From ILAT

Hill crusader trying to save Lakota language – 13 years on Native American reservation in South Dakota

March 7, 2013 

by Lou Mancinelli

If he went in search of a lifestyle completely different from the privileged one he experienced growing up in Chestnut Hill, with romanticized visions of Indian life swirling in his head, the reality of living for 13 years on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota has washed away those fancies as if they were sediment upon the looking glass.

But at the same time, it has transformed those idealistic visions into practical applications and revised perspectives. What Chestnut Hill native and 1996 Chestnut Hill Academy graduate Peter Hill, 34, discovered is a people still fighting to rise from the unspeakable atrocities committed against them by the U.S. government.

As a teenager, Hill visited the Pine Ridge Reservation during a series of summer work trips organized by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the Episcopal church his family attended regularly.

And after Peter graduated from Carleton College in Minnesota in 2000 with a B.A. in Native American Studies, he moved to the Pine Ridge Reservation through an international teachers’ program. He has lived there ever since, working as a history and language teacher at the reservation’s high school, Red Cloud Indian School.

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