On February 28, 1877, the U.S. Congress
passed the February Act of 1877, which officially seized the sacred Black Hills
from the Sioux Nation.
The sacred. That which is set
apart, that which reveals, that which puts us in touch with the unknown, with
the ancestors, with wisdom, with the Creator.
The sacred: an idea, a teaching, a story, a verse, a ritual, a human
person (priest, prophet, healer), an animal, rock, or tree (who are also
“persons;” characters, masks, in the drama of life as well), a place (built or
natural), a natural or made object. The
term Sacred Place is often used to describe a natural location, a spring, rock
formation, mountain, lake, or grove, that has spiritual significance to a people
or religion, and that has been set apart for spiritual purposes. These purposes may include worship, ritual,
initiation, “vision-questing,” contemplation, or simply the acknowledgement of
divinity manifested, “Numen Inest.” All
of these characteristics may be found in built sacred spaces as well: the temple, church, mosque, longhouse, kiva,
etc. The “sacred” nature of built sacred
space is easily recognized and acknowledged, even by those who don’t share the
beliefs of those to whom the structures are sacred, and, as a consequence, the
special quality and autonomy of built sacred space is therefore generally
respected. When it comes to natural
sacred space, acknowledgement of, and respect for, what a particular place
means to those who hold it sacred—its significance to them and its integral
place in their worldview and culture—is, by contrast, much harder to obtain
from persons and institutions who don’t share those beliefs. This is especially the case with persons and
institutions whose worldviews are colored by a utilitarian and materialist
viewpoint concerning the non-human world; and those persons and institutions
dominate political and economic thinking in the world today. Over and over again, we see the endangerment,
profanation or destruction of Sacred Places.
In the U.S. alone, there are so many examples, including Bear Lodge,
Black Mesa, Yucca Mountain, Medicine Lake Highlands, Mt. Taylor, the San
Francisco Peaks, Pu’u Keka’a, Eagle Rock, Mato Paha, the Black Hills, and
Petroglyph National Monument, to name just a few.
The idea of the sacred as
“that which has been set apart for a special purpose” is central to an
understanding of the nature of the Sacred Place. Just as the Eucharistic chalice is set apart
for the celebration of mass and would be profaned if used for everyday
drinking, so, too, the Sacred Place is dishonored when humans use it for
frivolous or detrimental purposes. The
Sacred Place is set apart by history, custom, and tradition as consecrated
space. Therefore, the kind of “secular”
uses that endanger Sacred Places worldwide such as mining, timber-cutting,
water diversion, and pollution, forms of recreation like rock-climbing, skiing, and
ATV use, highway construction and urban sprawl, not only threaten the physical
well-being of Sacred Places, the natural order, but also the rights of peoples
to hold and practice beliefs and rituals which are related to those places. A member of the Pawnee people once told me,
“The Pawnee were not so economically dependent on the buffalo as other plains
peoples before the white man came, but the buffalo was central to our
religion. The death of the buffalo herds
meant spiritual death to us.” Profaning
or destroying a Sacred Place denies people the right to their place of worship,
and, as such, it denies them their fundamental right to hold and practice their
own beliefs and culture.
In another way, too, it
threatens something of great value to every one of us, something that is
important even beyond the obvious threat to our own rights that the taking away
of other peoples’ rights always entails.
Those of us who personally hold deep spiritual beliefs are able to
respect the beliefs of others, but it is also important that people who are
skeptical of such beliefs also recognize that traditional religion and
spiritualities are the encoding of worldviews, of philosophies, even of
sciences. The beliefs concerning Sacred
Places that traditional peoples hold often embody unique insights that embrace
medicinal knowledge, psychological treatments and curing practices, means of
settling and healing conflicts and of reintegrating transgressors back into
society, non-linear concepts of time, ethical principles not based on
consumption or wealth-accumulation, deep understanding of the complex
relationships between humans and animals, and of the autonomy of the non-human
world. These ideas—and the cosmologies,
stories, songs, poetry, and ritual that embody them—are part of the human
heritage that we share. They are
intimately bound to their places of origin, the Sacred Places, and the forces
that threaten them threaten these precious spiritual legacies as well.
