in the community have linked reported appearances of Walking Sam to teens taking their own lives. In 2009, Walking Sam was alleged to have been spotted in the Pine Ridge community, which coincided with an occurrence of multiple teenage suicides. Blogger Mike Crowley described attending a meeting of the tribal council at the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, where a tribeswoman asked government officials for help dealing with Walking Sam:

[O]ne local woman, who left before I could talk with her personally, asked Washington for help dealing with Walking Sam. The woman, who was elderly but otherwise quite lucid, described Walking Sam as a big man in a tall hat who has appeared around the reservation and caused young people to commit suicides. She said that Walking Sam has beenthan a god of death—part terror, part Totoro. As a supernatural entity, he is tied to the land, and the land has a very real impact on the lives of the Lakota.

Writing of spending a week at Pine Ridge, Catholic chaplain Jeff Nixa praised “the unseen yet vibrant Lakota spirituality all around us.”

“Their sacred, earth-honoring ways, inextricably connected with nature and all living creatures, reach far beyond humans and human institutions,” he wrote.

Although some of the traditional seven Sacred Rites of the Lakota have fallen out of favor, numerous others, such as the vision quest, continue to be practiced, along with the Ghost Dance, a popular 19th-century hybrid of the traditional circle dance.

After Lakota Sioux began practicing the Ghost Dance, members of the U.S. cavalry attempted to quell