Dakota Life
Visions at Medicine Knoll
Clip | 4m 7sVideo has Closed Captions
In Central South Dakota, a petroform snake is a link to the past.
What do rock effigies tell us about collective knowledge of culturally significant places? Dr. Phil Deloria discusses a familial connection to the snake effigy on Medicine Knoll, near Blunt, South Dakota.
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Dakota Life
Visions at Medicine Knoll
Clip | 4m 7sVideo has Closed Captions
What do rock effigies tell us about collective knowledge of culturally significant places? Dr. Phil Deloria discusses a familial connection to the snake effigy on Medicine Knoll, near Blunt, South Dakota.
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship- [Phil] Saswe had this sort of period of time, as people often do before a vision or a vision quest, where, you know, he was hearing voices that were calling to him.
He knew that he was part of a kind of a spiritual encounter that was gonna happen at a certain point.
(spiritual music) They ended up camping at the Medicine Knoll up near Blunt, and he went up there to have his vision.
The way my grandfather was told it was that you could do a vision by standing and praying with the pipe, or you could do a vision in a somewhat different way by digging a kind of a hole with a kind of a little seat in it, and then you would put your head down, and you would wait.
And there's a tiny little other part of the story that also my dad tells in the book, which is that his cousin, Brown Bear, was sent up to check on him, to check on Saswe, and Brown Bear rode his horse up the Medicine Knoll and was stopped by all of these rattlesnakes.
And the snakes, you know, kind of would not let him pass, and he had to spur his way in this very, very, you know... Traumatic, I think, to sort of imagine this, right, these snakes, but you feel like you have to go, and he couldn't quite get there.
But he, you know, got to the point where he could see Saswe, he saw snakes crawling all over his body, and Brown Bear, at that point, you know, kind of turned and went down, you know, with his horse.
And he had been sort of forcing his horse to go and went back down into the camp and said, "Oh, you know, my cousin is dead up there," and that the people started mourning.
And at that point, Saswe, you know, in the middle of this morning practice, Saswe came down off the hill and, you know, and there he was.
(spiritual music) - Another thing about these effigies out of rocks, I mean, rocks are not just rocks in Lakota cosmology.
This idea of these rocks are from their origins from the beginning of time from a Lakota perspective.
This is a being.
This is, how to say that.
These rocks are evidence of this original being called Inyan, and he was what was here at the beginning, Inyan.
And eventually, Inyan, which I just love the phrase, he pulsated with the potentiality of the universe.
So this being, eventually, through processes that are in Lakota cosmology, that he bled out and went from this amorphous, powerful being to this hard brittle substance that we call rock today.
So any of these rocks are, in Lakota cosmology they're referencing Inyan, that original being.
So to use them to make a shape of anything can have these really strong cultural significance.
- [Phil] The people on this landscape, right, knew this landscape cold.
You know, I mean they knew everything about it.
They traveled all over it.
They understood it in great detail and, you know, these kinds of places, these medicine knolls and buttes.
And this feels to me like something that was knowledge that was held collectively by people for a really long time.
(spiritual music)
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