ROCHESTER, Ind. — Thirteen students from Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kan., set out May 13 to walk to Washington, D.C., to ask the government to stop destroying wetlands and native sacred places, including tribal burial grounds.

Their primary goal is to halt a proposed $174 million, four-lane, six-mile highway to be named the South Lawrence Trafficway, that would run through the Wakarusa Wetlands near Haskell.

“It seems like the white man’s cemeteries are sacred, while Indian burial grounds are of no concern to those planning another interstate highway,” said Leonard Lowery, a Choctaw Indian concerned with preserving as much of his people’s legacy as possible.

Speaking at an informal gathering at the Fulton County Historical Society, where the group camped last Wednesday night, Lowery quoted Chief Seattle, a Suquamish leader, by saying, “’We don’t inherit the earth from our ancestors. Instead, we borrow it from our children.’

“We need to remember that,” he said. “We are only temporary custodians of the earth. It is our obligation to care for it and honor it.”

Another quote from Chief Seattle stressed the difference between views of the earth: “The white man’s dead forget the country of their birth when they go to walk among the stars. Our dead never forget this beautiful earth, for it is the mother of the red man.”

Milli Pepion, a junior at Haskell with family origins in Navajo and Blackfeet tribes, organized the march. “We walk in little sections so we can have breaks,” she said.

She did not speak at the Rochester gathering because she was busily preparing a petition the group would present to former President Bill Clinton in Chicago, asking him to make a Native American Indiana initiative to complement his American and African initiatives.

Earlier, at a stop at Purdue University, Pepion said she is walking because markers indicating where Potawatomi children who died along the “Trail of Death” were buried already have been stripped in preparation for the proposed highway. The Trail of Death refers to the 1838 forced removal of more than 850 Potawatomi from Indiana to Kansas.

The Trail of Broken Promises follows that trail in reverse through Kansas, Missouri, Illinois and Indiana, and on east. Unlike the Potawatomi, however, the group from Haskell alternates walking and riding – and they are not being marched at gunpoint.

“They have already desecrated our history,” Pepion said, “and that’s exactly what’s happening in the wetlands all over Indian country.”

She said she wants to save the wetlands not only to honor the children who died there when Haskell was founded in 1884 but also to save the 260 migratory birds and 400 indigenous plants in the area.

Haskell, a leading intertribal university, empowers American Indian and Alaska Native scholars for leadership and service to sovereign first nations and the world by virtue of its academic programs and research, creative activities and culturally diverse student experiences.

The walk to Washington is following a varied itinerary. For instance, a planned visit to Ball State University’s Native American Center was cancelled when the group discovered the center had closed. Instead, they spent more time at the Great Lakes Native American Cultural Center’s pow-wow at Portland.

Pepion, who has been asking the spirits to walk ahead of them and go home with them, has given water to them because she knows those on the Trail of Death cried for water, since 1838 was a year of drought. At the end of the walk, she will ask the spirits to go up and be “star people.”

And by the end of the walk, on July 9, the group plans to ask Congress to add to the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 an amendment to provide a right of action for protection of Native American Sacred places, such as the Wakarusa Wetlands.