Page 22 THE VILLADOM TIMES IV • May 23, 2012 and the government took the Black Hills from them. Gradually, a large part of the agencies, now called “reservations” because the land was “reserved” for the Indians, were also broken up. The U.S. Army stayed on the reservations until 1924, when the Sioux Indians were declared citizens for their help in winning World War I. The FBI moved in substantially after they were given the right to purchase liquor legally in 1953 for their help in winning World War II. In 1973, some Indians who had helped the rest of us lose the war in Vietnam took up arms to defend themselves, essentially from their own corrupt tribal politicians, and a major federal presence led to the Wounded Knee II incident, which convinced the globe and much of America that the Indians were still around, and still scary. I worked at a daily newspaper with 100 college graduates in the City Room and those who grew up on the East Coast or in California, which was just about everybody, believed Indians were extinct. Whenever some of my friends came in to say howdy, their arrival sparked a mad rush for the elevators. No scalping took place on either side. People who were brave enough to talk to them enjoyed their sense of humor. Their idea of dry mirth was trying to find out from my colleagues which restaurants served “real” American food, and the number of the U-boat that had brought me to the United States. They told me they meant it as a compliment. In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the 1877 seizure of the Black Hills had been illegal, and offered the Lakota people money for a clear title. Indian Title is still a big deal in western real estate deals, much as we do not have to think about it in New Jersey. The Lenape (Delaware) signed off on New Jersey in 1809 and left for Pennsylvania after being paid cash for what was left of their New Jersey holdings. Remnants of the Lenape exist in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and in Oklahoma. The spoken language, now extinct in daily conversation, is preserved on CDs. Most of the Lakota did not want to share the fate of the Lenape and two-thirds of the other tribes, now blended or vanished. They turned down the money, even though the last offer of $900 million could have put a big dent in rural poverty. The last deal endorsed by the majority of Lakota would allow all private white landowners to keep their private property, allow federal employees in the National Park Service to keep their jobs, and give the Lakota the Black Hills. The land is described as “sacred,” but to traditional Indians, all land is sacred, though the Lakota recognize several holy places in the Black Hills. Let’s see what happens in September. The second story, as Edward R. Murrow said about the Nazi bombing of London, has only one side. A year ago, a baby white buffalo who was not an albino was born on an Indian-owned ranch in north Texas. Indians all over North America proclaimed that the rare white buffalo calf was a symbol of coming peace and harmony. Nicholas Black Elk, a Lakota holy man, described the legend of the white buffalo in 1930 in “Black Elk Speaks.” He said that two hunters saw a beautiful young woman. One approached her with lustful thoughts. He was struck dead on the spot and eaten by worms. The second hunter was respectful and the beautiful woman gave him a sacred pipe, the emblem of traditional Lakota worship. “Behold,” she said. “With this you shall multiply and be a good nation. Nothing but good shall come from it. Only the hands of the good shall take care of it and the bad shall not even see it.” “…And as the people watched her going, suddenly it was a white bison galloping away and snorting, and soon it was gone.” Oliver La Farge, a 20th century artistic scholar and admirer of Indian culture, did some calculating and discovered that White Buffalo Calf Woman first appeared on “winter counts” – Indian pictorial calendars – in 1540, the year Francisco de Coronado first ventured onto the Great Plains, and suggested that the legend was inspired by veneration of the Virgin Mary. Whatever the inspiration, the idea of peace, brotherhood, and harmony is a worthy one. People who follow the news will know, however, that a few weeks ago somebody slipped into the corral unseen and butchered and skinned the white buffalo calf and left the body to rot. The next day, the white calf’s mother was also killed and skinned. Whether the killing was motivated by simple greed or by an attack on Indian tradition, it was a vile action by a person beneath contempt. The good news may be that the world now knows this. The Black Hills give-back split the difference in public opinion, but the brutal slaughter of the white buffalo calf aroused universal indignation. People from all over the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia donated money for a reward to find and prosecute the killer. A woman in Oregon donated a full-grown white buffalo bull to the Indian ranchers. The expanding profile of kindly, decent people and the dwindling number of racist thugs and would-be Indian killers is good news not just for America, but for the world. Self-styled patriots may attempt to justify what other Americans did to the Indians from the safety of their saloons, but the rest of the world has long ceased to listen to them. Curing our problems with a changing world could start at home. Two stories that loomed on the western horizon earlier this month may not be complementary to one another, but are somewhat complimentary to the American people. The first to flash prairie lightning was a suggestion from the United Nations that the United States return the Black Hills – not just Mount Rushmore, but the entire Black Hills region – to the Lakota Nation, the American Indians known in Hollywood Westerns as “the Sioux.” The second story concerned the brutal killing and skinning of a rare white buffalo