Emily Brisse

"When you pray with this pipe, you pray for and with everything." -- Black Elk   I can promise you one thing: when my brother and I, as children, careened around the Pipestone National Monument 's Circle Trail ( through prairie, over rocks, up cliffs, down ledges, through prairie ), we were not thinking about prayer. And we certainly didn’t whisper. The sacredness of the place never crossed our minds. Our parents were from Pipestone, the small southwestern Minnesota town where the monument resides, and the park seemed as much our backyard playground as it had once been theirs. Besides, we were eight and five, and it was just cool to climb stuff. But when I was older—twelve, maybe—I was given my first pair of dangling, red pipestone earrings, carved into the shape of leaves, and later—at fifteen?—I received a small ceremonial pipe. There were conversations surrounding these gifts, explanations of how the pipestone was quarried from the earth, how it had been ...