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“A pipe cannot hear your prayers. It’s just a piece of material.” That’s what pastor Sarah Lucas told her congregation last Sunday in Arapahoe, talking about our Sundance. Her comments spread fast, and over a hundred tribal members showed up outside her ministry. Christianity has told our community for generations that our ceremonies are archaic, pagan, something to be corrected. She isn’t the first person to say this, and she won’t be the last. But three things make her comments worth answering directly.
First, understand our worldview. In her religion, only humans have a spirit. She sees the pipe as an object. In the Arapaho worldview, everything has a spirit: water, animals, plants. Our Old Man Pipe is a physical representation of the Creator, given to us, connecting the ones who came before us to the ones not born yet. She doesn’t have to believe it. She doesn’t get to disrespect it.
Second, she didn’t stop at insulting us from the pulpit. She brought in Crow and Shoshone members to back her up and pray for the Arapaho tribe, treating our ceremonies as something needing intervention. She then claimed her and her followers would be “persecuted,” equating public backlash with Christian martyrdom. Being called out for insulting a community’s sacred traditions is not persecution. It is accountability.
Third, this arrogance has a long history. From the 1880s, Christian missions ran boarding schools here, while the federal government criminalized the Sun Dance and other sacred ceremonies from 1883 to 1978. Despite this oppression, we kept the Hoseihoowu’ (Offerings Lodge) alive, maintaining one of the most intact traditions on the Plains. When a pastor now claims our pipe is ‘just material’ and our Sun Dance ‘bears no fruit,’ she is simply dressing up a 140-year legacy of spiritual suppression as concern.
My great-grandmother, the late Patsy Dodge, went to St Stephen’s boarding school as a child and became catholic. After Sundance one year, she shook my hand and said she believed we all have the same Creator, some just pray to Him differently. Christians believe Jesus already died for all our sins, so they see the Sundance as unnecessary suffering. Arapaho tradition believes we have to give something up, make a sacrifice, for our prayers to be heard. Giving up food and water is the ultimate sacrifice. It should be revered, not ostracized.
So here’s what happens next. Apologize, publicly, for calling our most sacred item just a piece of material and slandering our ceremonies from your pulpit. Sit down with the people you insulted. Fasting during prayer isn’t unique to us. This act is common in nearly every faith on earth, from Ramadan to Lent. Sundance isn’t archaic, and it isn’t for you to decide whether it works or not. It’s ours, and it doesn’t need your theology’s permission to be real. Respect what we practice and there’s room for both of us on this reservation. If you can’t respect that, you don’t belong in our community.
Big Wind Carpenter
Lander, Wyoming