Sioux

The sweeping beauty portrayed in Kevin Costner's epic drama ''Dances With Wolves'' is about to become host to one of the largest garbage dumps in America.Recently, over the objection of tribal members, the Rosebud Sioux Tribal Council in South Dakota signed a contract with a Connecticut-based waste-disposal firm to develop a 5,000-acre garbage dump that will accept waste from Minneapolis, Denver and beyond. The proposed dump is 70 miles from the site of the massacre at Wounded Knee and in the heart of the unspoiled prairie America recently viewed in ''Wolves.

Clouds may have obscured it, but last night's full moon was the nearest to Sunday's fall equinox, so that makes it the Harvest Moon. A nearly forgotten relic of our agricultural past, the Harvest Moon provided vital illumination all night long for farmers rushing to get their crops in before winter. To the Sioux, it was the Dying Grass Moon, Guy Ottewell's Astronomical Calendar tells us. In China, the autumn moon ties lovers with invisible thread. And I thought those were cobwebs.

LAUREL BROWN was half a country away from her home in Taneytown.She stood on a ladder on a hot, picture-perfect July day, painting a sign that read "Golden Age Senior Center."From below, she heard the soft singing of a Sioux as he chanted to the four directions of the Earth to start the wind.Wind would make the heat more bearable for Brown and her 35 colleagues, who had driven to a Lakota Sioux reservation in Fort Thompson, S.D., as part of Volunteers in Mission, an outreach program of the United Methodist Church.

In South Dakota, where lawmakers passed a near-total ban on abortion last month, the leader of one of the state's Indian tribes is proposing to circumvent the legislation by establishing an abortion clinic on an Indian reservation - within reach of women who need the service but outside the reach of the strict new law. Cecelia Fire Thunder, a former nurse who is the first female president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, said it was "an eye-opener" when legislators...

Even from his secret grave, Crazy Horse continues to bedevil the establishment, this time a small Eastern Shore college and a prestigious New York auction house.His war shirt -- or one purported to be his -- was sold in May by Washington College for $211,000. That action has raised the ire of the Sioux Indian Nation and the interest of the FBI.Tribal leaders say the college and Sotheby's auction house violated federal laws that protect American Indian artifacts. They recently filed a complaint with the National Park Service, which turned it over to the Justice Department and the FBI.The tattered buckskin shirt, beaded and decorated with buffalo strips and quill-wrapped human hair, was part of the Albee Collection.

The tom-toms are stilled and the Sioux ghost dancers gone from Stronghold Rock in the Badlands of southwest South Dakota.Anguished chants floating skyward, invoking the great buffalo spirits and foretelling the rebirth of the once-mighty Sioux Nation, have been silent for more than a century.But another ancient prophecy will be soon be fulfilled, when Chief Crazy Horse returns to lead his people back to the ways of dignity and self-reliance.The spirit of the great chief has been in the Black Hills west of Rapid City all along, of course, on the mountain known as the Crazy Horse Memorial.

MINNEAPOLIS - The University of North Dakota, after a couple of seasons of frustrating finishes, is back in the Frozen Four. The Fighting Sioux upended Niagara, 4-1, last night to become the first team booked for Providence, R.I. North Dakota (29-8-5) will take on the winner of today's Michigan-Maine game in an April 6 semifinal. "It's certainly going to be good to get back to the Final Four after three years of not getting there," said North Dakota coach Dean Blais. The Purple Eagles (30-8-4)

Arriving from South Dakota a week ago, Luie Blue Coat brought a suitcase of clothes, some turquoise beads and the ingredients for a Dream Catcher.He brought the items -- icons of his Lakota Sioux culture -- to give members of the Epiphany Episcopal Church in Odenton a taste of his way of life and to participate in a fledgling cultural exchange program between the Sioux and the church.He arrived at the church Sept. 28, on a trip arranged by the church pastor, the Rev. Phoebe Coe, as part of an effort to establish an Indian Cultural Center at the church.

In South Dakota, where lawmakers passed a near-total ban on abortion last month, the leader of one of the state's Indian tribes is proposing to circumvent the legislation by establishing an abortion clinic on an Indian reservation - within reach of women who need the service but outside the reach of the strict new law. Cecelia Fire Thunder, a former nurse who is the first female president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, said it was "an eye-opener" when legislators...

PINE RIDGE, S.D. - As a young man, Russell Means picked up the gun and became a militant symbol of the American Indian Movement, but today, at age 63, he preaches that the ballot is more powerful than the bullet. Nearly 30 years have passed since Means and 350 other heavily armed American Indians made a 71-day stand at Wounded Knee, occupying the site where as many as 300 Indian men, women and children were killed by the 7th Cavalry in 1890. Gunbattles erupted during the takeover, staged to protest broken treaties and lost land.

