INTRODUCTION
WHEN I WAS VERY SMALL AND TRAVELING with my father in South Dakota,he would frequently point out buttes, canyons, river crossings, and old roads and tell me their stories . In those days before interstate highways, when roads were often two ruts along the side of a fence, it was possible to observe the places up close, and so indelible memories accrued around certain features of the landscape because of the proximity of the place and because of the stories that went with them. He seemed to remember details that other people had missed or never knew. He could point out buttes where vision quests were held, the hill near Standing Rock where the woman lived with the wolves, and obscure landings along the Missouri where the people crossed or where Jack Sully, shirt-tail relative and famous bandit, escaped from a posse. I came to revere certain locations and passed the stories along as best I could, although visits to these places were few and far between. It seemed to me that the remembrance of human activities at certain locations vested them with a kind of sacredness that could not have been obtained otherwise.
Gradually I began to understand a distinction in the sacredness of places. Some sites were sacred in themselves, others had been cherished by generations of people and were now part of their history and, as such, revered by them and part of their very being. As the Indian protest movement gained momentum and attracted many young people to its activities, much of the concentration of energies was devoted to the restoration of sacred sites and the resumption of ceremonies there.
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