Sixty years later the church my grandparents started is sitting at the fairgrounds in Minot and the other church is being used by a congregation from the Air Force base - not Lutheran.  Many of the Lutherans went to church in Glenburn, a few miles north, which has two Lutheran Churches created, so the story goes, by neighbors who could get along only with each other.

     In the Lutheran plains tradition the location of the church building doesn't seem to have been as important as the people who made up the congregation.  The immigrants brought their religion with them and erected buildings to worship in.  If you were mad enough at your neighbor, and if there were a bunch of you, you simply moved to, or built, a new worship space.

     This is changing for us plains Lutherans.  The importance of location - the old church that looks like a church, that holds the memories of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of baptisms, confirmations, marriages, burials, - is becoming more important as the churches age and hold more memories.  I can't speak for the people who adhere to the Native American religion, but I can imagine how important a stable, spiritual point of reference would be to a plains people who moved with the buffalo, how powerful a mountain was to a people who lived so close to nature on the plains.

      I don't have to imagine how important it is, however.  I simply have to respect the words of those who tell me it is so.  I asked one of my board members, Father John Spruhan, the supervising priest of the Rosebud Episcopal Mission for 10 years, to review what I was going to say today.  He agreed with me, but added "Native people are people of place, and not time.  Changing use of a sacred site isn't like moving a church--it just isn't done period."  He also pointed out that "The property may be owned by whoever, but using it (in this way) so close to Bear Butte is very disrespectful."
We try to keep the bars away from our churches.  Bear Butte is church to a lot of people.

     I realize that there will be an economic impact if you prohibit selling alcohol within 4 miles of Bear Butte.  I've been out there, however, and didn't see much evidence of high capital investment.  One bar I saw looked like a machine shed with a parking lot.  A different bar had a new building, but that investor knew his business was being protested and went ahead anyway.
 
     If there are existing, long standing businesses, particularly near the edge of the four-mile boundary, it might be possible to design the law to minimize disruptions for them.  What is being asked for is not a destruction of existing business but an opportunity to freely worship in a place that has historically been used for that purpose.

     There is an argument that we should not be dictating how people use their personal land.  This argument is not consistent with our tradition.  We, collectively, have always reserved the right to determine matters of public good.  All of our zoning powers depend on this tradition.  We separate commercial from residential neighborhoods.  We have powers of eminent domain to stop personal greed and stubbornness from disrupting common good.  We haven't always used this power wisely, and there are arguments whenever we do use it, but we have the authority, and the tradition, to make decisions in the public interest and to protect basic rights of a group.

     It is argued that the State should not impose its will on the county - that the county has the responsibility to make these decisions.  It is true that decisions affecting people should be made at the political level closest to the people being affected.  In the case of the Meade County commissioners, however, they abdicated this authority.  They indicated that they should not interfere with landowners right to use their property as they saw fit.  They said that the business owner must only pass a background check and that the land use must not violate public safety standards.  They refused to look at the question of whether the normal operation of the business would encroach on existing neighbors rights or how it would impact on-going uses of other property in the county.  Their power was defined too narrowly, and so they abdicated their right to be the final authority in this matter.

     It is ironic that the Native Americans have to fight for the right to stop the encroachment of alcohol on their worship space.  I grew up in North Dakota with the stereotype of the alcoholic Indian.  I know that alcohol and drugs ravage many of the lives of native people on and off the reservation.  I have heard lots of personal, heartfelt, testimony about the power of the traditional ways - of the traditional religion - to act as medicine against the power of alcohol. 
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     We have two very important symbols here.  Bear Butte symbolizes the history, traditions, and religion of a people.  Moving the Sturgis Rally into the country to avoid the legal consequences of alcoholic behavior symbolizes something else.