Program Spotlight: Lakota Perspectives on Environmental Sustainability and Indigenous Rights
The Lakota Perspectives on Environmental Sustainability and Indigenous Rights program in South Dakota offers students the opportunity to live alongside and learn from Lakota native Americans. Through agricultural service projects, immersive accommodations, guided trips, relationships with local residents, and readings and discussions on Lakota history and culture, participating students walk away from their experience on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation not only enriched educationally, but also with a newfound sense of community and connection to the environment.
The Global Experiences Office is committed to the idea that anyone can benefit academically, professionally, and personally from experiencing a new cultural perspective from anywhere in the world. Typically, people think of study abroad as overseas travel. But in the new, post-Covid landscape, GEO is working towards expanding this line of thought by creating study away programs that include more domestic locations and communities – cultures we can encounter in our own backyard.
The Lakota Perspectives on Environmental Sustainability and Indigenous Rights program is just one of the impactful study away programs designed by the Global Experiences Office, in partnership with the global service-learning non-profit Amizade. One of Amizade's core values is providing community-driven service, meaning that the community defines their needs. We then come alongside community members, following their leadership and contributing appropriately where we can. These values are reflected in the Lakota Perspectives program design.
Here are some stories from students that participated in the Lakota program Summer ’23.
Maia Carney:
During my time on Pine Ridge, I learned about a real meaning of community while developing in spiritual, emotional, and interpersonal ways. We participated in building a drip irrigation system for a garden, shoveling out a pit for a well, constructing frames for solar panels, repairing a foot bridge, planting trees on a cattle ranch, planting crops for a greenhouse, digging a hole for a new outhouse, debarking and transporting multiple large logs for use in a ceremony, and collecting countless piles of firewood.
We also participated in Lakota sweat lodges. The five sweat lodges we participated in were by far the most transformative experiences for me. I felt the impacts of true family and community while finally feeling a spiritual connection to the earth and others that I had searched so long for.
While on the reservation, I met Jim Cross, who is also known by his native name as Jim Poor Bear. Jim is the family medicine man who runs many spiritual ceremonies and rituals. While Jim had numerous memorable quotes in our time together, the one that stuck the most was “Do time, don’t let time do you.” In saying this, Jim meant that we should take advantage of not only our time, but also what we hold true to ourselves in order to support our intentions with action.
The Cross family was giving, gracious, and welcoming. Even though we shared life with them for only two weeks, we were connected from that point forward. Upon us leaving, Ron Cross, who is Jim’s brother, said to us that our footsteps are on the land along with the footsteps of their ancestors, which means we are forever intertwined.
Read Maia’s entire testimony here.
Jake Vasilias:
On our trip to Pine Ridge, the overarching lesson I learned was that land gives and sustains life. While in South Dakota, I saw that the Lakota have a relationship to land that acknowledges this.
Keeping in mind that this is just a fraction of what life used to be for the Lakota people, students can take these lessons and values about land, community, and the people they meet on the 
Pine Ridge reservation back home and apply them to their own lives, whether they’re thinking about their relationship to land or other issues. They can also educate others and advocate for people they met during the trip.
I encourage other students to participate in this program because while in South Dakota, we were engaged in a community-living style that feels very healing and restorative from the go-go-go mindset we come from. From gardening projects, digging wells, planting trees, and installing solar panels, it’s nice to see the fruits of your labor benefit something else greater than yourself. This work also showed me more about how I and the Lakota relate to land the resources that nature has given us.
On top of these new experiences, I’ll add that being with the Cross family – the primary family who hosted us – was the best hospitality I’ve ever experienced. We were instantly treated like family, making such a personal experience even more profound. We shared great connections, making saying goodbye difficult. Fortunately, in Lakota language there is no word for “goodbye.” Instead, they leave one another by using a word for “later”: Tókša. This bodes very well for me and my classmates, as this amazing communal experience invites us to go back to Pine Ridge.
Read Jake’s entire testimony here.
Grace DeLallo:
Coming out of an experience where you spend copious amounts of time with strangers in intimate settings, you usually feel a bond of sorts form. The extent to which that bond lasts depends on the people and the impact. But my time in South Dakota was like a match being set upon kindling. An experience like this burns intense — bright, sometimes a little painful, nonetheless searing into your vision; it becomes a part of you. That may sound dramatic, and coming from a dramatic person, it is, but the beauty of an experiential learning trip is that you get to carry not only the lessons learned with you for as long as you can, but the impacts from the relationships forged too.
As much as I gained from watching documentaries about the im
prisonment of Leonard Peltier, the massacre and occupation at Wounded Knee, the telling of different indigenous tales; talks with Lakota members about their experiences on the reservation related to white-owned cattle farming, land and water rights, education, economic opportunities, racism and discrimination; discussing the boarding school that some of the men we interacted with attended. I found that without being present together in that environment, we would not have fully learned what the Lakota people have gone through. Growing up, I wasn’t taught indigenous history, and having it under my feet, at my fingertips, and in front of my eyes was unlike anything I have ever experienced, and for that I will always be thankful. For every non-indigenous person who has this chance, this is an invaluable opportunity to begin to understand not only the hardships of indigenous people, but also the absolute strength and resilience as well.
So, if you’re wondering why you should venture to a state some forget exists, remember that so much of this country awaits people who are curious and empathetic, with open hearts and minds with eagerness and surprise. I met some of the most kind, memorable, and humorous people in some of the most exciting scenery I’ve come across — and not to say that I wasn’t expecting any of this. I simply did not know what to expect. I urge any student interested in broadening their perspectives to look no further than some 1,400 miles away.
Lakota Perspectives on Environmental Sustainability and Indigenous Rights is now accepting applications for Summer 2024. You can find more information and apply for this program on the Global Experiences Office website here. Any questions or interest for the program can directed to the program manager Tim Crawford at timcrawford@pitt.edu.
Written in collaboration by Maia Carney, Grace DeLallo, Mark Kramer, Rachel Vandevort and Jake Vasilias