The Heritage Center at Red Cloud

Red Cloud, the Oglala leader who had forced the army out of the Powder River forts in the 1860s, spent his last decades on the Pine Ridge Reservation and asked for Jesuit teachers for its children. Holy Rosary Mission opened just north of Pine Ridge in 1888, in a brick building made from clay and lime dug on the grounds. Like other mission schools of the era it was a boarding school, and for generations its pupils were taught in English and expected to give up their language and ceremonies. Red Cloud died in 1909 and is buried in the mission cemetery on the hill above the campus.

In 1969 the school renamed itself for him and set out to put Lakota culture at the center of what it taught. That same year a Jesuit, Father Theodore Zuern, started the Red Cloud Indian Art Show, which has run every summer since and is among the largest and longest-running Native art shows in the country, one of the few held on a reservation. The Heritage Center grew out of it.

The collection now holds more than ten thousand historic and contemporary works, beadwork and quillwork beside painting and sculpture by Lakota and other Native artists, and the gallery is free. Next door, Holy Rosary Church, rebuilt in 1998, has stained glass designed by Red Cloud students with a Lakota elder, and a short walk up the hill reaches Red Cloud's grave.