Wyoming's sacred rock finds new respect through shared stewardship

Devil's Tower rises 867 feet from the Wyoming plains like a stone finger pointing at the sky. For over 50 million years, this monolith has stood witness to the land—first as magma that pushed sedimentary rock into a dome, then as the surrounding stone eroded away, leaving behind the columnar-jointed tower that climbers and pilgrims travel thousands of miles to see.

But the geology is only half the story.

Two Stories, One Sacred Place

The Lakota Sioux know this formation as Mato Tipila, or Bear Lodge. Their oral tradition tells of seven girls fleeing from bears who climbed a small hill seeking refuge. Wakan Tanka, the Great Mystery, caused the earth itself to rise up beneath them, lifting them to safety. The bears clawed at the rising stone, their marks becoming the distinctive vertical grooves that stripe the tower today.

For the Lakota people, Mato Tipila remains a place of profound spiritual significance. Pansy Hawk Wing, a Lakota elder, describes it as a site where her people come to pray, conduct vision quests, and hang prayer ties—cloth offerings that carry intentions and gratitude. The practice of smudging, using sage or cedar smoke to purify mind, body, and spirit, is woven into daily spiritual life at the site.

When President Theodore Roosevelt designated Devil's Tower as the nation's first national monument in 1906, the decision preserved the landscape but overlooked whose sacred ground it was. The very name—Devil's Tower—carries a disrespect that many indigenous people have long felt.

A Shift Toward Partnership

What's changing now is the relationship between the National Park Service and the tribes who have stewarded this land for generations. Cade Herrera, a Lakota climber who works at the monument, sees genuine momentum in this partnership. The NPS has a complicated history of removing native peoples from their ancestral lands, but Herrera points to the growing co-stewardship model as evidence that things are shifting.

This isn't performative. It means the Lakota people have a real voice in how the monument is managed, preserved, and interpreted. It means their spiritual practices aren't squeezed around tourism schedules—they're centered. It means their name for the place carries weight.

When Pansy Hawk Wing speaks of visiting Mato Tipila as "coming home," she's describing something that goes beyond tourism or even historical preservation. She's describing a people reconnecting with a place that never stopped being theirs, just one that was temporarily managed by others.

The work of genuine co-stewardship is ongoing, but the direction matters. As more visitors stand at the base of those 867 feet of stone and learn both the geological story and the spiritual one, something shifts in how we understand what it means to protect a place.