Peace Park

 Outside the Medicine Lodge Community High School we found the band practicing on the field (interestingly named 'The Indians') and out front a statue to an event that took place almost 150 years ago.

Among the many treaties signed between Indians and Europeans from 1492 until the end of the American Indian Wars in 1890 this one signed by some of the leaders of the five central and eastern plains tribes and the US Government, though far from perfect, has been considered by many to be one of the fairest.

The 15,000 Indians present agreed that they could in no way eliminate the European from what had been their ancestral lands. And the 500 or so US troops and their civilian partners, agreed that they would not fight the Indian if the Indian stopped raiding the whites.

But neither side could entirely stop.  No one could stop angry whites like Colorado's Chivington or angry Indians like the Oglala Sioux Crazy Horse from fighting anyway. So many Indians sadly left their lands and eventually ended up in reservations, and some others tried to return to their homelands or at least exact some revenge upon the whites who were vulnerable.

 So why every four years (next in 2015), do hundreds of Indians officially representing the five tribal nations who met here in 1867, join hundreds of  Americans of many colors in a place called PEACE PARK just east of Medicine Lodge, Kansas? They all celebrate with a POW WOW, dances, a re-enacted Indian raid on a wagon train, and all kinds of unrelated carnival festivities. And it's been going on now for over 50 years.


Maybe it is a way to find reconciliation between red and white and brown and black, men and women (for the US Army Buffalo Soldier- the all black US Cavalry, with white officers, were active in Kansas too). Or perhaps the Indians who attend are not what some Indians call REAL.  These who are willing to find a way to forgive the white, and the white who are so wanting to be forgiven and move on together are often called 'Uncle Tom' Indians or whites by their present day angry counterparts. Yes.  The ranger at the Sand Creek Massacre site told us some who come to visit that site state that they pray daily that some disease would wipe out American Indians today.  Skin heads and white supremacists all, and not many of them, but still angry people still do hate.

I think those who participate in such projects of reconciliation are heroes. Kit Carson was a hero. He tried till he died in 1868 to create a way for the Apache and Navajo to live next to the white man in peace.

Buffalo Bill Cody didn't gain the friendship of such true Indian leaders as Sitting Bull just to get them to join his show. He did what he thought was right for the American Indian until his death January 10, 1917.

Chief Joseph was never more a leader than when he led his fleeing Nez Perce Indians in surrender after a valiant effort to escape the hardship of their Oklahoma reservation and return to their beloved mountain valleys. Joseph did not say 'I will make war no more forever' because he was a coward.  He did so because he could not allow his defenseless surviving brothers and sisters to die of starvation on the plains.

I believe that celebrations like this one, or the Golden, Colorado' Buffalo Bill Days we saw a month ago, where Indian tribal representatives danced and honored all present with a holy prayer of blessing, are serious. The participants are serious. They recognize that somehow, for our many nations to truly be one nation, all nations, tribes, children of God, the true Great Father, must find ways to live together, not separate, while honoring and remembering the good and bad of their joint past.

Meanwhile many of the businesses pf Medicine Lodge are already advertising next years return of the Peace Treaty event.  Already, wherever we went, we were asked to return if possible next year in September to join our new friends in celebrating peace between very different peoples.

Who knows?  Maybe our journey will place us back here in this little town that does all it can to promote  Peace again.

-Ken