[soft music]
♪
male speaker: Welcome.
I am the Red Spider.
♪
This is the place where we get
the medicine from Mother Earth.
♪
This is not a playground.
The Creator is always here.
♪
I have spoken.
I am the Red Spider.
That is who I am.
[ambient music]
♪
Wilmer: My grandfather was telling a time
when the people came together.
Menia: The elders used to talk about it all the time,
about that Pipestone.
Maxine: My grandparents was telling me about this.
Faith Spotted Eagle: My great-grandmother, her name was Standing Stone,
Tunkan Inajin Winyan.
Maxine: I learned all these from my grandmother
because her dad was a chief.
Wilmer: The stories are told over and over
in different ways.
Leta: As I got to be a teenager,
that's when my grandmother started teaching me more things
because I was ready to learn.
Maxine: I was always told that that was a sacred place.
[singing in native language]
♪
Wilmer: Out of all the sacred items the Lakota people have,
that is the central, the most important
item in our culture
is a sacred cannupa, the pipe.
Carrie: We use the Pipestone to pray with,
to vision quest with,
and we use it in ceremonies.
As the Bible and the cross are to you,
the cannupa is to us.
♪
[children giggling]
[soft music]
Wilmer: My ancestors used to live in a ti ikceya--tipi.
They mined their pipe at the quarry at Pipestone.
They ventured many hundreds of miles
to get back there
to dig the pipe and bring it back.
♪
And all the chiefs smoked their pipe
before they start the council meeting.
And nobody can speak during
that time the chiefs are smoking.
Albert: When a pipe is given to us,
the spirits of the relatives,
the spirit of the eagle, the buffalo,
the horses, things that fly, those spirits,
they want tobacco as an offering.
Faith: It's a way to pray.
By smoking it, those prayers go up to the Creator.
They carry our prayers.
♪
Boye: There's only one place in the world
where we can gather our red Pipestone
and that's in the Pipestone quarries,
located in southwestern Minnesota.
Albert: We have a term in Lakota...
It's Wakan.
This place is Wakan.
It's a relative, that's Wakan.
And we're very fortunate that relative is here
where we can come.
Richard: My name is Richard Lee.
I'm a member of the Sault St. Marie Tribe
of Chippewa Indians.
I consider this whole area here
a sacred place.
And to be able to quarry for this
as they did in the years gone past,
our ancestors, I'm very honored.
It's a good feeling,
a good feeling in my heart here to be able to come here
and quarry for this stone.
Leta: The way we do it today, too,
is just using tools and our own hands
and not using big machines or anything.
And I think that's part
of what's so special about it.
We're still using our hands
and using our minds
to figure out how to get to the Pipestone.
[singing in native language]
♪
Boye: More than 50 quarries
still exist at Pipestone today.
Only enrolled members of tribes
recognized by the U.S. Government
are allowed to quarry here.
The wait to get a permit for a quarry
can take five years or even longer.
But the search for Pipestone
can become a lifelong journey.
♪
Travis: My name is Travis Erickson.
I'm a fourth generation pipemaker
in our family.
I've been doing it for 28 years.
[crumbling]
This quarry actually represents
more than half my life.
To be able to come down here
and quarry in the womb of Earth Mother,
you know, that's really special.
♪
Chuck: The Pipestone deposit is buried
under this quartzite rock.
So what we have to do is,
we have to take it off a layer at a time
because there's about four layers
of the quartzite that overlays
the Pipestone deposit.
♪
This is the second hardest rock in the world.
Clyde: A lot of work, tremendous work.
Takes weeks sometimes.
Mark: A lot of pressure, a lot of tons of pressure.
A thousand pounds of pressure.
Oh, I think it's moving, just a little bit.
Travis: This is actually a spiritual journey down here.
When you come down to these quarries,
because we're on special ground,
you come on these quarries,
you have to leave yourself open
to interpretation by Spirit,
not just what I think.
And when you lift it up,
you could see how dark the stone is,
and it says, "Wow! Look at that!
That's going to make a nice-looking pipe
when I can get that out of there."
Boye: For those just beginning to quarry,
the job can be overwhelming.
Leta: My name is Leta Killer-Bailly.
I'm from the Oglala Lakota Nation
and I'm also Arikara from my mother's side.
This is our quarry right here.
But this was all caved in
and it was just filled with rubble right here.
I have three children.
They're Ashleigh, she's 16, JR, he's 15,
and Marisa, she's 11 now.
We're trying to dig into the earth
to get down to the rock layers,
but it's a mixture of rock and dirt.
Well, we haven't reached the Pipestone yet,
so that's one of our goals.
We just keep looking forward to it,
like it's a goal to get down there
one of these days.
It's probably not going to be anytime really soon,
but just thinking about it keeps us going.
I think it's very important for Native People
to be able to quarry here
because it's very historical in our world
to be quarrying,
and that people have been doing this
for years and years and years.
♪
Boye: For many different tribes, our very beginnings
come from this place - Pipestone.
The people the white man call "Sioux"
tell just one of many creation stories.
♪
Wilmer: When we were children,
they used to tell a story of this cannupa ok'e
and how it was formed, you know?
They call it Ohunkakan Story -
the story of the ancient ones.
♪
They said it rained for many days.
It rained for many days on end, non-stop,
and pretty soon, the people started drowning.
[thunder clapping]
♪
And then there was this one young girl.
She saw this high hill, so she went up there.
And a lot of her people have already drowned.
So she ran up there and she was all alone.
So she began to pray.
[uplifting music]
♪
And here all of a sudden, the rain stopped.
So she was standing there
and all she could see around was water.
She felt something.
So she looked up and here from above
there was this giant bird.
And then he opened his wings like that
and here a man emerged from there.
