Overview  

The most potent symbol of the tribal connection between spirituality and sovereignty are South Dakota’s Black Hills, or Paha Sapa. The Hills – named for their dark silhouettes smudged against the horizon - have long been of spiritual significance to the Cheyenne and Lakota.  The Lakota always called He Sapa, the Black Hills, 'The Heart Of Everything That Is', and when James B Herrington (Chickasaw), a Native American astronaut took a photograph of the Black Hills from space, unsurprisingly to traditional Lakotas, they looked exactly like a map of the human heart.

 

  About Your Day  

 

• Spend the morning at Wind Cave, learning of Lakota genesis, visiting the cave entrance from whence The People emerged to the face of the earth.

​

• Travel into what is now known as Custer State Park and enjoy lunch at the State Game Lodge, after which you spend time seeking out Tatanka, the buffalo - which was everything to the Lakota: the meat sustained the people, the hides clothed and sheltered them and the bones provided tools and arrowheads. But more importantly, the buffalo was, and remains, a direct spiritual link to the ancestors. And in the undulating grassland, encounter the descendants of the great buffalo herds that once roamed the plains.

​

• Among the granite spires and brook laden grassy meadows of the Black Hills experience the tradition of Lakota storytelling.​​