Cynthia Albers

November 12, 2017

It started with a dream.

The Lakota Waldorf School sits on a golden South Dakota hillside in the heart of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. It is an equal distance from the Stronghold Table, where Ghost Dancers once staged a desperate attempt to regain peace and prosperity in their sacred lands, and Wounded Knee, where the sacred dream died.¹ Home to the Oglala Lakota, the reservation is both a beautiful and a desolate location, where one can imagine great potential and a bitter struggle to survive. When the United States government created the reservation in 1889, this was land that no one else wanted.

Pine Ridge is an impoverished community where generations have suffered the highest rates of unemployment, substance abuse, and suicide in the United States. The desire…