Pilgrimage: Sturgis to Wounded Knee and Back Home Again, a Memoir

by Jeffrey Rasley

An antiwar book that starts with Motorcycles and Native Americans: The Lakota Sioux once ruled the Black Hills of the Dakota Territories on horse back. Now, in August the Black Hills are filled with the roaring iron horses of bikers riding to the Bacchanalia of Sturgis Bike Week. Jeff Rasley set out for Sturgis to whoop it up with his biker friends. An unplanned detour through his family history led him to the site of one of the worst massacres in U.S. military history, Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

One of the author's ancestors fought in the Sioux Indian Wars in the Black Hills. Another helped the last of the Potawatomi survive a harsh winter in Indiana. Lt. James Mann of the 7th U.S. Cavalry was one of the few whites to die from wounds in the massacre at Wounded Knee. Valentine Berkey was given a beaded deerskin vest as a token of friendship from the Indians with whom he traded and aided.

Discovery of the different ways his ancestors treated with the people who were on the land before us began on a road trip to Sturgis Bike Week in South Dakota. A wrecked Harley motorcycle and bull-riding strippers sent Rasley on a Pilgrimage to Wounded Knee to discover the dark side and light side of his family history with Native Americans.

Rasley was forced to ask, to what tribe do I belong? No longer welcome in the Biker community at Sturgis, Rasley sought refuge among the Sioux in Pine Ridge Reservation. He didn't find the reconciliation he sought. Instead, his confrontation with the history of his ancestor's participation in the massacre of the Sioux people at Wounded Knee sent him off on another spiritual journey.

"Pilgrimage: Sturgis to Wounded Knee and Back Home Again, a Memoir" takes the reader on a motorcycle road trip without a bike. The road from Sturgis, South Dakota to Wounded Knee led to a spiritual dead end. The trip didn't end there. The pursuit of a pathway to understanding the shared roots of all humanity then took the author across the wide Pacific to a remote village in the Nepal Himalayas. Enlightenment came on the way back home. Enjoy a ride of discovery to the source from whence we all come.

Genres: Memoir

75 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 14, 2013

About the author

(Author writes under the name Jeff Rasley)

Jeff Rasley is the author of sixteen books and over 80 feature articles, which have been published in numerous academic and mainstream periodicals, including Newsweek, Chicago Magazine, ABA Journal, Family Law Review, Faith & Fitness Magazine, Friends Journal, Journal of Communal Societies, and Real Travel Adventures International Magazine. He is an award-winning photographer and his pictures taken in the Himalayas and Caribbean and Pacific islands have been published in several journals.

Rasley has engaged in social activism and philanthropic efforts from an early age. In high school he co-founded the Goshen Walk for Hunger. In law school he was an advocate for renters' rights as a lobbyist and president of the Indianapolis Tenants Association. He is the founder of the Basa Village Foundation, past president of the Indianapolis Scientech Club and University of Chicago Indy Alumni Club. He served as a trustee for Earlham College, and is the president of the Scientech Foundation of Indiana and of the Basa Village Foundation. He is a director of the Indianapolis Peace and Justice Center and served as a director of the Indiana Alpha Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. He is a co-founder of the Jeff & Alicia Rasley Internship Program for the ACLU of Indiana.

Jeff is an avid outdoors-man and recreational athlete. He leads trekking-mountaineering expeditions in Nepal and has solo-kayaked around several Pacific island groups. He also loves to read and considers completing Marcel Proust's 3600 page Remembrance of Things Past as great an adventure as climbing Himalayan peaks and solo-kayaking Pacific islands.

Jeff is U.S. liaison for the Nepal-based Himalayan expedition company, Adventure GeoTreks Ltd. He has taught classes for IUPUI Continuing Ed. Program, Indiana Writers Center, Butler and Marian Universities.

Jeff is a graduate of the University of Chicago, A.B. magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, All-Academic All-State Football Team and letter winner in swimming and football; Indiana University School of Law, J.D. cum laude, Moot Court and Indiana Law Review; Christian Theological Seminary, MDiv magna cum laude, co-valedictorian and Faculty Award Scholar. He has been admitted to the Indiana, U.S. District Court, and U.S. Supreme Court Bars.

He was given a Key to the City of Indianapolis for serving as a law school intern to Mayor Hudnut and preparing a report on the safety conditions of all Indy Parks. Rasley has received the Man of the Year award from the Arthur Jordan YMCA and the Alumni Service Award from the University of Chicago.

Rasley has been a featured guest on over 200 podcast, radio, and TV shows and has given programs to many service clubs, community organizations, and churches.

jeffrasley@gmail.com
www.jeffreyrasley.com

Reviews

[Faith Colburn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just finished reading Pilgrimage: Sturgis to Wounded Knee and Back Home Again, a Memoir by Jeff Rasley and I agree with him almost entirely, especially about the communalism and spiritualism of the Native Americans. Like me, he wonders how much better off our environment might be if we’d learned to live with them rather than killing them. I am, however, a little concerned about his willingness to accept the assessment of one very discouraged old man [Black Elk] about the state of his people. The genocide being committed against Native Americans continues apace, although they’re the fastest growing population in the U.S. now and assuming Wounded Knee was the end of the tribes only absolves us all from thinking about or working toward stopping the unfair practices that still make Indians’ lives miserable. Charles Wilkinson’s book, Blood Struggle brings the Indians’ struggles for existence up to date.

