After I visited Wounded Knee in late 2015. It took hours to navigate Pine Ridge Reservation’s roads back to the Interstate. At one point I came to a “T” intersection. I pulled to a stop, facing a weathered strip of plywood nailed between two fence posts. Hand painted letters cried out, “NRC URANIUM EXPANSION HEARING. […]
Of Lava Floes and Religious Insight
Camping at Idaho’s Craters of the Moon National Monument, can be a real source of religious insight. Looking down from a weather satellite, those black lava fields stand out like a sore thumb. The eruptions began through a 75-mile crack in the earth’s crust more than 10,000 years ago. The lava only stopped pouring forth […]
On a Ute Holy Man at the Parliament of the World’s Religions
Last week marked Indigenous Peoples Day. A year ago last week I attended the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Salt Lake City, Utah. For me, these two things will always be connected. The Parliament of the World’s Religions marked a homecoming for me. I grew up in Salt Lake City and still have family […]
Of Science, Bison Bones, and Eternity
On a side trip last year while camping my way to the west coast, I found myself casting up dust along a tooth-jarring washboard road across Nebraska’s badlands. After twenty miles I arrived at a gravel parking lot, from which a dirt path led down to a Monet-like pond. Glassy water mirrored sky, cattails, willow, […]
Custer’s Last Stand, Pt. II: The Little Bighorn’s Grandson
140 years ago today (June 27, 1876,) a column of soldiers discovered the bodies of George Armstrong Custer and 210 of his soldiers on a desolate ridge in Montana, above the Little Bighorn River. Dug in atop a ridge four miles southeast, were Major Marcus Reno, Captain Frederick Benteen, and the 400 surviving members of […]