Close Encounters of an Even Closer Kind

Director Steven Spielberg portrays a positive encounter between humanity and visiting aliens from outer space in the classic sci-fi film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The film concludes with Americans and aliens communicating peacefully through music, as an enormous alien spacecraft hovers above a gathering of awed humans standing atop Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. As one film critic put it, this event “suggests that humankind has reached the point where it is ready to enter the community of the cosmos.”

Aliens and humans getting along atop Devil's Tower.

Yet a review of what’s been going on at the real Devil’s Tower gives the intelligent among us great pause concerning this critic’s point. It sheds light on how inadequate we still are as a community of the Earth, let alone of the cosmic community.

As portrayed in the documentary In the Light of Reverence, Devil’s Tower is part of the Black Hills, a territory that was legally granted to the Lakota Nation by treaty with the United States. Sacred to these Midwestern American Indians, it’s called Mato Tipila in the Lakota language, meaning Lodge of the Bear. Lakota legend has it this flat-topped butte was supernaturally formed to spare a group of children from the wrath of an angry bear. The peak continues to be a place of sacred rejuvenation and healing for the Lakota to the present day.

Treaties in the late 1860s between the Lakota Nation and the United States affirmed Lakota ownership of the Black Hills. Within several years of signing them, however, the infamous U.S. military commander George A. Custer and his cavalry swarmed and occupied the Hills, stealing them for the United States when gold was discovered. The Black Hills were never sold or ceded to the United States, yet to this day they are still wrongly considered U.S. public land, managed under the National Park Service. But the Lakota have never ceased their legal battle, merely seeking non-exclusive title to the Hills rather than exclusive. Their wish at this point is to practice their traditional religion in the Hills, without interference from Americans.

Alas, as the documentary continues to portray, Americans continue to make recreational use of the Lodge. They primarily come to climb the steep-sided butte. But for the Lakota, their sacred land is being desecrated. On behalf of the Lakota, climbers have at least been asked by the Park Service to voluntarily refrain from climbing Mato Tipila in June when the Lakota perform their primary religious ceremonies.

In the Light of Reverence makes us keenly aware of just how infuriatingly ignorant some Americans continue to be about American Indians and their religions, even today. A lawsuit successfully prevented the Lakota from making such requests for a time, using the First Amendment as an excuse. It was later repealed, on the obvious grounds that this was an accommodation towards, rather than an enfranchisement of, native religion. Some of the interviewed climbers argued for their personal right to climb as they see fit, without any regard for Lakota wishes. The Lodge is viewed only as American park land, nothing more. One climber frivolously compared his personal “religious experience” of climbing to the experience of Lakota religious ceremonies, clearly demonstrating his complete lack of understanding and respect for what is a serious religious practice.

Understandably, so much time has passed since the land’s theft from the Lakota people that it’s perhaps natural for (uninformed) Americans today to regard it as part of United States public park land. Established now for a few generations, local Americans today did not personally steal it. But some Americans interviewed in the documentary quite ironically accused the Lakota of attempting what the United States has systematically done to the Lakota for the past century and a half: steal land and impose their own culture and values. One man demonstrated a particularly astonishing example of ignorance when he insisted that no native people were around when a nearby American town was settled, apparently implying that white people were the first to discover the Black Hills!

A basic sense of fair play clearly informs us that Lakota property not willingly sold nor given to the United States rightfully should remain Lakota property. The U.S. Supreme Court finally conceded wrongdoing here, albeit a century after the fact. Yet instead of giving the land back to the Lakota, the Court awarded them monetary compensation. But a monetary award implies that payment was due for land willingly sold.

Mount Rushmore, with the famous faces of four U.S. presidents carved into it, is not far from the Lodge. As reported in The Light of Reverence, it’s a federal crime to climb the presidents’ faces at any time of the year. Interestingly, nobody complains about not being able to climb Mount Rushmore while some protest being asked to voluntarily not climb the sacred Lodge of the Bear for just a month out of the year.

This writer thinks they protest too much. If only humanity could peacefully coexist with itself as well as we do with aliens in Spielberg’s movie…

The real Devil's Tower, a.k.a. Lodge of the Bear

Works Referenced

Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Perf. Richard Dreyfuss, François Truffaut, and Teri Garr. Columbia Pictures, 1977. Film.

In the Light of Reverence. Dir. Christopher McLeod. Sacred Land Film Project of Earth Island Institute, 2001. Film.

Pahre, Robert. “The Stories of the Black Hills.” University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Web. 1 July 2016. <http://publish.illinois.edu/pahre/tag/mato-tipila/>.

Silet, Charles L.P., ed. The Films of Steven Spielberg: Critical Essays. Scarecrow Press, 2002. Print.