On November 29, 1864, Chief White Antelope of the Cheyenne nation, emerged from his lodge at daybreak, startled by the sound of gunshots. The village, then settled at Sand Creek, Colorado, was surrounded by 675 US Army soldiers, firing indiscriminately at terrified men, women, and children. There was no escape. The chief stood calmly, arms folded, and sang his death song: “Nothing lives long. Only the earth and the mountains.”
Opening his posthumous memoir with this horrifying event, Frank Waters, noted author of the American Southwest, observes that “the wind and the rain of time and change prove the truth of White Antelope’s song.” Time and change “alter our daily lives, wash away civilizations. Only the earth and its mountains, visible parts of an unseen whole, endure forever.”
In the hymnic cosmology of John 3:16-21, Christ Jesus is the light and love who bodily “came into the world” to show us the way back to our humanity, limned in the likeness of God. Yet generation after generation, too often hiding behind a mask of false Christianity, of idolatrous faith, this is the verdict: “that the light came into the world but people preferred darkness to light.” From a Christian perspective, White Antelope spoke truthfully at his death, but only by half. He and the Native peoples who were massacred on that terrible morning remain part of the “unseen whole” that endures forever in the mercy and justice of God.
To be a companion of Jesus is to commit ourselves to the unseen whole, which is to say, that everything, without exception—the mountains and the earth, and all the living things and peoples who inhabit her—belongs to God. Only in God can we sing our death song in peace.

Christopher Pramuk

Christopher Pramuk, author of Hope Sings, So Beautiful, is University Chair of Ignatian Thought and Imagination and a professor of theology at Regis University in Denver, where he resides with his wife, Lauri, and their four children.