calf named Lightning Medicine Cloud just before his first birthday. This act horrified not just the American Indians of many tribes, but a considerable part of the world’s civilized population. The Black Hills story is more complicated, and perhaps more convoluted. United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of the Indigenous James Anaya recently recommended that the Black Hills of South Dakota be given back to the seven “Sioux” tribes who laid claim to the region in a series of court cases. “In all my consultations with indigenous peoples in the places I visited, it was impressed upon me that the sense of loss, alienation, and indignity is pervasive throughout Indian country,” said Anaya, a Harvard Law School graduate and a professor at the University of Arizona. Anaya’s full report is expected in September. The return of the Black Hills is not expected any time soon. The Black Hills region was deeded to the Sioux in the Sioux Treaty of 1868, after the tribes and their Cheyenne and Arapaho allies defeated the U.S. Army in a series of engagements on the Bozeman Trail. They were later defeated, but proved to the government that the extermination of the Sioux Nation down to the last man, woman, and child, as recommended by General William Tecumseh Sherman, would be extremely expensive. Each dead Lakota, without regard to age or gender, was said to have cost the United States $1 million. In those days, $1 million was real money. Building on a previous plan by Thomas Twiss, first agent to the Oglala Sioux, Washington offered the Indians the western half of what is now South Dakota with a sliver of North Dakota, and annuities until they learned farming, ranching, and skilled trades and could become self-supporters. After a few years, graft took over. The promised food was generally awful – coffee mixed with dirt, sand mixed with sugar, rotten meat – and some of the Indians skipped the reservations and went back to hunting buffalo. In 1873, a depression hit America based on the fact that the railroad system had been over-built. In 1874, George Armstrong Custer led an expedition that discovered gold in the Black Hills. The Indians were offered $6 million. Most of them refused to take it, and Custer was sent out not so much to exterminate them – eastern Americans and Europeans still loved Hiawatha and Minnehaha and Old Nokomis – as to bring them back to the agencies where the Indian “menace” gave the U.S. Army an excuse to keep sucking up taxpayer money. Guess what happened next. With Custer dead, the Army took off after the Lakota, A changing world could start at home Area They embrace different religious traditions, grew up in different cultures, and live on opposite sides of the ocean. Who would have expected they would become friends? But Rabbi Gloria S. Rubin and Imam/Shaykha Halima Krausen were determined to overcome the obstacles: some easy to identify, others far more subtle. The community is invited to hear about their shared view of humanity on Saturday, June 16 at 1:30 p.m. at Temple Israel & JCC in Ridgewood. “Muslims, Jews, and Friendship: Seeing through the Eyes of the Other,” is open to the public, free of charge. The temple is located at 475 Grove Street in Ridgewood. The event, which will follow regular Shabbat morning worship at the synagogue, is being co-sponsored by Saint Elizabeth’s Episcopal Church on Fairmount Road and the Muslim Society of Ridgewood. The Rev. Canon John G. Hartnett of St. Elizabeth’s and Mahmoud Hamza of the Muslim Society readily offered their communities’ support after Temple Israel’s spiritual leader, Rabbi David J. Fine, Ph.D., reached out to them. The three serve together on Ridgewood’s Interfaith Clergy Council. Rabbi Rubin, a retired pulpit rabbi and Temple Israel congregant, and Imam Krausen, spiritual leader of the German-speaking Muslim community in Hamburg, Germany, met in 1995 at an interfaith gathering, the Standing Conference of Jews, Christians and Muslims in Europe, held in Bendorf, Germany. A senior rabbinical student at the Academy for Jewish Religion in New York City at the time, Rabbi Rubin came to the conference eager to explore a topic outside the standard rabbinical school curriculum. She chose to focus her study that week on Qur’anic Arabic. ‘Muslims, Jews, and Friendship’ slated Imam Krausen was the instructor. Conference participants observe the days of rest of all three faith traditions. On Shabbat (Jewish Sabbath) afternoon, the rabbinical student and imam took a long walk together on a road through the woods. The conversation about their respective families, beliefs, and communities led to the discovery they are kindred spirits. The two haven’t stopped talking since, and now, 17 years later, have co-authored a book, “Unlikely Friends.” Born into a Catholic/Protestant German family, Imam Krausen converted to Islam in her teens. Now widely considered Europe’s foremost female Muslim scholar, she was the German media’s go-to contact following the 911 terrorist attacks and remains a frequent commentator on interfaith issues and conflicts on the continent. She is a published author, lecturer, and teacher, and participates in numerous international interfaith initiatives, including recent sessions held in Germany, the UK, Jerusalem, Sudan, Morocco, Austria, and Sweden. She was on the committee that translated the Quran into German, with commentary, wrote an introduction to the Plaut Humash from a Muslim perspective, and has appeared on a panel with the Dalai Lama. Rabbi Rubin has been a keynote speaker, lecturer, and teacher at interfaith events held in the U.S. and Europe. She is the author of numerous articles on parenting and family issues for national magazines and was the editor of the arts and entertainment section of The Jewish Standard, an independent weekly covering the Bergen County Jewish community. She is co-author of “Living with Your New Baby” (Franklin Watts, 1978).