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A few minutes with Ed ~
When I was a pastor at the United Methodist Church in Hughes Springs, the youth group took a summer mission trip to Tribal Land (“Indian Reservation”) in South Dakota. When they returned, each of the young people spoke during Sunday worship about what the experience meant to them. I was amazed at how deeply they had been touched. One young lady in particular said that she had decided to change her college major because of the trip and was determined to return to help at places as they had been to. She spent a year at Texas State, majoring in social work, and got a summer job with an organization working on a reservation in Montana. After the summer, she transferred to Montana State to finish college while working at the reservation. She ended up marrying a Native American man on the reservation and helped raise two young stepdaughters.
Walk a Mile in My Shoes: These young people had never seen, up close, the kind of poverty that existed on this reservation. Some elderly people literally froze to death during the winter because they lacked adequate firewood. They lacked almost everything that we would think necessary for a normal life. Seeing the hardship up close and meeting the people as fellow humans changed these young people. They had deep compassion for the people they met. They had a desire to help them, with no thought at all of blaming them.
Recently, one of the young stepdaughters was named “Miss White River Cheyenne Indian Days” at the Pow Wow in Busby, MT. This celebration was held recently to remember the Battle of the Greasy Grass, which took place 150 years ago on June 25 & 26, 1876. The Battle of the Greasy Grass is what many Northern Cheyenne and Lakota people call the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
Two Sides to Every Story: I’m sure I remember cheering at the Saturday morning movies when the Cavalry showed up just in time to save the white folks and kill the Indians. We didn’t know anything about the real events, but felt sure that Indians were savages who did bad things and had to be dealt with. As you can imagine, the Native American narrative of the Battle of the Greasy Grass is quite different from the one we grew up with for the Battle of the Little Bighorn. One of the objectives of Pow Wows, and of selecting “Miss White River Cheyenne Indian Days” and similar events, is to preserve their history and their story. I hope we all can have the right to tell our stories. Truth is not created by preventing other stories from being told or other opinions from being expressed.
~~Ed
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