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Groton Daily Independent
Saturday, June 09, 2018 ~ Vol. 25 - No. 330 ~ 22 of 59
News from the
SD Lottery
By The Associated Press
PIERRE, S.D. (AP) _ These South Dakota lotteries were drawn Friday:
Mega Millions
14-30-33-44-56, Mega Ball: 13, Megaplier: 2
(fourteen, thirty, thirty-three, forty-four, fifty-six; Mega Ball: thirteen; Megaplier: two) Estimated jackpot: $127 million
Powerball
Estimated jackpot: $105 million
Debate ensues in South Dakota over meaning of Poet’s Table By CHRISTOPHER VONDRACEK, Rapid City Journal
CUSTER, S.D. (AP) — The handle from a purple roller suitcase stuck up from the soggy, boulder-strewn pathway leading up to Poet’s Table on a Wednesday afternoon. Soon, a man in an orange shirt appeared.
“Do you know the way to Poet’s Table?” he called out.
A Journal photographer, reporter and local guide walked up the trail. Hours earlier, Custer State Park posted to Facebook that park officials had taken a new green table — constructed by a local woodworker — up to Poet’s Table to replace the one two women sawed up and trucked down on their backs the weekend prior. The women told a park ranger the site “desecrated” the natural Black Hills alcove. Many on social media excoriated them. Some agreed.
Going forward, however, the debate over what exactly Poet’s Table means and represents to people in the Black Hills continues, the Rapid City Journal reported. Is Poet’s Table a mountainous Shrangi-La? A shrine to the poetic muse? Or an overrun dump heap long detached from original vagabond poet’s John Raeck’s dream for the place?
On May 30, hours after Poet’s Table Pt. 2 arrived, the pilgrimage of this one man — who declined to offer his name because his wife could be reading — seemed to embody all of these things at once.
“What’s in the bag?”
“Oh, a chess set,” said the man. “I’m bringing it up to Poet’s Table. It’s back, right?”
Last year, park officials removed a fort. The rock wall has been tagged by #NoDAPL hashtag to high
school romances. Verse, sacred and profane, stuffed the now-removed cabinets. And within hours of the table’s return, some guy left a business card for his visual design company.
Is this the sacred Poet’s Table?
James Giago Davies, a writer and correspondent for Native Sun News Today, said for many Lakota people the public outrage over the removal of clutter from the mountain has been amusing.
“For Lakota, this whole situation resonates in a completely different way,” he said, noting what the U.S. Supreme Court has acknowledged, that the Black Hills was illegally annexed by the U.S. government in the 19th Century. “Many of us see that picnic table as a blight, not as an iconic piece of sentimentality.”
A meme is circling the internet featuring a Kermit the Frog sipping sun-tea, framed by the words, “Black Hills Stolen from the Lakota and nobody bats an eye....A table is taken off the hill and everybody loses their mind.”
Giago Davies also questioned the initial act by Raeck, a transplant to the Black Hills from Wisconsin.
“If the intention of that vagabond poet in 1968 was to honor that spot, then he should’ve just written poetry encouraging them to go up there, instead of crudely erecting a manifestation of a culture that is