The Turner Thesis

This is the second piece of a larger essay. Part one can be found below.

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The occupation ended around five, when word came down that Turner had decided to decline the college’s offer of an honorary degree. None of us had expected such a decisive victory, and while we were elated at the outcome, it left us wondering about our larger purpose. The Turner campaign had helped bring into focus many otherwise vague concerns, and we had expected that the protest would mark the beginning of a longer period of negotiation over questions of curriculum development, social programming, student recruitment, and ethnic studies. Within the intellectual and social space created by the campaign, students had begun to articulate new visions of how they hoped to interface with the administration, as well as a different sense of the obligations that bound students, faculty, and staff. The Turner campaign, in other words, had become, over the course of several months, one of the most dynamic political spaces within an already-dynamic campus political environment. As students attempted to position themselves as collaborators to the institutional processes that framed, and enabled, their education, Turner was valuable as an antagonist, yet he was never much more than a symbol. Once Turner had removed himself from the conflict, much of the urgency was lost, and—despite many of our best intentions and efforts—the larger agenda was abandoned.

None of this was on our radar the night after the occupation, when we gathered to reflect on the events of the day and plan our next moves with regard to the administration. For at least the next week, we knew, there would be meetings with different administrators, including a sit-down with members of the Board of Trustees, and we had to map out strategy. At the same time, we wanted to discuss how we might move forward with our larger agenda after the loss of our star antagonist, and as we were faced with the end of the academic year. Our energy would peak, we knew, unless we were able to find new outlets, and new purposes, that would sustain us over the summer months. That evening, we asked Clyde about AIM’s plans for the summer, and whether or not there was some role that we might play in the organization during the coming months. Part of our vision was of a more active relationship between the college and local communities—something more dynamic and ongoing than the missionary outreach that went on in the name of the college’s commitment to “service”—and I think we hoped that we might use the summer to build bridges with the American Indian community of the Twin Cities. Clyde, for his part, had different ideas. The American Indian Movement was grateful for our commitment, he told us, and to honor the success of our campaign, the elders of the organization were inviting us to the annual AIM Sundance, to be held that summer, at the sacred pipestone quarries outside Pipestone, Minnesota. He gave us literature and asked for our contact information. We pressed him for advice on activism. “Just come to the Sundance,” he replied. We made our promises, and went off to study for finals.

That August, I was one of two students who took the elders up on their invitation. For ten days, my friend Emily and I camped out, with several hundred others, in empty fields near the pipestone quarries in western Minnesota. The Sundance itself took place over about six or seven days. Like the Turner protest, the ritual brought into the open a sideways reality, a world that sat alongside the material plane, but that remained, for the most part, beyond the realm of sight. The Sundance remade the world, filling it with portent, elevating our most mundane actions from the banal to the sublime. The morning after we arrived, I woke early to take part in a sun ceremony in which we greeted the dawn with drums, song, and dance. On a small hill overlooking the camp, we sang for the sun, and when the first sliver of light appeared just over the rise, it felt as if we had brought it up. We knew that the sun came because we asked it to, and from then on, everything that we did seemed desperately important, utterly ripe with purpose.

This sense was only heightened when, later that day, we marched into the woods in search of the sacred Sundance tree. The tree had to be of a certain age and height; it had to be living; and, perhaps most importantly, it had to be cut and carried to the Sundance site without ever touching the ground. When we located the appropriate specimen, its trunk was smudged with sage, and the elders prayed, while the rest of the community prepared for its removal. Over several hours, the men hacked away at it with an axe. When one tired, another would step in, and the children would take advantage of the break to rush in and scoop up the wood chips left in their wake. As the operation neared its end, and it became apparent how the tree was going to fall, those of us who held back began to arrange large timbers on the ground. They would catch the weight of the trunk and prevent it from touching the earth. After it was on the ground, we gathered around it, and with a truly spectacular measure of martial discipline, we hoisted it—all one hundred feet of living wood—above our heads, and began marching back to the camp. We carried the tree over a mile back to the Sundance grounds. After adorning the tree for the ritual, tying its branches with bundles of tobacco, we set it upright, fitting its base into a large hole that had been carved into the earth. Using ropes tied to its upper branches, we held the tree upright while others filled in the soil at its base. This final operation took about thirty minutes, during which we exhausted ourselves keeping the tree in position. When it was over, however, the tree was secure in the earth, and we had become, in the course of the afternoon, somehow sanctified. Although we were tired and sore, we had accomplished something that seemed utterly improbable, and in the act of creating the sacred space, we had become something greater than ourselves.

This is, of course, the purpose of a Sundance, which is something that Clyde knew when he invited us. Although generations of anthropologists have been thrown by the name, the Sundance is, in essence, an allegory for birth: the Sundancers spend several days making circuits around the tree, pausing to dance at each of the cardinal points. The tree is in the umbilical cord, the link to the mother, here figured as the body of the earth, and by dancing to the north, south, east, and west, the dancers salute the different spirits and spirit realms that cohabitate with our material world. On the final day of the ritual, after several days without food, the Sundancers pierce their chests with large chunks of wood or bone, before tying themselves to the sacred tree. With what remains of their strength, they fling themselves to the ground in an attempt at breaking free. They continue in this manner until their flesh tears and they are released, or they are exhausted and unable to go on. This final drama, generally referred to as “piercing,” represents the birth that is a rebirth, the transformation of the dancer, and the renewal of the community that is his support.