Remember Killdeer Mountain

FRIDAY, MARCH 1, 2013

Remember Killdeer Mountain

Photo by Valerie Blumle, Save Killdeer Mountain.

Killdeer - In the land of sky and wind Killdeer Mountain rises above the prairie like a step to heaven. The plateau is ancient, carved by rain and wind, gradually cracked and broken by ice and the sun for uncounted seasons. From the top of the step lies an unparalleled view of unending sky and vast rolling prairie.

North Dakota is in the center of North America. The farthest one can get away from the oceans, and yet here the great waters take different shape and form. Verdant waves undulate and break upon the step. There is no great emerald splash, no violent splatter of grass. The wind is the current, the wildest of the natural energies, which envelopes and ascends the cracked plateau in a fury.

Two-pronged antelope still scamper about the hills in a long forgotten race which gifted them with their fleet ability. Deer wander about the land in early morning or evening with the natural born caution that predators and humans grafted into them over thousands of years. Bison appear only in the imagination these days but a gange can be found in the Theodore Roosevelt National Park to the west.

Photo by Sage Brush Photography.

Archaeologists say that it’s a site that shows continuous cultural occupation for the past three thousand years. Young men travelled there on spiritual pilgrimage, a quest, to learn as much about themselves as to learn a good way to live in the natural world. They left little sign of their passage, but what they left was enough for anthropologists to date when they were there.

On a hot midsummer day, June 28, 1864, the long-held sanctity of the plateau was shattered when General Sully and his command of 4,000 soldiers engaged the Hunkpapa Lakota and Ihanktowana Dakota, commonly regarded as “Sioux.” These particular tribes of Sioux had nothing to do with the 1862 Minnesota Dakota Conflict. When the smoke of gunfire and cannon cleared and when the dust of combat settled on the broken encampment, all of the children who were left behind in the confusion of the raid were swiftly scalped and executed.

Photo by Sage Brush Photography.

A spiritual sanctum for untold generations of vision quest pilgrims became a violent memorial. The peace of the broken arrow, a sign never to raise war upon each other or an enemy, was replaced with bugle call to war.

Natural history on the Northern Great Plains has given way to industry. In the late nineteenth century it was railroads, in the middle of the twentieth century it was the interstate and highways. These days it’s the oil industry. North Dakota is the face of national energy development and independence. Industry has been changing the face of the prairie for over a hundred years and it’s changing at a greater pace than ever before.

Photo by Gerald Blank.

Killdeer Mountain is a sacred site to the Native people of Standing Rock, the Arikara-Hidatsa-Mandan Nation of Fort Berthold, the Turtle Mountain Chippewa, members of the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes, the Whitecap Dakota and Wood Mountain First Nations in Canada, and others not mentioned here. Indian nations spread across the distance of states and countries regard Killdeer as a spiritual and culturally significant site.

Killdeer Mountain is a memorial to American Civil War combatants. The United Statesand the state of North Dakota either don’t know it or are ignorant of it. General Sully is a Civil War general. Sully’s command fought a tertiary battle of the Civil War in Dakota Territory. The Confederate States of America (CSA) promised congressional representation to Indian nations who engaged Union forces. The Sioux were unaware of the CSA’s standing offer, but that doesn’t make it any less important.

Photo of man descending into Medicine Hole, 1919. National Park Service, photo by Calvin Reed.

In 1919, three men, AA Liederbach, WL Richards and Col. CA Lounsberry working together as the Killdeer Mountain Park Commission, submitted their report to President Wilson, Secretary of the Interior FK Lane, Commissioner of National Parks ST Mather, North Dakota Senators McCumber and Gronna, and North Dakota Representatives Norton, Young and Baer.

Former President Roosevelt died on January 6, 1919 and people across the country were clamoring for a national park in his honor, but Congress had more important things to worry about like prohibition than preserving one battlefield in the heartland. Efforts to memorialize Roosevelt with a park didn’t prove successful until the 1940s.

There’s been talk, mostly inconsequential mumblings, of bringing the Killdeer Mountainconflict site into the fold of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park system. Hesitant talk, maybe wishful talk, perhaps from people who know about General Sully’s Punitive Campaign of 1864 and want to save it for the history or perhaps in the spirit of Theodore Roosevelt want to save it for the sake of saving an undeveloped natural landscape. 

Photo by Valerie Blumle, Save Killdeer Mountain.

In recent years, the National Park Service published an update of a report about the nation’s Civil War battlefields, one of which focused on the Killdeer Mountain conflict. More talk is what the report amounted to. The report suggested all kinds of things that could be done to preserve North Dakota’s Civil War battlefields. It was published in 2010.