And he told her not to be afraid,
that he came to rescue her.
And that all her people were killed in the flood.
♪
He said the reason why he came to rescue her
because he wanted to marry her,
and through their marriage together,
the humans are going to start again anew.
[bird chirping]
When the waters receded,
in the story they said
the waters all drained,
drained down the drainage
and came to one place.
And here it was all the blood of the people
that were drowned that formed in that area.
And then they said that's what became
the cannupa ok'e.
And it was the blood of the people that was--
the blood was red into the stone.
♪
Faith: The color red is something
that is very sacred to our people.
And so when that was placed there for our use,
it was a message that we have to take care of it.
It's almost like it was just plopped in there
and set aside to say,
this is a sacred area for your use.
[melancholy music]
♪
Chuck: Before European contact,
our people, our ancestors
regarded it as a very sacred area.
Albert: They knew this place.
Through stories, the history of our people,
through oral history,
always knew this place existed.
When the pipe came
and the people decide to accept it,
this is where they come
to get that stone... that relative.
♪
Wilmer: The cannupa ok'e is a special place
for many different tribes,
not only the Lakota or Dakota people.
It's a special place to the Cheyenne,
Winnebago, Arikara, Omaha, Ponca,
all these different tribes.
Faith: It was said in oral history
that when people went there,
it was not a place where people fought.
It was a place where they went
to gather Pipestone.
So it was a place of peace.
[soft music]
♪
Boye: Our people continued
to use the quarries
as they have for thousands of years.
Then things changed.
George Catlin, a famous white artist,
came to paint our quarries.
He sent a piece of our sacred Pipestone
away to be studied.
The white man came up with a different name
for our Pipestone.
They began calling it "Catlinite."
After Catlin would come many more.
Watching was a chief of the Yankton
named Struck By The Ree.
Faith: My grandmother's name was Lillian Ree
and she was the great-granddaughter,
a great-granddaughter of Struck By The Ree.
She said that the Europeans
are coming like maggots
and they were afraid
because they couldn't believe
that there would be that many people coming.
It was incomprehensible to them.
♪
Boye: Struck By The Ree knew
in order to save his people,
he would have to make peace
with the white man.
In 1858, he put his mark on a treaty
that opened up our lands
to the homesteaders.
Faith: And so he thought
by giving these people land
that they would respect it
and they wouldn't punish them anymore.
But in fact, they wanted more land.
[soft music]
♪
Boye: He was a man of great vision.
Before touching the pen,
Struck By The Ree demanded
"free and unrestricted use
of the Red Pipestone Quarry."
The treaty says, the quarry
was to be "open and free to the Indians
to visit and procure stone for pipes
as long as they shall desire."
But getting to our Pipestone quarries
was now more difficult.
Our spiritual leaders
could not leave their reservations
without permission from the Indian agents.
And then they had to travel great distances,
through lands once ours,
lands now filled with homesteaders.
The Pipestone quarries,
so long the spiritual center of our people,
slowly became silent.
[melancholy music]
♪
Albert: I can imagine...
the hurt and sadness
because they had no power.
♪
Clyde: They set up boarding schools
all over America.
One right over on the hill overlooking Pipestone
where our people were severely punished
for praying and speaking their native language.
♪
Albert: The United States Congress passed a law
outlawing all native spiritual traditions
across the country.
It doesn't matter what tribe you're from,
you couldn't practice
your spiritual traditions.
♪
Chuck: The pipe may have been lost
and that would have been
a real tragic thing that happened.
♪
Boye: The pipe wasn't lost because our people
and spiritual leaders refused to let it be lost.
Through hardship and pain
they continued to quarry.
Because of them, the legacy
of Pipestone remained unbroken.
Today, federal law recognizes our fundamental right
to freely practice our religions
and to be able to practice them
in places like Pipestone.
[singing in native language]
We're determined to keep our ceremonies
and the pipe alive.
Clyde: Every year that I've been hosting
Sun Dances and purification ceremonies
at the Pipestone quarries,
and people now again are coming
from all over the world
to participate in those ceremonies.
Boye: As our ceremonies continue,
so does our tradition of pipemaking.
♪
Vernon: I feel really privileged to be able to do
what I do with this.
I feel that this is partly
what I was meant to do.
I think it has everything to do with
the energy of keeping a people alive.
[speaking native language]
[high-pitched whistling]
Boye: This small island of sacred land
preserved by the treaty
in time became Pipestone National Monument.
[ambient music]
Because of leaders like Struck By The Ree
and the many quarriers,
we have kept the spirit of this place alive.
Pipestone is again a place of peace.
A place where all people are welcome.
Leta: Our family at Pine Ridge,
they keep asking us about the Pipestone,
if we've reached it yet.
But we told them that we haven't yet,
but we're still working on it.
♪
Boye: Everyone here quarries
for their own personal reason.
Leta: Well, there were times
in my immediate family's life
when we had hard times.
And we asked for help
to get through those hard times.
A lot of the people that were pipe carriers
and sun dancers that we knew,
that are in our family,
they helped us get through
those hard times too.
And I feel like if we could do
this little bit in return
and that someday somebody
who has this pipe and is a pipe carrier
will someday help themselves,
their family, and maybe others too.
And in that way, we can help others in this world,
people that we might not even know.
And that keeps me going.
[uplifting music]
Albert: Coming here brings a song.
The song simply says,
they're bringing you a pipe.
[Albert sings]
♪
I never felt so good knowing
that we're still here.
We're still alive.
We still have our songs,
dances, history, stories.
And most important, we still have
this beautiful place.
It's a survivor like us.
We're survivors.
♪
The Pipestone is a wonderful story
of a relative that's still with us today.
♪
[singing in native language]
♪
[uplifting music]
♪