07 – The Voyage goes off course.

I attend a beautiful sunrise ceremony in honor of Indigenous Peoples’ Day on a Monday, as planned, and am on the road before 8 AM. I arrive at the Standing Rock Reservation as the sun sets. I spend Tuesday in and around Standing Rock and am encamped at a cottage on Bureau of Indian Affairs Route 33 on the Pine Ridge Reservation by that evening. Wednesday is spent visiting the Lakota Technical High School in Pine Ridge where I deliver hundreds of dollars of donated art supplies, as well as dozens of Boston Celtics shirts, shorts, basketballs, official NBA socks. It feels good and energetic to be at the high school. Members of the football team are strapping themselves to the front of large school buses, leaning into the straps and pulling the buses across the parking lot.

There is a lot of cheering, teasing, and all-around good fun as each young man pulls the bus about 40 yards. The young men who help me unload the car are also having a very good time. The equipment I’ve brought is greatly admired, and they talk amongst themselves about how much the art teacher will like the canvases and quality acrylics, how much the boy’s basketball coach will enjoy the Celtics basketball warm-up pants. They unfurl the 40 foot wide winged Leonard Peltier ”puppet” and hold it against the wall of the high school as I take photographs.

Later that day I go to the Wounded Knee Memorial. It is immensely moving to be here and a separate entry about Wounded Knee would be appropriate. After spending time in the Wounded Knee graveyard with the living and the dead I go back to my cabin at Bureau of Indian Affairs Road 33. For reasons I don’t understand my left ankle is immensely painful and swollen and I spend the evening trying to sleep through agony unlike any I’ve known before.

Thursday morning I return to Wounded Knee for reflection and then proceed, exactly on the schedule I have laid out months ago, to Rapid City South Dakota, where I have planned to rest for two or three days exploring the Black Hills before heading north towards Calgary for a 10 day jaunt across Alberta and a rendezvous with my friend Joy, my ex wife Lynne, and my sister Sheryl. Instead of checking in to a motel however, I go directly to the Rapid City hospital emergency room where I am admitted.