Reznet

Leadership No Burden for Young Lakota Man

By Kevin Abourezk

Ignore Wizipan Garriott's bachelor's degree from Yale.

Don't mind the fact that he's finishing his last semester at a prestigious law school.

Yes, he's helping to run a presidential campaign.

But that doesn't mean he's some East Coast trust-fund baby bound for an Ivy League education.

Not by a long shot.

Instead, imagine a long-haired boy riding a horse on the dusty plains of South Dakota. A boy raised on the stories and traditional beliefs of his people — the Rosebud Lakota.

A boy taught his traditional language by his grandmother and his people's ceremonies by his uncle.

A boy, who, as a man, continues to pray each day in Lakota.

"I guess, to me, that's kind of grounding," he said of prayer.

So how did a BIA-educated boy from Rosebud, S.D., end up on the staff of a presidential candidate?

The 28-year-old had always done well in school. Well enough that he often took academic success for granted and didn't work very hard at it, he says.

That is, until a professor from Sinte Gleska University in Mission, S.D., suggested he apply to Yale.

He went for it.

After being accepted, he was told he should spend a year at a high school preparatory school.

So after graduating from St. Francis Indian School in 1998, he spent a year taking senior-level classes at the Native American Preparatory School in Rowe, N.M. Before it closed in 2002 due to financial pressures, the school was the only intertribal preparatory school for Native Americans in the country.

It's where Wizipan says he built the foundation for his later academic success at Yale, where he earned a degree in American studies with an emphasis in American Indian studies.

While at Yale, Wizipan said he learned a lot about government and how America is made. More often than not, those with real power are graduates of Ivy League colleges like Yale, he said.

And to see how few Natives attend those colleges awakened him to how Native people are being left out of the equation.

And it has nothing to do with their intelligence, he said. Indians simply don't get the opportunities to excel in life that many non-Indians get, he said.

"I'm not particularly special," he said. "I just had a few opportunities that I took advantage of and people who helped me out along the way."

For his senior thesis at Yale, Wizipan wrote about traditional Lakota beliefs of leadership, a topic he said he had seen little written about.

For the Lakota, leadership is not something you ask for, he said.

It's something that is asked of you.

It is a burden.

"In the old way, the people chose you," he said.

At the ripe age of 28, Wizipan — whose name means "burden" in Lakota — already has been asked to take on leadership roles.

Since last September, he has served as Native American outreach coordinator for Barack Obama's presidential campaign. It's a position that has charged him with helping develop Obama's policies on Indian issues and guiding discussion on Native issues on the candidate's Web site.

He describes Obama as committed to Native sovereignty and living up to America's treaty obligations with tribes.

After graduation this spring from the James E. Rogers College of Law in Tucson, Ariz., he plans to return home to South Dakota to work in the area of Native law and policy.

He wants to give back, he said.

With the support of Rosebud tribal leaders, Wizipan has incorporated a Native American preparatory school he hopes to one day open in the sacred Black Hills of South Dakota.

Much like his New Mexico alma mater, the He Sapa Leadership Academy would prepare Indians in grades 8-12 for Ivy League colleges, he said.

It's an opportunity he believes will help tribes foster the next generation of Native leaders.

"Given the same opportunities, Indians will excel," he said.

If Wizipan is any indication, anything is possible for Native people.

Kevin Abourezk, Oglala Lakota, is a reporter and editor at the Lincoln (Neb.) Journal Star. He is a reznet assignment editor and teaches reporting at the Freedom Forum's American Indian Journalism Institute.

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