Our time at Re-Member has come to an end after a challenging, yet insightful and exciting week. We packed up this morning and made a visit to the site of the Wounded Knee massacre. We all agreed that it was a more valuable trip having made it at the end of our week on the Rez. The bitter cold and winds brought to life the pain and despair of the location. It felt like the mutilated, frozen bodies in the photographs at the Red Cloud Indian School and the Oglala Lakota College could have been right in front of us. As we left the reservation, we were once again reminded of the solemn history that never ceases to haunt the beautiful, resilient Oglala Lakotas.
From Wounded Knee we headed down 20 West and trekked from South Dakota through Nebraska back to Wyoming. We stopped in Douglas for another taste of local society. We have spent the evening in Casper waiting for our flight home tomorrow morning.
As we conclude this week, we are ready to face the difficult reality of learning how to incorporate our new understandings and confusions into our ever-changing conceptual and practical frameworks. My charge to our group is that we will take time to challenge our inclinations to play the role of the “rescuers” through service opportunities. I hope that we will all find ways to deconstruct the notions of “helperism” that too often consume the liberal Western thinker. For it is not until we have come to terms with our own inherent, subconscious biases and agendas that we may begin to effectively reach toward others. It is then that we will be ready to surrender our privilege and move forth with our efforts as we walk hand in hand with those bound by oppression.
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