Americans may think the only significant place in the Black Hills of Wyoming and South Dakota is Mount Rushmore, where former U.S. presidents’ faces are carved into the mountainside. Americans may also think of the Crazy Horse memorial monument in the Black Hills National Forest, dedicated to an iconic Lakota warrior who stood up against the white settler encroachment of Native American territory. But for the Lakota themselves, the Black Hills are more than its monuments and its stunning landscape: It is their sacred place, their creation story.
For Quanah Yellow Cloud, a member of the Oglala Sioux Nation, the Black Hills are both home his sacred place. He is also a researcher and activist whose current focus is sacred places. Most recently- he released an article describing how indigenous knowledge has been historically marginalized in places like the Black Hills.
Quanah was born and raised on the Pine Ridge Reservation South Dakota. Pine Ridge is characterized by its prairie, Badlands and the Black Hills. The reservation measures 2.1 million acres, making it larger than both the state of Delaware and Rhode Island combined. Right now, Quanah lives in Albany, New York, where he is a graduate student at the University of New England, pursuing his master’s in social work.
A bright green flash of color took over my screen as he joined our virtual meeting. Quanah used a picture of the Black Hills as his zoom background, as even in his everyday life, he is tied back to his homeland of spruce, pine, and aspen dispersed across a lush hilly green landscape. He has a calm aura, featuring a small smile.
His passion directly ties into his Lakota background and native culture. Quanah explained, “as somebody who grew up, who was born and raised on the reservation, the way that we see, the world, ways of knowing, [and the] ways of viewing things are that everything is connected.”
Quanah fell into his love for the intersection of planetary systems in environmental health by accident. Before entering college as an undergrad, he thought he’d go into climate change or environmental work. However, two things changed his academic path.
First, growing up, Quanah watched his mother spend her career in the environmental health field, inadvertently growing his attachment to the environment. Second, in his academic discovery, prior to college, he went on a vast search to find what truly captivated him. By looking for the research published around environmental health, he realized the conventional understanding of environmental health, such as research on how the thick smoke from Canadian wildfires last year would impact the human body, was not what excited him. At the time, his mother’s career and the current research available focused more on biomedical science, which he realized was the inverse of his true passion. Quanah’s interest aligned more with how humans were affecting the environment, rather than how the environment is impacting humans.
Like other indigenous places, the Black Hills are both sacred places and environmentally significant to Indigenous nations around the world. For example, Many sacred places are located in large tourist attractions and, needless to say, Tourists do not value the Black Hills through the same underlying cultural context and belief systems like the Lakota: They may just see the Black Hills as just a tourist photo op, or just a good hiking area with stunning views. Quanah uses his knowledge of sacred places to bridge that gap between the non-Native visitors and Indigenous people’s understanding of the environment and sacred places .
With a light chuckle and infectious smile, his eyes lit up when asked to describe an Indigenous sacred place in his own words.
Quanah thinks about sacred places in three ways:—As he explains, “how I see it, versus how my family sees it, versus how the tribe sees it.” These levels, which in his academic research he names “micro, meso, and macro” model the multiple different levels of perspectives and interpretations of the world. This model is then applied to indigenous spiritual and relational understandings of the world.
Sacred places vary from tribal nation to tribal nation, band to band, and village to village. Quanah explained that it even varies person to person, as indigenous people have their own individual ideas of what is sacred and is not sacred.
For Quanah, “an indigenous sacred place for me would be a place that I designate personally as a place where that is holy to myself, a place where I can go to pray, a place where I can go to a practice ceremony by myself.” It can be anywhere in his homeland, it could even be in New York state, as long as he can find solitude in it.
However, for the Oglala Sioux Nation, there are designated sacred places, such as the Black Hills and the Pipestone Quarries in southeastern South Dakota, that are essential to the cultural practices that endure. They use red stone from the Pipestone Quarries to make pipes for prayer and ceremony. Quanah’s family has their own specific locations designated as a sacred place to them personally. One of these is “Holy Mountain”—not an official name of the mountain, but one that Quanah’s maternal side of the family declared for themselves. He said, if you were to travel to the reservation and ask where Holy Mountain is, no one except Quanah’s family would know what you are talking about.
Tourism is booming in the Black Hills. In 2023, tourists spent $1.9 billion in the Black Hills, another $1.73 billion on gaming in Deadwood Casinos in South Dakota , and helped support 20,840 tourism jobs. A growing part of this tourism market is Indigenous-led. Quanah’s eyes brightened when he defined Indigenous-led tourism in his own words: “I would define it as Indigenous peoples being directly involved in tourism, whether that’s by allowing them to manage a site, making culture the focus of destinations and opportunities for them as well to showcase their culture, nature, traditions, ceremonies, and really highlighting their achievements and ongoing work that’s going on there that Indigenous people are actively doing.”
The annual Black Hills Pow Wow is a great example. The annual pow wow lasts for four days in the month of October. Visitors from all over the United States and Lakota tribes, and other Native American tribes participate. It keeps their culture alive. The Black Hills Pow Wow’s President, board, and main staff are from Native American tribes.
This is the antithesis of another well-known Pow Wow Native American gathering, called the Gathering of Nations in Arizona. The Gathering of Nations is both a Pow Wow and expo, with horse parades, the Indian Traders Market, and the Miss Indian World competition as its main events. It is run and led by a non indigenous man, Derek Matthews. Quanah sighed, shifting his tone of voice to a more serious tone when talking about the controversial Gathering of Nations. He explained that Matthews collects all the money from the entrance fees, even charging the indigenous people to set up booths to sell their art, and charging them for the profits they make from that too. To Quanah “it seems to me outside tour operators [are] benefiting rather than the actual people.”
Beyond large scale Pow Wows, even on the Pine Ridge Reservation there are issues with visitors. If you go walking in the Black Hills, you will likely see ribbons tied to the trees, or unique rock formations. These are for ritual prayers. Quanah pushes up his glasses as he explains that tourists often take or disturb these rock formations and prayer ties, which the Lakota would never do, as they understand the cultural significance.
When Quanah was younger, he frequently attended council meetings and was an activist. One instance of his activism is at Standing Rock in 2016. He said with a light laugh recounting his youth “ That was definitely when I had more of that impulsive, fiery spirit within me,” he said with a light laugh, recounting his youth “I was all about going to the riots.” At that time, he reveled in the commotion and the tension as he and many others were fighting the Dakota Access oil pipeline, an underground pipeline that transports crude oil. Tension was thick, and it was apparent that fights could break out, and get ugly, real quick. But the young Quanah reveled in this tension. In retrospect, he wonders he should have been there at all — it was risky.
Quanah reminds me that the Black Hills for the Oglala Sioux are considered a sacred place but also their creation story. He said to them they view it “to be the heart of where creation started.”
Despite ongoing struggles to keep sacred places sacred, Quanah believes the work his people and other tribes have accomplished are a form of resiliency among their people.