A Reflection on What I Felt on Pine Ridge

Before going to South Dakota I expected that I would see a community in peril, that I would hear the voices of those no one listened to and that I would taste bitterness of my own past. I told others that I had no real expectations of Pine Ridge. Yet inside, privately, I expected to experience something important, something intangible, that would shift the way I saw myself and others around me. The very real expectation that I would find some underlying truth in my own life experiences did not go unfulfilled; however, I recognized something more important. I realized that the friendships I cherish, those whose love and whose advice I listen to will always present challenges to me. Those challenges force me to reevaluate what I think is true, what I hold as important and what I decide to judge.

When I listened to others speak about challenges they faced with family, friends and life I thought about my own situation and relationships.  Talking with residents on the reservation opened my mind to understanding the real and close connections of what community and friendships truly mean. Speaking and laughing through the painful experiences is something I learned on the reservation. To go from serious, and often sad conversations, to a light jokes and good humor was something that caught me off guard. It helped me break the spiral of thought that comes with attempting to intellectually define and understand life. To laugh at a corny joke and to not be sarcastic are things I recognized as essential to the healing of my own relationships and friendships.

Those people, that we all have in our life, the people who understand us sometimes better than we understand ourselves at times, are necessary for more than a healthy life. They become essential for a vibrant community that is built on compassion, support and struggle. We can never be free of struggle or pain, but we can always find solace in the words and embrace of the people who value us for the people we are.

Natalie Hand was one of the community partners we worked with while on Pine Ridge.  I learned more about resilience, support, and constitution from her actions than from other experiences I have had. She taught me the non-verbal lessons I needed to experience. More than most other people I have met, Natalie showed me the true value of being in a community. It does not simply mean giving back or helping. It means living and breathing, eating and laughing, crying and singing with the people you love (and even those who you don't like not so much). It is an action and way of healing. While others have taught me through their words, not many have taught me through their actions or character.

All in all, I believe that my experiences on Pine Ridge taught me to reevaluate myself. Not so much as looking within, but rather to take what I already have and look at it in another way. To look at myself not in the eyes of my own reflection but through my heart, to hear my own intuition instead of my fears, to taste sweetness of moments we share with others.

Post Experience: Why I am Grateful We Didn't Just Send Money

One week before leaving for Pine Ridge, South Dakota I wrote a blog post addressing the question of “why not just send money?” It’s funny looking back on this post and realizing regardless of how connected I thought I was with the bigger picture, i.e.- it’s more than money, it took living it and experiencing it to actually understand. Upon returning from Pine Ridge I feel that my life has been turned on top of itself. I have exposed pieces of myself that I didn’t know, or had forgotten, existed. I have made scary choices and I remain unsure of whether I am making a mistake or whether I am moving forward. So, only 12 days later, I offer this post to demonstrate the radical shift I feel within myself and the experience that I most definitely would not have had, and continue to have, if I had just sent money.

Human connection is one of the most beautiful and heartbreaking experiences to live. You can connect with a spirit, with an idea, a practice, a song, a piece of art, a dance, a movement, a moment, and, most importantly to me, another human. The scariest thing about connection is the impermanence in the permanence. You will never ever have that moment again, only the memory of that moment.

For many individuals you can never forget the experience of deep connection, it touches you beyond the surface level, it moves you beyond skin deep. Every connection we open ourselves to become experiences that change us, shape us, and leave us at least little bit different. Human connections carve out a piece of you, a sliver of you “owned” by another soul, object, or experience. That is to say you loose part of yourself in connection. But in this loss you also gain something. It is symbiotic, to an extent. You gain insight, understanding, and empathy. You learn how to be compassionate. You simultaneously selflessly and selfishly experience.

This last week of my life is making me stop and think about connections. It has me questioning love, love of myself and love of others. It has me wondering what is wrong and what is right. In a very real way it has turned my own worldview on its head. I am thankful that I am open to connections, open to listening to the world around me, but also recognize the hurt and pain that comes with these experiences. Life is duplicitous in the way it teaches us and as students of life we are forced to face this duplicity. Today, and everyday, I strive to not rationalize, validate, or order the duplicitous feelings inside of me but to instead let them come and go and recognize them in the moment. If you do not feel contradictions or hardship I would question whether you were living life to it’s fullest.

Anyone who is open to experiencing is in a constant state of gratitude and mourning. No moment can ever be recreated, no matter how much we try. Technology has made it so that you can stay in constant contact, you can recreate some semblance of connecting, but you still will never feel it in the same way again. Time moves on, life moves on, and who you are is in constant flux.

There is a moment, or many moments, in the human life where you feel like two bodies may actually be one. You feel like two minds are on the same page, churning from different perspectives and life experiences but united in a single moment to feel together. This is the power of human connection.

I am grateful that I was reminded of this power in this last week when I was living outside of my comfort zone. I am grateful to remember how much growth comes with the feelings of vulnerability and openness to anything. In this moment I am grateful to mourn.

I believe that human nature is fragile in its resilience. What a single individual, or a group of individuals, can experience and move beyond is amazing to me. There is so much hurt and trauma in this world that the fact that we all move forward is truly incredible.

Growth comes with anger, pain, suffering, grief, and sorrow. It also is how we add something better to our lives, how we pursue happiness, contentedness, joy, exuberance, love, and compassion.

