Below is Whisper #1 from my latest book, 48 WHISPERS, which is a collection of photographs and personal meditations created across a decade of travel to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and the surrounding northern plains.
Crazy Horse was born in 1842 near the Black Hills. In the decades that marked his life steamboats would conquer the Missouri River to the north as the railroad cut through the Platte River Valley to the south. All the while the buffalo herds kept shrinking. For his people, Crazy Horse epitomizes the essence of Lakota resistance to white encroachment, and he is considered by many to be the greatest Sioux warrior of the nineteenth century. Despite the cultural conflict, Crazy Horse prophesied reunification shortly be- fore his death in 1877 (which he stated would unfold seven generations into the future):
“Upon suffering beyond suffering, the Red Nation shall rise again and it shall be a bless– ing for a sick world. A world filled with broken promises, selfishness, and separation. A world longing for light again. I see a time of seven generations when all the colors of mankind will gather under the sacred Tree of Life and the whole Earth will become one circle again. In that day there will be those among the Lakota who will carry knowledge and understanding of unity among all living things, and the young white ones will come to those of my people and ask for this wisdom. I salute the light within your eyes where the whole universe dwells. For when you are at that center within you and I am in that place within me, we shall be as one.”
—Crazy Horse
Now is the time of the seventh generation.
