Art Zimiga’s five decades of mentorship

RAPID CITY – Every year we lose a handful of important Lakota elders, they take their wisdom and their history, and their stories to the spirit world, and few of them are able to record and share even a fraction of it. Most Lakota men live only to their mid-Fifties, but Art Zimiga has beaten those odds at the still active age of 85. Most of the peers from his time are gone: Jim Wilson, Tim Giago, Ed McGaa, Lionel Bordeau, and elders like Art Zimiga are the last thin threads we have connecting us to the storied history of the Oyate.

Art didn’t step into the adult world swinging for the fences. He was in his mid-twenties when he was drafted and sent off to France and Vietnam. But once back state-side, he started to get busy doing something with his life and eventually earned a doctorate from Harvard.

“I was born in January 1940 in Pine Ridge,” Art told NSNT. “I went to school first in Provo, South Dakota, Black Hills Ordinance Depot. Then I went to Holy Rosary., and then to Provo, I graduated from there, went to the University of South Dakota. I did three years at the university and then I was drafted into the service. When I got back, I went to the University of Sioux Falls and finished my degree. After that I went to Harvard University for a Masters, and I finished that in 1972. I also went back and finished a doctorate in Learning Environments at Harvard in 1980.”

Between getting his masters and getting his doctorate Art worked for the state.

“I worked as the Commissioner for Indian Affairs for the state,” Art said. “I ran pretty much all the education programs, having to do with Title I. It was contracted to the Unified School Board, board members from each of the schools throughout the reservation.”

Title I, or the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on April 11, 1965. An important plank in Johnson’s “War on Poverty” policy, the goal being to provide low income students access to quality education. “

Many of the long time institutions on the reservation were created and implemented by men of Art’s generation.

“We started Pine Ridge Educational Society,” Art said, “and after we created that, it became Oglala Lakota College. A lot of people had come back to the reservation to assist in moving the next generation into positions through higher education.”

Art continued to work for the Oglala Sioux Tribe, implementing other government programs as Commissioner of Indian Affairs for the state: “I ran CETA training programs with people like Dr. Jim Wilson from Pine Ridge. We created programs for farming, heavy equipment operators, and vo-tech. We trained people who were teacher’s aides to get their degrees. At the time Pine Ridge had started a college, but they could only do a two-year certificate. So, we branched it off with other colleges, the University of Colorado, Black Hills State, and a number of people received their bachelors and masters from that program.”

Art then moved up to Rapid City: “I worked for the Indian Health Board and they had an Indian Center. Al Trimble had asked me in 1981, when I finished my doctorate, to come back and help run those programs.”

Just like Art has been a mentor to this generation, the generations before Art mentored him: “A leksi of mine, Frank Fools Crow, told me there were four people that brought more change than in comparison to other generational history of the Lakota people.” He named Tim Giago, Billy Mills, Russell Means, and he said, “And you. You are the people who brought these ideas to help people accomplish what they wanted in this life.” I had to thank him for that compliment.

One more thing Art was active in at this time was helping Lakota come to terms with the modern world, but retaining a deep traditional understanding of their identity: “We tried to pursue that through writing, about who we were as people. We were two-leggeds, and we had a relationship in our creation stories. Our ceremonies taught us that to be Lakota was not based on race, it was based on four and seven. The Europeans, if you wanted to know something, it was always in a book, but for the Lakota it was a circular philosophy, the four ages of man, as a baby, as a child, as an adult, as an elder.”

Having spent his life straddling the two worlds of education, the European and the Lakota, Art has figured out a couple of things: “I appreciate the young people, but I think, sad to say, our education is getting too linear, and we need to preserve (circular philosophy) through language. I happen to be in Yuma, Arizona today, and I see a brown nation of people with their own language. They maintain their identity through their language and their culture, so why can’t the Lakota have the same thing?”

Art says states are doing the same thing, but in the opposite direction: “They want to make a linear education, trying to make people all homogenized and pasteurized in their thinking. When Tim Giago and I went to Holy Rosary, they wouldn’t let us speak Lakota or be a part of our ceremonies. If you take out a piece of the holistic thought, you diminish it, and it is not the same.”

Art explains education: “I love education, but I like it to be where everyone can express their own ideas. That’s what made this country so powerful, because from the land, it came from the resources, it came from the people themselves.’

Art sums it all up: “It is up to the Lakota people to preserve ourselves. And we need to do that in our own way and manner. The only ones who are circular in their thought are indigenous people, the First Nations people, they are the ones who have the relationship to this earth, the (Europeans) don’t have that.”

(James Giago Davies is an enrolled member of OST. Contact him at skindiesel@msn.com)

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