Last week, I went with Messiah’s Youth to Rapid city, South Dakota to work with Bob Dudley and the Lakota Indians that live on the Pine Ridge Reservation. It was a great week. We met a lot of really fun people - some from the Pennsylvania Church Army and some that lived in Rapid City or the smaller town of Red Shirt Table. Overall, it was a very laid back week. The culture of the Lakota is in general very relaxed. We never did any real work until 2 or 3 in the afternoon and the work we did do was mostly things like, grilling food for a town barbeque, setting up chairs and tables, practicing skits and worship music, driving around and handing out fliers to invite people to the services and the pow-wow. Pretty simple and non-taxing chores. But the fact that there was little pressure made it fun. We were able to enjoy the week as a team and not be tired and crabby with each other. Since we had less physical work to do, we were able to sit down and chat with the people who lived there, sometimes for a whole evening. One of the girls on the trip met a lady who was one of the dancers in Dances With Wolves.
Thursday night, we held a pow-wow in Red Shirt Table. Red Shirt is a town of about 15 houses, so the fact that there was a pow-wow there was a really big deal.
Anyway, Bob lead the pow-wow and it was very cool to see. He has a great ministry in South Dakota. Instead of telling the Native Americans that they need to give up their culture and their traditions, he shows them how they can use their traditions to worship God. For example, at the pow-wows, he talks about dancing for the Lord and talks about how David danced and how dancing is a form of worship. So, all these people come to the pow-wow, the drummers, the singers, the dancers, and everything in sung in Lakota and the dancers are all wearing traditional dress, but they are all dancing for the Lord. When we were there, there were more kids than adults dancing. And the kids danced hard. They were mostly under 7 years old and they danced almost the entire evening.
We were invited to dance as well. They had several intertribal dances and circle dances that everyone participates in and during these dances, the experienced dancers dance along side a new comer and show them how to dance. My friend and I held the hands of a 6 year old girl named Hannah. About half way through the song, Hannah let go of our hands and said, “It’s not hard, do you think you can do it by yourselves
now?” Then another little girl, Stevanya, danced by us (by the way, Stevanya is a princess, meaning she is one of the top dancers in her age group) and told us we were making it look hard. Gotta love kids.
We were only there from Sunday to Friday, but I was talking to another one of the leaders on the way home and we both agreed that it would have been great to stay another 2 weeks, just to be able to talk to the people more and really get to know them and hear their stories.