We all are where we are, in this exact moment, though it is constantly changing and transitioning. Living life means we are along for the ride. Some of us hold on to comfort and close ourselves to the harsh reality at times, in order to protect ourselves, but each of us has moments when we cannot ignore what is happening around us and how that changes the way our hearts beat.

I was changed through my experiences.

I traveled to South Dakota armed with a sturdy base of theory and intellect, naively believing that this was enough. I arrived with expectations, the biggest being that I would be able to understand everything I saw as long as I listened.

I left South Dakota, and the big bad west in general, with a realization that I will never understand but I can always feel. I can never shut myself off from feeling, from loving, or from connecting. Some connections last a lifetime and others are only there for a brief moment, a moment to remind you that you are human. I am grateful for those reminders.

As I transition back into the everyday routine, into paying bills and turning in assignments and serving people their dinner I am faced with a great sense of mourning. I am mourning for the people who hurt, everyday, and who I can forget about because of the nature of this fucked up world. I am mourning for those eyes I will never again gaze deeply into. I am mourning for the lack of smiling children in my life. I am mourning for the feeling of a single purpose when I wake up everyday. I am mourning for paths that I have decided to turn my back to. I am mourning for moments of love that cannot withstand the reality of life.

I am grateful for the mourning. The mourning means it matters, the mourning means I care. The mourning means that I will always be striving for connection. The mourning is provocative.

It provokes me to greet everyday thankfully. It provokes me to never forget, but to gracefully move forward. It provokes me to give instead of take. It provokes me to always be thankful.

Human connection motivates me to love and listen with my whole heart, body, and mind.

In this moment of gratitude and mourning I could not be happier that we did not just send the money.

-Wendell Robinson, Warren Wilson College Senior

Why We Aren't Just Sending Money

There is a question that has been on all of our minds all semester: why not just send the money? As a Cultural Psychology college break trip we are spending quite a bit of money, time, and energy to travel to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Home of the Lakota Native Americans, it is estimated that 50% of Pine Ridge residents live below the Federal Poverty Line and the average life expectancy for those individuals on the reservation is thirty years below the rest of the nation. Statistically, the reservation experiences twice the amount of suicides compared to the United States at large, and over 80% of the reservation is unemployed. From the green lawns of a private liberal arts college, we travel westward to this reservation, and it isn't without questions.

Who are we to travel to Pine Ridge and impose ourselves, our culture, and our outward whiteness in a place where that may just bring pain, frustration, and anger? Pain for what has been lost and not yet returned. Frustration at the money that is continuously offered but the land that remains disrespected. And anger. Anger for the injustice that has happened, is happening, and may continue to happen. We have searched for answers in our textbooks, in stories shared, and in the way we reason with ourselves. The internal debate, the guilt that is felt but catches in our throat as we try to utter our thoughts. Thoughts that tangle in our head as we try to understand pain that we did not feel, cannot feel. How does our being their mean anything to them? Is it a selfish desire for "experience"? 

These questions are meant to reflect the nature of discussion that have been circulating as our Cultural Psychology class prepares to venture forward to Pine Ridge, South Dakota. We have spent the semester studying ideas of culture, of cultural difference, and of the consequences. We have learned that we are immersed in a discipline that has, in many ways, blinders up in regards to practices that stray away from western ideology. As a class, we have struggled back and forth to understand what it means to have culture, to be a culture, and to shape a culture. 

We have learned to question the meaning of child development as there are 8-month old children of the Aka nomadic tribe (Western Congo Region) who wield machetes safely in order to help contribute to the welfare of the family. We have learned to question the ways in which we test our children and the ideas of intelligence if intelligence testing is full of cultural bias. We have introspectively turned to look at ourselves and our family culture-- the roots of who were are. We have asked ourselves time and time again, what is culture?

I realize these are a lot of questions to pose without offering any answers. I do not want you to think I have any answers, or that there are answers to these questions. These questions are square and intellectual in nature, instead of circular and open. Culture is fluid and constantly changing and cannot be summarized easily to fit in a box. 

Culture is more than skin deep. It is more than the country in which you were born or the languages you speak or the kind of food that your parents cooked for you. Culture isn't simply your religion, your politics, or the way you view the world. Culture is everything. Every piece of you that has been shaped, constructed, or maybe extinguished. Every emotion, thought, and perception you have had, are having or will have: that's culture. Culture is your experience as an individual and the shared experiences of individuals around you. Culture is the common ground, but it can also divide. 

It is here we find our answers, however rough and incomplete. 

We do not travel to Pine Ridge to study and experience the novel-- the unknown culture-- but rather, we travel to experience human connection. We travel to learn what it means to connect to another person. We travel to feel those connections, not by feeling for but for feeling with individuals. We go to admit that we know very little and what we do know is shaped by our own individual culture. There is both Culture and culture. The big and the little, the collective and the individual.

We travel to the Lakota to learn about ourselves, to admire and respect difference between and among individuals. To understand that money is a cultural practice and to understand the sending money doesn’t make connections.

Our hosts on Pine Ridge cannot share their experiences with money or make a personal connection. Money is part of culture, but culture can exist without money.

We travel to Pine Ridge attempting to empathize and to listen.

We travel to Pine Ridge to connect.