The Hindquarters of God, Seeing the Sacred in a Landscape:

Summary

The Hindquarters of God, Seeing the Sacred in a Landscape:

As the needs of our expanding society increasingly refashion our natural environment, we struggle to maintain healthy habitats and our sacred places. Archaeologists, land developers, lawmakers, theologians, and indigenous practioners of traditional spirituality all struggle with conflicting views of what do we mean when we declare that something is sacred and how do we recognize and preserve sacred places. The burning questions at the heart of this struggle are seemingly unanswerable: "What is sacred and what is not sacred." If something is sacred, can we interact, alter or develop it? If everything is sacred what can we develop, consume or even study in an academic setting? Dakota Elder Tom Ross taught that the sacred cannot be defined. He believed that the more we defined the sacred, the further we got from understanding it. Tom was taught by elders how to think about the sacred. He was taught how to recognize what could not be defined. This paper briefly outlines the teachings on the sacred and sacred places of some Dakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho and Shoshoni elders.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Intersection of Sacredness and Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage