Payton Sierra is a student at the Red Cloud School on Pine Ridge Reservation in SD and a runner-up in the Middle School category of Lakota Children’s Enrichment’s 2014 VOICES OF THE LAND Writing Challenge. In her prize winning poem, Makhóče kin Únšikila, (Lakota for “Pity the Land”), Payton presents a message to the world and her community about the mistreatment of the land.
