The Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota is the home to the Oglala Lakota Nation, the people of Crazy Horse, Red Cloud, and Olympic gold medal winner Billy Mills. It is a place with widespread material poverty, but with great spiritual wealth, natural beauty and hope for the future. The proud and beautiful Lakota people struggle every day to overcome the problems of unemployment, poverty, disease, grossly inadequate housing, alcoholism and drug abuse which have arisen as a result of their ignoble treatment over the past 150 years.
Pine Ridge is also the center of a relatively recent revival of traditional Lakota teachings, religion, language and ceremony. In spite of the constitution's guarantee of freedom of religion, Lakota religious ceremonies and language were illegal until the mid 1970's. In the remote regions of Pine Ridge, the Lakota preserved their culture in secret, spoke their language and preserved their ceremonies. Presently, Lakota language and culture is taught in the schools and at the tribal college. Many people have returned to their native religion. As a result, the pride and values of the Oglala Lakota Nation are growing strong again.
Wounded Knee, the site of perhaps the most profoundly tragic massacre in United States history, is located on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Here several hundred starving, freezing Lakota, mostly women and children, who had surrendered to the Army, were gunned down. Their frozen, contorted bodies were buried three days later, without ceremony or respect, in a mass grave at the top of a hill overlooking Wounded Knee creek. In the words of Black Elk, Lakota medicine man, the sacred circle was broken that day and his people were destroyed. He predicted that it would take seven generations for his people to heal, and perhaps mend the sacred circle.
The children now attending the SuAnne Big Crow Boys & Girls Club are the seventh generation since Wounded Knee.