Rasley describes his visit to the Pine Ridge Reservation, one of the bleakest places in the U.S. Not only is the land the Whites “gave” them some of the most barren I’ve seen, the people who live there deal with a scourge of alcoholism. Although the reservation is dry by vote of the people, the town of White Clay supplies unlimited booze to addicted people. Whites should be helping the Lakota to get rid of the White people making millions on their misery [the only businesses are three bars]. If those establishments existed in any white community, they'd have been denied continued licensing. Ian Frazier's book, On the Rez, that describes the heroism and despair of people on the Pine Ridge.

Jasley wrote a bit of the second Wounded Knee, the occupation in 1973 by the American Indian Movement. Peter Mattiessen wrote a wonderful account of the doomed effort to remind White Americans of the fact that Native Americans are still being treated inhumanely in his book In the Spirit of Crazy Horse.



I don’t want to criticize Rasley's book, but rather to add information to which he doesn’t have access. On the whole, I appreciate his acceptance of cultures that are different from his own, including that of Indians, and his work to make people's lives better on the other side of the world. I just hope that American Whites will let go of the assumption that the Indians’ struggle ended at Wounded Knee. There are still opportunities for redress of the wrongs our ancestors did to the indigenous people of this continent, or at least to stop ongoing exploitation.

[Lindac · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pilgrimage:Sturgis to Wounded Knee and Back Home Again, a Memoir captures the spirit of adventure set in the backdrop of Mr. Rasley's journey to deeper self-awareness. He describes how a spontaneous trip to Sturgis, South Dakota, Bike Week turned into an exploration of his ancestry, Native American history and the Wounded Knee massacre. He engages the reader through personal revelations to consider how the dominate culture we are born into positively or negatively affects how we treat others. Along the way, he reflects on the outcome of broken promises he made to himself and in a larger sense, governmental promises broken to an entire culture.

Mr. Rasley begins his adventure by telling his love/hate relationship with motorcycles. Love representing his wild free spirit out to experience the thrill of the open road via a 7,000 mile trip from Indiana to Mexico. The downside was a series of accidents leaving him with serious injury. He described one specific motorcycle accident that resulted in surgery at a Mazatlan hospital while he was under police guard.

This book is a story of becoming disillusioned with the Sturgis mystic and searching for reconciliation with history. He leaves the Sturgis bull-riding stripper, alcohol induced frenzy, testosterone soaked snakepit motorcycle tribe and hits the road to explore iconic historical sites of the western United States. A serendipitous side trip takes Mr. Rasley to the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, site of the Wounded Knee massacre. Jeff's ancestor, Lieutenant James D. Mann was a military leader in the 7th Cavalry U. S. Army engaged in slaughtering over 150 Native American men, women and children.

Mr. Rasley writes about the Native American aspects of his hometown Goshen, Indiana. He notes the irony of our Hoosier state being named for "Land of Indians" yet there are no recognized Native American tribes left in Indiana. The Miami, Potawatomi and Kickapoo tribes of the north and the Delaware and Shawnee tribes of central and southern Indiana were killed or forcibly removed. I am a Hoosier. I readily identified with the harm inflicted by our predatory ancestors and residual prejudice.

Jeff has trekked and led mountaineering expeditions to Nepal Himalayas multiple times since 1995. He has written extensively about his close relationship with the Sherpa and Rai people of Nepal. He was instrumental in organizing the Basa Village Foundation, USA. He is an experienced attorney and holds a Masters degree in Theology from the Christian Theological Seminary. His multifaceted personal, professional and spiritual life gives him a unique perspective in this book to provide comparison and contrast of the Native Americans and the people of Nepal.

Pilgrimage: Sturgis to Wounded Knee and Back Home Again, a Memoir, allowed me to hop in Jeff's Sebring named Goldie and hang on for the ride. Without becoming sappy, Mr. Rasley shared his viewpoint of historical and current events with a nostalgic flavor. I recommend Pilgrimage as a vehicle for introspective reflection.

[Aric Cushing · Rating 5 out of 5]

This highly personal memoir from Mr. Rasley takes you from the bacchanalian strangeness of Sturgis to an emotional journey of both ancestry and personal reflection that is both informative, on many different levels, and poignant. There was another review from a reviewer that gave the book 2 stars, which, I believe, is utterly inaccurate. First, I have no connection to biker culture, nor most of what Mr. Rasley writes about, except for that fact that I am 1/8 American Indian. The book was very personal, honest, and the writing well conceived. What I find even more interesting about the memoir was Mr. Rasley's background. He mentions in the book that he has a Masters Degree in Christian theology. Taking that into account, he does not recuse himself from his biker past as he moves from one stage of his life to another, both with self reflection and perspicuity. Now, as everyone knows, American Indians are not Christians. His exploration into this subject matter (which is probably unique for this author's background despite having a distant relative associated with the massacre at Wounded Knee - and I am personally using the word massacre specifically ), is without bias or condemnation, but viewed with an altruistic encompassing that really expands the personal narrative into something truly meaningful. At one point in his travels from Sturgis to Wounded Knee, he comments, "We have no home towns. We are modern Americans." These kind of observations are from beginning to end in the book, and I was reminded of Joan Didion's essay "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream". With all that in mind, I (obviously) highly recommend this book.

[Jeffrey Rasley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Per Aristotle, it has a beginning, middle, and end.