Fall 2007

Cover Story – Yellowhawks: Tradition and Transition

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It’s a perfect Black Hills evening. Powder blue skies have begun to fade into white behind the green and black of needles and bark. Typical of early fall, the warmth of the day gives way quickly to the coolness of impending dusk and accentuates the cleansing smell of pine.

The people gathered on a hillside between Hermosa and Keystone on this...

Tom Warner: The Eye of the Storm

There are a lot of reasons why people fall in love with the Black Hills, and given my unique job of meeting and writing about fascinating faces, I thought I’d heard them all. There’s the friendly, small-town atmosphere, the clean mountain air, and the relative lack of traffic that allows us to get just about anyplace we care to go in a matter of minutes—variations of which I hear all the time and heartily agree with. But this summer I met a man whose attraction to the Black Hills was...

Learning Curve: Norsky and Dutch

Our learning curve assignment: to become Ole and Lena. We would eat Norwegian food, sing Norwegian songs, wear Norwegian clothes, dance Norwegian dances, and laugh at Norwegian jokes.

FACES advertising director Ann Henrichsen is, in fact, one fourth Norwegian, but of the non-observing variety, so it would be an opportunity for her to reclaim a part of her heritage. My ancestors lived on the other side of the North Sea in the Netherlands, but I felt that every South Dakotan should know...

Faces of Faith: Dan and Karen Derrick

Why would a married couple on the brink of retirement bliss sell a lovely home, get rid of their accumulated treasures, say farewell to their children and head to Africa to live in relative poverty? Dan, 63, and Karen Derrick are planning to do just that.

They are selling their home of 17 years situated on a 24-acre meadow south of Custer because they believe that God is calling them to be missionaries. For Karen, 58, it’s the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. Born in Burke in...

Steve Bernard: Domestic Dad

I had some doubts. To put a finer point on it, I wondered how I could interview Gail and Steve Bernard on a weekday night at 7 p.m. with four small children in the house. Maybe, I told myself, they got a sitter who would keep the children corralled in another part of the house while I interviewed the parents. Or maybe the children all went to bed at 6:45 p.m.Get real. Who puts their children to bed at 6:45 p.m.?

So I drove to the Bernard’s home in a Rapid City neighborhood I...

The Great Joshini

“Pick a card, any card.” The tall youth stepped out of the starlit night into the FACES office. I gingerly pulled a card from the fanned deck in his hand. “Look at it, remember it…don’t tell me what it is. Put it back in the deck and give me three chances to find your card.” I didn’t think finding a card in three tries was as impressive as finding one on the first try, but I didn’t say anything. If the young man was trying to learn to do card tricks, I thought, far be it from...

Kelli Braun: Wolf People Howl

It’s 9:30 in the evening. Kelli Braun, a 28-year-old mother of three, steps onto her deck, tilts back her head and gives a long, melancholy howl. Down the hill, her mother, Cindy Swanson, stands on her deck and joins in with a beastly wail of her own. To the uninitiated among the onlookers the women might appear to be moonstruck. Then, out of the darkness comes the eerie cry of real wolves, overwhelming the feeble sounds of their human imitators.

The scene takes place every night...

Gerald Yellowhawk

Gerald Yellowhawk is a lot of things to a lot of people—husband, father, grandfather, artist, speaker, pastor, traditional dancer and Lakota translator. These are titles he’s acquired through a lifetime of hard work and dedication to family, ministry and service. But another title transcends all others, and has been bestowed on him by natives and non-natives alike. Gerald Yellowhawk, or Jerry, as he is called by family and friends, is an Elder.“Jerry’s sisters called him an elder...

Jim Yellowhawk

JIM YELLOWHAWK grew up knowing he had big moccasins to fill. There were those of his father’s, an elder, holy man and artist, and there were also those of his ancestors, whose roots were deeply grounded in the Cheyenne River area soil where Jim would spend his youth.As opposed to Jim’s father’s generation, who grew up with the constant pressure to extinguish their Lakota traditions while being thrust into the white man’s world, Jim’s generation, growing up in the increasing ethnic...