Free Storming the Gates of Paradise by Rebecca Solnit

history, but long before its absorption into the terrain of scenic tourism, it was a sacred site for several tribes in the region, including theLakota and the Kiowa (who call it Bear’s Lodge, because of the story in which seven sisters fled their brother, who had become a bear; they were saved by a giant tree stump that rose from the ground with them on it: the butte we see today is scored by the bear’s claw marks, and the sisters became seven bright stars in the night sky). Lakota leader Charlotte Black Elk recalls, “I grew up going to Devils Tower. As a kid with my family, we would pass ourselves off as tourists, initially. Back then, the park wasn’t a high traffic place.” The butte appeared in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
as the site where the aliens landed, which, says Black Elk, caused tourism to increase significantly. So too did the growing popularity of rock climbing. In 1973, 312 climbers visited Devils Tower; now about 6,000 do so every year. Because of the popularity of rock climbing and the growing respect for Native American religious beliefs and rights, monument superintendent Deborah Ligget called for a voluntary moratorium on climbing every June, when Native Americans conduct ceremonies at Devils Tower.
    The number of June climbers dropped dramatically when the moratorium was instituted in 1995; but Andy Petefish, who owned a climbing service, sued to have the ban declared illegal. Petefish and the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which represented him, argued that the voluntary ban was a violation of the First Amendment—that protecting Native American religious practices amounted to establishing a religion. Petefish, whose real motives seemed to be economic, asserted, “Climbing on Devils Tower is a religious experience for me. But when the rock gets crowded, I don’t ask for my peace and quiet to be regulated. I just want equal treatment on public land.” Since he wasn’t prevented from climbing or guiding clients on the butte, he seemed to be suing to protest being made to feel that climbing there was inappropriate.
    The same attitude has prevailed at many other sacred sites across the West, where protecting indigenous rights or respecting non-Western religious beliefs by limiting access to the land has been attacked as reverse discrimination, by non-Natives who assert that the pleasure of outdoor recreation and scenic views is equally a form of spiritual observance. Some of the friction arises because many contested sites are federal land; another problem is that natural sites are not visibly tied to specific cultural practices, as is the case with, say, churches. An interpretationdependent upon oral tradition is less distinct than one embodied in architecture and sculpture—it changes how people look rather than what people see.
    Similar cultural clashes have arisen at Rainbow Bridge in Utah (sacred to Dine [Navajo] people and already damaged by the flooding of nearby springs and petroglyphs caused by the Glen Canyon Dam); at Cave Rock in South Lake Tahoe (sacred to the Washoe and popular with climbers); and at the Western Shoshone sacred site at Rock Creek in northern Nevada’s Landers County, whose officials wanted to create a recreational reservoir that would put the site underwater (with a lot of activist work, the county measure was recently defeated). As Malcolm Margolin, a historian of Native California, said when discussing a sacred spring in the San Joaquin Valley that was threatened, “I began to realize that for them the religion, the religious experience was rooted in that particular place, in the power and the beauty of that particular place, and if you destroy the place, you destroy the religion.”
    Edgar Hachivi Heap of Birds has worked as a public artist for more than a dozen years. All his public works have been temporary or permanent monuments to the erased or invisible indigenous history of the chosen site. The pieces most often consist of short texts placed on