Killdeer Mountain isn’t on the National Registry of Historic Places. Neither are any of the other Civil War related North Dakota conflicts listed in the National Park’s report. It is never too late to nominate Killdeer Mountain to the National Registry of Historic Places. It is too late to preserve it. The commercial value of the site is worth far too much ($250 million) to leave it undeveloped. The oil (3.5 million barrels) trapped under 3000 years of history, a battlefield, and sandstone would go to waste otherwise.

Photo by myself, south looking north to the plateau where rests Medicine Hole.

In the spring I plan on taking my sons to Killdeer Mountain for a walk. We won’t talk about the oil wells. Instead we’ll talk of the mountain. We’ll talk of the conflict. We’ll probably take pictures. And it will remain a memory. 

http://thefirstscout.blogspot.com/2013/03/remember-killdeer-mountain.html

The Killdeer Mountains: Living History and Sacredness

01/25/2013

The Killdeer Mountains: Living History and Sacredness

By Aaron Barth

Individuals concerned about what happens to the Killdeer Mountains chat before the public hearing at the Bismarck capitol on January 24, 2013.

The Killdeer Mountains in Dunn County, western North Dakota have been getting a lot of attention lately, especially after theNorth Dakota Industrial Commission decided to, well, industrialize the area, and allow the Hess Corporation to follow through with signed leases and drill and frack for oil there. The Grand Forks Herald reported on it here, and The Bismarck Tribune here. The Industrial Commission is composed of three individuals, including Jack Dalrymple, Wayne Stenehjem, and Doug Goehring. They have scheduled meetings with the Department of Mineral Resources and Lynn Helms, the sitting Director. It is important to remember that this was a public hearing, and at public hearings the public ought not to be shy about attending. This experiment America has going, our Democratic-Republic, necessitates these local meetings that have global implications.

On January 24, 2013, at 1:00pm (CST) the public hearing for the Killdeer Mountains was held in the capitol of Bismarck, North Dakota. It was Industrial Commission Case Number 18618 concerning sections 25 & 36, T. 146 N., R. 97 W, this about 30-35 miles north of Dickinson, North Dakota. Originally the hearing was scheduled in the Governor’s meeting room, a rather closed-off and secluded place. Because of the public turn-out, though, the hearing was relocated to the larger Brynhild Haugland room in the western wing of the capitol. I drove over from Fargo to Bismarck to attend the meeting, and while there scribbled down some notes and took some audio-video as well. The high-points, I thought, were in capturing two Native voices from two disparate cultures.

The first is a video from Theodora Birdbear of Mandaree, North Dakota (Mandaree is Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara territory). The microphone on my Canon PowerShot SX260 HS captured the audio a bit, and just in case there are those of us hard-of-hearing, I provided transcript of Theodora’s testimony below.


Transcript:

…and he expressed the impact of oil and gas development, the industrialization of an area, which impacts the quality of that spiritual experience. I guess it’s kind of equivalent to having an oil well right beside your Catholic church or something. It’s parallel to that. So I wanted the commission to know that Fort Berthold does have a living connection to that area, and to consider that in your decision making. As people have said prior to this, technology is evolving, and to keep it [oil] in the ground is not wasting it. They are going to be after it in the future. What’s the rush? The rush is quick decisions, unplanned decisions, and unplanned impacts. So I just wanted to make a comment about our relationship with that area. It is still living today.

North Dakota Industrial Commissioners listen to Natives speak about the sacredness and history of the Killdeer Mountains.

Theodora remarks on how the Killdeer Mountains are a sanctuary, as sacred and sacrosanct as a Catholic Church, and to carry the analogy further, as a Lutheran or protestant church, a Synagogue, a Mosque, a Buddhist monastery, a Hindu temple, a Confucian temple, and so on. These spaces are sacrosanct in the sense that when an individual goes to the area to pray, they are really interested in having it as quiet. A library could also be considered a sacred space by this definition (libraries carry on that monastic-academic tradition of the deliberate contemplation of texts — this is arguably the antithesis of our hyper-industrial, full-throttle, 21st century world).

The other Native voice captured came by way of Dakota Goodhouse, who originally hails from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in south-central North Dakota (he shares the namesake of the state, which in English means ally or friend). Dakota gives some backdrop about the history of Killdeer Mountains as it pertains to the US-Dakota Wars, specifically the punitive campaigns carried out by General Alfred Sully west of the Missouri River circa 1864.
For some video context, Dakota is speaking and Lynn Helms is seated at the right. In this video excerpt, Dakota is remarking on how the encampment and battle boundaries are much larger and broader than what is delineated now (as of 01/25/2013), and how they need to be re-considered.

http://theedgeofthevillage.com/2013/01/25/killdeer-mountains-living-history-and-sacredness/