Tree-Planting Marks Lost Burial Mounds

November 9, 2006

Author: Katya Cengel

Source: The Courier-Journal

http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061109/NEWS01/61109028

As traffic swirled past the little park on the corner of Fifth Street and Muhammad Ali Boulevard Thursday morning, Chief Arvol Looking Horse prayed.

Outfitted with a feather headdress "an offering of tobacco in one hand, a smoldering cedar smudge bundle, used for purification, in the other” he asked the creator to bless the 70 or so people gathered in a circle around him.

“We come here as a spirit, we leave here as a spirit, we must not be lost on the sacred path along the Earth, ...” he said.

Chief Looking Horse, of the Lakota Sioux Nation, and his wife Paula Horne-Mullen, of the Dakota, came from South Dakota to participate in the ceremony and the Festival of Faiths that encompasses it.

An interfaith event aimed at bringing together different faiths to work for the betterment of the community, the festival is about something both Horne-Mullen and her husband understand well.