Inila: An account of opening to sacred knowing

Abstract

July 1992. Everything was shades of Payne’s gray and dark Irish green as I drove west on Highway 20. I was headed toward the little town of Lusk, Wyoming, looking for a hotel room. For the previous two years, I’d driven this road on numerous long solo journeys, traveling to and from South Dakota to my home in Arizona. Just a couple of hours before this particular drive, I’d been on the Pine Ridge reservation of the Oglala Lakota, in the towns where I’d come to be familiar with the families and summer gatherings. I spent time buying gas and washing clothes in the town of Pine Ridge, preparing to “leave the field," as the ethnographic literature calls it. Technically, this meant I was supposedly finished with my fieldwork; it was time to begin my analysis and writing. However, this entire project had not been technically, or practically, anything quite like it was supposed to be. In this project, I’d never consciously voiced what my next steps would be. The road home was to teach me to hear the lessons in the silences.