OCC’s Doyle Arts Pavilion Exhibit Documents 300-Mile Lakota Tribe Pilgrimage

Orange Coast College’s Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion will present “Ken Marchionno: 300 Miles, The Oomaka Tokatakiya” from Oct. 26 through Dec. 2.

The exhibit is part of a larger multi-layered documentary project that features members of the Lakota tribes in North and South Dakota. OCC’s exhibition will highlight an annual event undertaken by three Lakota tribes — the Hunkpapa, Minnicoujou, and Oglala — as they embark on a nearly 300-mile ride by horseback across the Dakota winter.

“This pilgrimage embraces Lakota culture and history, and is an embodied memorial to the days that led to the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890,” explains curator Kim Garrison Means.

Each year, the ride starts on Dec.15 at the site where the Lakota Indian Chief Sitting Bull was killed and traces the trail taken by some of his tribe to join Chief Big Foot. It goes on to follow Big Foot’s effort to reach Chief Red Cloud in Pine Ridge and ends on Dec. 29, at the site where the Wounded Knee Massacre took hundreds of innocent lives in 1890. One hundred years after the massacre, the Lakota performed a Wiping of the Tears Ceremony to signify the end of their collective mourning. In 1990, after tracing the trail for four years, the ride was meant to end, but in 1992 the ride was restarted and aimed squarely at the future.

“While the ride is still in homage to Sitting Bull, Big Foot and those who lost their lives at Wounded Knee, the ride is now also meant as a cultural embrace, and an experience used to foster

leadership qualities in Lakota youth,” says Garrison Means. “Along the way, the riders experience some of what their ancestors endured physically, intellectually and spiritually. Braving the brutal South Dakota winters, kids as young as seven ride up to 35 miles in a day.”

Every year Marchionno brings cameras and computers for the youth on the ride so they can work together to tell the story. He works side by side with members of the Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, and Oglala Sioux Tribes to capture the ride and offer it a public face through social media, each day uploading images and videos from the field as the ride proceeds.

“Marchianno’s work not only creates an important historic document, but it is a living representation that each year promotes, an empowering image of a community that is accustomed to being mistreated by representation,” says Garrison Means.

The exhibition includes point-of-view videos from Jesse James White, Jamie Turning Holy, Marvin Noisy Hawk, Lachelle Turning Heart, Shad Young Agard, and Kayson Thompson.

While this work has found a natural home within the community involved, iterations of the project also are regularly presented nationally and internationally. Exhibitions, publications, and screenings of the work have seen three continents and Marchionno has brought multiple teen participants to speak in the Los Angeles area. In 2009, in association with an exhibition of their work, two teens from the Standing Rock Indian Reservation gave a talk at the U.S. Embassy in Prague.

Marchionno will give an artist talk at OCC on Wednesday, Nov. 8, at 3 p.m. in the Doyle Arts Pavilion. He will be accompanied by tribal member Jesse James White, and will give a presentation on this body of work and the Oomaka Tokatakiya ride.

An opening reception for “300 Miles” will take place on Oct. 26 from 5–8 p.m., and the public is invited to attend. The Doyle Arts Pavilion is open from 11 a.m. until 5 p.m. Monday thru Wednesday, and 11 a.m. until 7 p.m. on Thursdays. The exhibit will also be open on Saturday Dec. 2 from 11 a.m. until 3 p.m.