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| This Native American Cowboy is Turning Up the Heat in Wyoming’s Prisons—And the Inmates Love It. |
| By narrative.ly- Stacey McKenna |
| Published: 06/06/2016 |
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As the morning cracks Wyoming’s stark horizon, casting light east to west across the panoramic plateau, a group of inmates moves through an ancient ritual. They follow the sun’s direction, sweeping clockwise past a fire and pausing to smudge and bless themselves four times with sage, cedar, tobacco and sweetgrass. An unassuming mound of earth is adorned with the dried, smoldering plants and a quartet of flags – red, black, white and yellow to represent four racial groups. The mound holds at its core all the invocations from past ceremonies. One by one, the prisoners prepare to enter the sacred space. They kneel to crawl through the low sweat lodge door, filing into a circle around the central pit of glowing sandstone orbs. The ceremony’s leader, a 79-year-old cowboy from the Wind River Indian Reservation, ladles water over the hot rocks. Steam jets upward. The temperature rises. It is time to pray. When first asked to provide spiritual guidance in Wyoming’s correctional institutions, Willie LeClair – “Grandpa Willie” to the inmates – hesitated. LeClair has inhabited many skins in his one life, forging a path that, more often than not, meanders betwixt and between. But it took him a long time to choose his spiritual journey, and years more to bring it into the prisons. LeClair spent his childhood on a ranch in the foothills of the enigmatic Wind River Range, born to a white mother and Eastern Shoshone (Native American) father, both devout Catholics. Indian rodeos – a popular subculture of junior, amateur and professional circuits that fuses the traditional Native American focus on horseback skills with wild west flair – provided the first vehicle through which he embraced his dual backgrounds. LeClair started breaking horses at age nine, rode bucking bulls by fourteen, and competed in saddle bronc and team roping contests as a young man. In 1960, he began calling the events. “West of the Mississippi, I can say I’ve either participated or announced a rodeo in almost every state,” he says. Read More. |
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