Wakanyeja

Saturday morning started off early and with a bang.

I woke up at 6:45am and clicked Steve's leash on, opened my apartment door and saw the entire retreat group still sitting in the kitchen.  They were planning to be on the road back to Chicago by 6:30am, but they didn't appear to moving anywhere fast.  As I walked down the few steps to the front door, I caught the eye of one of the group's chaperones and she said, "Our van window was smashed in."

Now, any of you who have seen me walking Steve when I first wake up in the morning, since walking him is always the first thing I do in the morning, know that I am not the most functional within the first twenty minutes of stirring from slumber.  I couldn't quite compute what the chaperone said to me, until I walked outside and saw the smashed windshield of their 15 passenger rental van.  My mind raced back to the night before, when I was walking Steve, and I saw a few men walking through the back yard of the PRRC and heard a loud noise as they passed the shed.  I thought they hit the shed at the time.  At 7am, my mind raced through this visual memory and suddenly realized that I had witnessed an act of vandalism to a vehicle parked in the same parking lot as my own car.

The group spent the rest of the day in the center, waiting and hoping for a solution to their predicament.  Eventually, after several false alarms, they had another rental van arrive...at 9:45pm; the van came from Denver, Colorado.

Apparently, windshield smashings and tire slashings are semi-regular occurrences around here.  There are 38 gangs on the reservation, from what I've been told, and this is a way of doing initiations.

I don't write this to make anyone worried or feel bad about things, but I'm finding that my days here seem to have this ying-yang effect of fitting these two opposite pieces into each other.

While the morning began with understanding a random act of vandalism, the evening was another day of the kids' time, called Sanctuary.  Today's Lakota word is "wakanyeja," which means "children."  "Wakan" means "sacred," so the word for children describes how sacred they are.  I know that children are sacred, after being raised in Euro-American culture, but these children, in this place, seem sacred in a different way.

After Sanctuary tonight, I watched some of the kids walk or ride their bikes away, most seeming far too young to be alone in the middle of a town, crossing a busy street.  I began the morning with a slap in the face, worried about my car and my year here.  I ended the day worrying about the children that were walking home, back into the same neighborhood that I was and am nervous about.

Prayers for these wakanyeja.