Having a degree in Literature, and a voracious interest in reading all things about the Great Plains, has given me a special comfort in working at Hudson-Meng. I can look at the site as a story and try to give that story to people who come here from all over the world. I try to tell a story of people who came here time and time again for thousands of years, and in large part for two things, water and food.

I had a poetry professor who once told me something about people and land which stuck with me. He said something along the lines of, “People are so simple, we really only need food, water, and shelter. And yet we are so complex. Land is so complex at face value but can be so shallow at times when peeled back.” The land and its people overlap in countless ways philosophically, and in the tangible things found together at Hudson Meng: bones, spear points, charred rock, abraders, a single wooden stake.

The surrounding Oglala National Grassland around Hudson-Meng is home to thousands of prehistoric artifacts and even prehistoric human remains are sometimes found. I’ve gotten the opportunity to talk with our Forest Service heritage program about intertribal relations and have learned about the tribal proceedings that happen once skeletal remains or artifacts are found. Working at Hudson-Meng has furthered my understanding that this public piece of land is still the land of those who lived on it for thousands of years, and the reverence owed to that lineage.  

The Great Plains can be a tricky landscape at face value, and the same thing can be said for Hudson-Meng. There is the most important ecological relationship, grass and water. There are distant buttes here and there, the cottonwoods here and there, and the ever-present vision of the wild herds once occupying the plains which are nearly twice the size of Alaska. Because I can see a long way it all seems straightforward, but places like Hudson-Meng remind me that the return and subsequent leaving must require complexity. For thousands of years people have come and gone from a small spring in the Pine Ridge escarpment, not as a robotic movement of people trying to survive, but of a people trying to find the best way to survive. I try to speak to that distinction as I learn and interact with the visitors.

We are nearing the end of our tourist season at Hudson-Meng, and the leaving brings on gratitude for having had the opportunity to learn and interact with a diverse group of forest visitors and my coworkers. Conversations this year have taken place amongst six to eight feet tall, big bluestem and prairie sand reed. Grasses we usually don’t see much, but this year has brought heavy rainfall. Thanks to the Hispanic Access Foundation and the Resource Assistant Program there isn’t the usual worry of seasonal employment and what is to come for me at seasons’ end, but rather a forward vision of how to promote places of story, places like Hudson-Meng.