Preserving Sacred Places

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.