Podcast: Play in new window | Download (27.0MB) | Embed
Bear Butte, South Dakota, or Mató Pahá, is a well-known sacred place to the Lakota. The mountain has spiritual significance to many tribes, and is the setting for ceremony and prayers. That’s in contrast to the new Full Throttle Saloon. The owners bill it as the “World’s Largest Biker Bar” with 15,000 patrons a night during the Sturgis Bike Rally. In August, a group of Native American activists plans to protest the bar because of its proximity to Mató Pahá. We’ll check in with those who know the location the best and learn about how the famous motorcycle rally is encroaching on other important sites.
Guests:
Cody Hall (Cheyenne River Sioux) – activist and co-founder of Native Lives Matter
James Swan (Cheyenne River Sioux) – founder of the United Urban Warriors Society
Break Music: In the Time of Chiefs (song) Estun-Bah (artist) From Where the Sun Rises (album)
I am praying deeply for Bear Butte!
I pray you will be left in peace to enjoy your Church and Sacred places. Enough harm has been done to you Sacred Beautiful People!!!
Please! Leave these Beautiful People in PEACE!!!!!???????❤️????????????
It’s great to hear how younger people are doing a spiritual run as Cody Hall stated. We must keep our young people engaged and informed about our treaties. We will never sell our sacred Paha Sapa and we are against the exploitation and disrespect of our sacred, Mato Paha.
People need to respect this holy place!
It would be very interesting if anyone researched the oral history that was recorded back in the late 1930s, and correlate it with the anthropological and archaeological evidence to see who was in this area the longest, thousands of years before the Sioux were forced out of the Woodlands area like so many other tribes that were pushed westward because of the gun trade and disease.
Honesty can be hard to hear, but most of what has been related by the “Natives” here as it relates to the history of “Bear Butte” and the “Black Hills” is revisionist history-made up due to the loss of their tribes’ oral history.
There is only one tribe that has a Covenant that comes directly from Bear Butte, and who have had it for thousands of years. They are the tribe whose ancient sites such as the Animal Dance, Antelope Pit, and buffalo bone pits belong to, as well as many other ceremonial sites in this region, one of which is the major tribal ceremony of this tribe. This tribe has to live within the realm of the laws that correlate directly to the land and this site. This tribe was the only one seeking to protect this area all the way up until 1978 when an Oglala tribal member finally got involved. This tribe is the whole reason why Bear Butte was even nominated as a National Monument. They’re the only tribe and the principle participants in the 1961 dedication of Bear Butte as a South Dakota State Park.
The 1851 Treaty was not ratified by Congress. Further not all tribes participated in the regions designated as being recognized as belonging to tribes in the Horse Creek Treaty. For some tribes only factions of their tribe participated, agreeing to accept terms AS THEY WERE TOLD (the tribal participants couldn’t read the treaty and they were being told through interpreters). Traders, trappers, and Father Pierre de Smet had more say in the land recognition assignments than the tribes themselves. Every tribe who signed the Horse Creek Treaty broke their end of the deal due to inter-tribal warfare and warring against the U.S. military and some of its settlers and agents (i.e. scouts).
Lastly, this tribe who maintained their traditional homeland, their Covenant and tie to Bear Butte, told the agents at the Horse Creek Treaty that they, the U.S., had no right telling them or others what land was theirs and not and refused to participate. They did not sign the 1851 Horse Creek Treaty and in their absence that is how the Black Hills became recognized to be recognized as belonging to a few of the Sioux tribes. Other Sioux tribes were late arrivals due to being pushed into the SD, ND, and NE areas just prior due, during, and after the “Great Sioux War.’