`Island' wins Delaware 'Cap Island Sand charged past Gunther and pacesetting Two Trail Sioux in mid-stretch to post a 3 3/4 -length victory in the $1 million, Grade II Delaware Handicap yesterday in Stanton, Del. With Jerry Bailey aboard, Island Sand was content to sit back through the first six furlongs. She then swung to the outside on the final furlong, where she went after the leader before drawing off late. Island Sand covered 1 1/4 miles over a fast track in 2 minutes, 2.89 seconds.

The last time I drove through the Black Hills, it was 1977 and Elvis had just died. I didn't appreciate the fuss at the time. Nor, as I drove cross-country with my then-boyfriend in a post-college stupor, did I stop to think about the Indian reservations we passed, much less the violence, broken promises and poverty that beset them. I certainly had no clue that the Pine Ridge Reservation, the site of so much recent turmoil, including a spate of murders and the occupation of Wounded Knee, shed many tears for Presley's passing.

Dee Brown, 94, whose Homeric vision of the American West, meticulous research and masterly storytelling produced the 1970 best-seller Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, died Thursday at his home in Little Rock, Ark. Mr. Brown was a librarian who was writing books after his children had gone to bed when his best-seller Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was published. The book, which sold more than 5 million copies, told a grim, revisionist tale of the ruthless mistreatment and eventual displacement of the Indians by white conquerors from 1860 to 1890.

PINE RIDGE, S.D. - As a young man, Russell Means picked up the gun and became a militant symbol of the American Indian Movement, but today, at age 63, he preaches that the ballot is more powerful than the bullet. Nearly 30 years have passed since Means and 350 other heavily armed American Indians made a 71-day stand at Wounded Knee, occupying the site where as many as 300 Indian men, women and children were killed by the 7th Cavalry in 1890. Gunbattles erupted during the takeover, staged to protest broken treaties and lost land.

I AM AT A LOSS. A close confidant has died. I relied on her counsel and advice for 46 years. She was a next-door neighbor, best friend and mother all rolled into one. She talked me through everything from a serious case of teen-age acne to my husband's affair with his secretary to the drug overdose of my son. She never hemmed and hawed and delivered her advice with candor, compassion and a comic's one-liner. "Kwitcherbellyachin'" was a favorite expression. And if she didn't always have the answer, she knew where you might find it. Like the time my cousin's dog got stuck in the toilet or a close friend tested positive for the virus that causes AIDS.

LEARNING TO READ is a rite of initiation to which schools pay more attention than any other accomplishment. "The child learning to read is admitted into the communal memory by way of books," wrote the reading historian Alberto Manguel, "and thereby becomes acquainted with a common past which he or she renews, to a greater or lesser degree, in every reading." This is why many people remember when and where they experienced the epiphany of reading. It's also why parents will move heaven and earth to help their children learn to read.

There is an ugly blot on the image of shining purity projected by the United States. Our story of ourselves as a land of freedom and liberty and democracy and opportunity that respects the rights of all individuals rings far from true when you consider the treatment of the American Indian.We have tried to mythologize that bit of history we don't want to face with the Western movie and cowboy-and-Indian serials. We have tried to trivialize it by making the Native Americans silly symbols of the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians and other sports teams.

Sitting Bull was a great man whose tragedy it was to achieve greatness at the moment of his civilization's death.In any era, he would have been a leader. He was born with a rugged body, a deep mind and an acute sensitivity to the world of the spirit. He grew into a warrior of bravery and a mystic dream-seer, a man wise in his knowledge and in his understanding of his Sioux people.His times, however, were unique. Whites, armed with superior weapons and a deadly efficient approach to war, were invading the western plains, chasing out and killing the buffalo and squeezing the nomadic Sioux onto ever-smaller reservations, finally demanding that the Native Americans give up the hunt and become farmers.

MINNEAPOLIS - The University of North Dakota, after a couple of seasons of frustrating finishes, is back in the Frozen Four. The Fighting Sioux upended Niagara, 4-1, last night to become the first team booked for Providence, R.I. North Dakota (29-8-5) will take on the winner of today's Michigan-Maine game in an April 6 semifinal. "It's certainly going to be good to get back to the Final Four after three years of not getting there," said North Dakota coach Dean Blais. The Purple Eagles (30-8-4)

"On the Rez," by Ian Frazier. Farrar Straus & Giroux. 320 pages. $25. This book should bury the notion that a talented writer can make any subject fascinating. That was the prevailing conceit at the New Yorker under Harold Ross, William Shawn and Robert Gottlieb. Writers were routinely handed acres of white space, if not the entire magazine, to slowly unspool their wondrous tapestries. When it worked -- John Hersey's "Hiroshima," Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood" -- the results were glorious and form-breaking.