michelle Vocu, had Tre drop by their place.
Read the rest of the story on the all new Native Sun News website: Even Mustang fillies are tough (James Giago Davies can be reached at skindiesel@msn.com) Copyright permission Native Sun News
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