James Giago Davies. Photo from Native Sun News Today
Richard Broken Nose opened my eyes
Our way is not the old way
By James Giago Davies
Native Sun News Today Columnist
nativesunnews.today Imagine a gymnasium wall. Not hard to do, not like imagining the quantum foam of the sub-atomic world. No person can imagine that. I admit I have spent a lot more time trying to imagine such things than I have gymnasium walls. Shouldn’t come as a surprise. I consider myself one of the smartest men in Lakota country, but I am about to have my eyes opened, someone is about to graciously expand my understanding of something I have written about many times in this column, something I arrogantly assumed I understood far better than he ever could. Standing inside the Oglala Recreation Center we are surrounded by four walls, and Richard Broken Nose points to one wall, so I didn’t even have to imagine that wall, like you have to. Richard likes to keep things simple. In fact, he’d rather be explaining the epiphany to come in Lakota, but he can’t. Why? Because a couple generations back my ancestors came to Holy Rosary Mission trilingual, speaking English, Spanish and Lakota, and they left there speaking only English, the other two languages browbeaten out of them. More on that later. Richard explains that you can’t get around the wall walking in either direction, you just wind up standing where you started. You can’t go over the wall because there is a ceiling. At the bottom of the wall are the sekseca, the Lakota bones of people who fought the wall, the warriors, the women and children, the reservation poor, the vulnerable, the alcoholic, the lost and angry and violent.
Read the rest of the story on the Native Sun News Today website: Richard Broken Nose opened my eyes (Contact James Giago Davies at skindiesel@msn.com) Copyright permission Native Sun News
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