*The Independent* (London)
Saturday, 20 May 1995
"A five-star hotel and casino. Well thanks, Kevin"
by Alix Sharkey
Today, a "spiritual gathering" takes place on a tract of
land in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Hundreds,
perhaps thousands, will converge on the site where film
star Kevin Costner and his brother Dan are building a
320-room luxury hotel-casino complex. Most of the
protestors will be Lakota Sioux Indians, who claim that
Costner is building on land that belongs to them.
Standing at the centre of a six-state area once known to
white settlers as "Indian country," the Black Hills, or
Paha Sapa, are sacred to the Sioux. These were their
burial grounds and holy lands, where they came on "vision
quests," and held their annual Sundance rituals. Only
150 years ago they lived a semi-nomadic existence, here
on the Great Plains.
But once settlers discovered gold in the hills, the US
government systematically persecuted the Indians to the
edge of extinction, herded them on to reservations that
were little more than concentration camps, and did its
best to annihilate their language and culture. The Black
Hills were sold off to property developers, gold and
mineral mining companies, and timber firms. Anything
left over was declared National Forest land, and the
Indians were denied access for religious ceremonies.
Now, Kevin Costner is hoping to attract thousands of
European and Japanese tourists with a five-star monument
to kitsch called The Dunbar. The long-suffering Sioux
regard this as the last straw, and plan to occupy the
land today in order to make a peaceful protest.
The bitter irony here, of course, is that Costner built
his Hollywood career on the back of Sioux culture. In
his 1990 film *Dances with Wolves*, Costner portrayed Lt
John Dunbar, an 1860s cavalryman who becomes enchanted
with the Lakota way of live and "goes native." *Dances
with Wolves* made more than $500m worldwide, and Costner,
as director, producer and star, took about 10 percent of
that sum.
And how did he repay the Indians whose culture, language
and history he had employed so freely? Did he build a
hospital on one of South Dakota's four reservations? Did
he set up a college trust fund to educate underprivileged
Indian kids? Did he buy a piece of the Black Hills and
give it back to the Sioux, so that they could perform
their religious ceremonies there?
Well, no actually. Despite the unthinkable wealth
generated by *Dances*, and the fact that South Dakota's
Indians are, according to the latest US government
census, the poorest people in the entire United States,
nobody can recall Costner donating so much as a dollar to
an Indian cause. Perhaps he thinks they should be
grateful that he is investing $100m in the Dunbar resort
(where they can apply for minimum-wage jobs, washing
dishes and the like). But nobody really knows what he
thinks, because Costner refuses to discuss the matter.
Of course, Kevin Costner can produce deeds of ownership
for the land. But so can the Sioux, whose papers date
from 1851, when the first Fort Laramie Treaty was signed
with the US government, acknowledging the Indians'
ownership of 60 million acres of the Great Plains,
including the 7.3 million acres of the Black Hills. In
1868, a second treaty was drawn up, reducing the Indian
land to 26 million acres, but still including the area
now being developed by Costner.
There is also the small matter of 1980s US Supreme Court
ruling, which declared the Lakota Sioux the rightful
owners of the Black Hills, and denounced the government's
appropriation as a "rank case of dishonourable dealings
... unparalled in American jurisprudence." (The Sioux,
however, rejected the Court's award of $105m as
"insulting." You can see their point: the hills have
yielded over $250bn of gold alone in the last 100 years.)
"I believe the Dunbar resort is not only illegal, because
the Black Hills issue remains unresolved," says Mitchell
Zephier, a Lakota Sioux jeweller, "but it comes down to
whether or not we hold the earth to be sacred. And the
earth *is* sacred, you know, it's a gift to all of us.
It's not about material gain. It's about sustaining
life, and life itself is sacred."
Costner's PR people say he "wants to leave a legacy" in
the Black Hills. But what kind? He can bequeath yet
another symbol of avarice and deceit, a luxury palace for
the privileged classes. Or he could still rebuild
bridges with the Lakota (who even now are unwilling to
condemn him) and put something back into the land from
which he has already taken so much. Just a fraction of
his casino budge could establish sustainable subsistence
farming on the reservations, for example.
Maybe Kevin Costner sill realize that this debate goes
much deeper than the argument about his casino. It
extends beyond the Black Hills, and has significance for
all of us, touching on the very nature of our
relationship with the earth. It begs the question of
whether we are prepared to recognize and maintain the
sacred nature of the land, or if indeed we agree that
everything has its price, and anything can be bought and
sold.
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