New Town kids get a lesson on the sky
New Town kids get a lesson on the sky
By Jerry W. Kram
People have looked at the skies since time immemorial. Billions of people have looked at the random scattering of stars in the night and, like a cosmic connect-the-dots, used them to draw pictures. We call those pictures constellations. The European tradition gives us the names of the constellations used by the ancient Greeks, who matched the starts to their myths of gods and heros.
But other people also looked at the sky and made different pictures and tied those pictures to their own stories. Among those stories are those of the Lakota people, who found the Thunderbird, Fireplace, and a Great Racetrack in the sky.
Those were the stories being told at Edwin Low Elementary School last week, as an instructor in the Ogalala Lakota College Science and Math Program brought an inflatable planetarium to give New Town students a lesson about the starts.
“I can’t tell you how many kids asked me if it was a bouncy castle,” said Michelle Salvatore. “We brought our portable planetarium and are teaching Lakota Star Stories and Star Knowledge.”
