Conflicting Concepts of Land: The Badlands::

The Lakota Badlands

The South Dakota Badlands spread east from the base of the Black Hills, some thirty-five miles north and south, and more than ninety miles east. They were formed over a period of fourteen million years, around thirty-seven million years ago, as layers of mud, clay and silt washed off the eastern flanks of the Black Hills and eroded into an otherworldly terrain that drops down into a trench rather than soars upward into the skies. The Mako Sica, or Badlands, have held great value for the Lakota Sioux. Once the centre for burials, the shimmering expanse of craggy spires and layered pink, white, yellow, red, brown and lavender rock is still today a focus for sundances and vision-quests. During fieldwork in South Dakota between 1998 and 1999, two Lakota women told me of the spirits that dance there in the silence. They told me that in order to experience the spirit of that landscape, one must walk out into it and feel and hear and see. Created as the result of a mighty flood in ancient time, the Badlands are filled with fossils - the bones of the water monster spirits known as the Unktehi in Lakota mythological belief.

Mako Sica, or the bad lands, were near the geographical centre of the Lakota's domain, being virtually adjacent to the Black Hills. The rocky terrain appeared desolate and barren to European eyes, but to the Lakota the region was filled with spirits. The people buried their dead, sought visions and performed sundances there.

Lakota mythology explains the origin of the Badlands and describes a mythic description of its volcanic origins. There was a time when all the lands that lay east of the Black Hills were lush and green, covered with trees and plants and crisscrossed with clear streams and the tracks of numerous animals. The region was a peaceful one for the Lakota and there was no intertribal warfare there.

One day, a tribe swept in from the west, desperate for clothing and food. In their greed and hunger, they drove off all the other tribes, and refused to be placated by the offer of gifts, sacred pipes, prayers or pleas. Nothing could persuade this tribe to share the bounty of the land. Finally, the displaced tribes gathered together and plotted to drive out the greedy tribe.

On the day of their advance, however, Wakantanka caused a commotion in the heavens and in the ground. He caused dark clouds to hide the sun, lightning to streak across the darkness, thunder to rumble through the skies, fire to flame from the ground and the earth to shudder and rock. A vast chasm opened in the ground and into it everything sank - the people, the animals, the plants, and the springs. The storm ceased as suddenly as it had begun. The once-lush region was now a stark, rocky wasteland upon which nothing could ever grow.

The Badlands contains the fossilized remains of the dinosaur-like unktegila - great water monsters, each of which had one eye, a spine like the serrated edge of a saw, red hair all over its body and a horn in the middle of its forehead. The unktegila regularly fought with the Wakinyan, or Thunderbeing, who resided in the Black Hills. Wakinyan's missiles can also be found in the Badlands, in the form of coal-like stones called kangitame in Lakota.

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