The Lakota Translation

The Olmec inscription does not, on its own, give us coordinates. It gives us a phrase: "noble bird," "hand," "sacred temple." Read with the supplementary Lakota cross-references the academic provides — because the priests who maintained the Cibola tradition adopted local sacred grammar as the centuries went on — the phrase resolves spatially. The "noble bird" is an eagle. The "hand" is a human hand, palm spread. The "sacred temple" is a mountain whose silhouette, viewed from the east at sunrise, reads as a giant feathered raptor. The mountain is in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The mountain is, by 1941, a sculpture.