This morning I woke to sky-dappled mountains, turning rust colored. We’ve lived on this hill for three years now and it just never gets old. There is a way the wind and the clouds play around the Blue Ridge that offers us an ever changing, seasonal panorama of natural art. I love having my day punctuated by the sun hitting the Blue Ridge in the morning, and then ducking behind it at night.
Bob and I hit the last festival of the season this past picture-perfect weekend. On Saturday we drove north to Graves Mountain Apple Festival. It was our first time in this particular holler, and it really did feel as if we’d stepped back about a hundred years. There were apples in old oak crates with children and grannies bending into them, hayrides for families on a huge tractor truck, Cloggers and the Dark Hollow Bluegrass Band music in a pavilion, and arts and craft tents sprinkled everywhere. Strange how having absolutely no cell service was thrilling and frightening all at once.
Besides my first and last funnel cake of the year, I purchased some bone beads to make a necklace from a Native American Outpost tent. You’d be surprised how many Virginians I’ve met who claim to have this indigenous gene in their DNA. In a curious constellation of events, I also watched Diane Sawyer’s “Hidden America: Children of the Plains” episode on 20/20, and started reading “Empire of the Summer Moon” by S.C. Gwynne. I had absolutely no idea our Native people were suffering through poverty, neglect and addiction still, as portrayed by the children of Pine Ridge Reservation.
The juxtaposition of this picture with this morning’s shot of the Blue Ridge speaks volumes about the Lakota Sioux who live in the southwest corner of South Dakota. As late as the 1940’s children were being separated from their parents to be sent to eastern schools and assimilated. Natives were not allowed to teach their own language until 1970. Now they live in dilapidated trailers with 5 or 6 children sleeping in one room. If you were to watch this 20/20 episode online, you would wonder at celebrities building schools in other countries. And if you were so moved to act – to help bring awareness, to teach or sponsor a scholarship for a school or a boy like Robert Looks Twice who wants to be the first Native American President, or maybe bring a business (as Subway has done) onto their plains – you can find a link here:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/organizations-seek-donations-improve-life-pine-ridge/story?id=14729358
Thank you Diane Sawyer, for traveling our country as near as Appalachia and Camden, NJ and as far as Pine Ridge to highlight our neediest children.
MountainMornings 