For the Lakota, Creativity Thrives Where There’s No Word for Art

There is no word for art in the Lakota language. But the power of art, in every facet of life, has drawn a boisterous group of moccasin beaders, painters, regalia artists and producers of Native hip-hop down a two-lane road that undulates through the tawny hills of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, eight miles from the nearest intersection.

The setting is the new Oglala Lakota Artspace, a Native-run studio space that’s the first of its kind on the Pine Ridge reservation, and since its debut last May, it has liberated scores of artists from their kitchen tables. It’s a place where mothers hover over sewing machines fashioning ribbon skirts for their daughters to wear at powwows, while young hip-hop artists in requisite black T-shirts record music videos and mixtapes under the tutelage of a 30-year-old rapper and producer.

Helene Gaddie, the instructor for the Warrior Women Sewing Circle, is one of five Artspace artists-in-residence; she’s also co-founder of an organization bringing science, math and cultural education to Lakota youth. “There are a lot of statistics about our community,” she observed. “This place is a beacon of hope, a safe, welcoming space where community members excel.”

The Pine Ridge reservation, home to the Oglala Lakota Nation, spans some 3,469 square miles — a distance twice the size of Rhode Island — including a swath of canyon-colored tablelands within Badlands National Park. In recent decades, the reservation has contended with a litany of social ills tied to deep poverty, including alcoholism and substance abuse, overcrowded, dilapidated housing and youth suicide. The unemployment rate on the reservation as of 2022, according to census figures, was 10.8 percent. Its geographic isolation is compounded by spotty broadband and dirt roads that become impassable with mud in heavy rains.

The Oglala Lakota people on Pine Ridge are part of an ancient confederacy called the Oceti Sakowin, or Seven Council Fires, whose members speak three dialects of the same language with seven bands spread across reservations primarily in North and South Dakota. All Lakota tribes were once part of the Great Sioux Nation before the government divided them into separate reservations shoehorned onto greatly reduced lands.