We camped in the Badlands, sleeping under the stars, and gathered in our family’s rustic log cabin deep in the Black Hills.īack then, there were no restaurants on Pine Ridge, just one grocery store and a couple of gas stations dotting the immense reservation. In late summer, we’d harvest chokecherries and timpsula, a wild prairie turnip, and pick juniper berries off the prickly trees. Our dogs chased prairie dogs, pheasants, grouse and antelope, and alerted us to rattlesnakes and jack rabbits. We raced over the open plains, and through shelter belts of tall elm trees, the air full of dust and sagebrush. Growing up on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the 1970s, I ran wild with my cousins through my grandparents’ cattle ranch, over the hot, sandy South Dakota land of burrs and paddle cactus, hiding in the sparse grasses and rolling hills.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |