The legitimacy of Travis Erickson's spirituality lies in an act of devotion expressed in 23 years of physical labor that a saint would admire.

In a one-man quarry at the Pipestone National Monument, Erickson worked out a personal theology involving canupa, the sacred pipe that is central to the traditional spirituality of many Native American tribes.

With sledge hammers, pry bars, chisels and wedges, he reduced an 11-foot wall of pink quartzite into a mound of sharp-edged slabs, a 30-foot-high pile of tailings he calls "Mount Erickson."

He broke and moved all this rock to expose a retreating deposit of heavy, red stone from which the sacred pipe is carved.

"Every time you come out and quarry, it should be a spiritual experience. You are within the womb of Mother Earth, in the stone," says Erickson, who was born and raised in Pipestone, Minn., and is an enrolled member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux Tribe. "Hopefully, the harder it gets, the more humble I will become."

Travis Erickson hoists a chunk of Sioux quartzite onto a ledge while working to get at a vein of catlinite at the Pipestone National Monument in Pipestone, Minn. Erickson uses the stone for pipes used in native religious ceremonies. He sells the pipes to anyone whose 'heart is into it," including non-Indians. "My responsibility is to carve the pipe. My responsibility is not what they do after that," he says.

But Erickson, like many modern practitioners, has tailored the pipe tradition to his own use.

"When I started using the pipe in my life, I followed it straight," he says. "I did that for two years. I really felt constrained, tied in. I wasn't given enough room to do what I felt should be done.

"Just because you are praying doesn't mean you have to take the pipe out every time."

Such willingness to adapt the pipe falls comfortably in line with Lakota tradition, where sacred ceremonies are conducted in accordance with each medicine man's spiritual vision.

For instance, some of the stone Erickson is quarrying will create a pipestone floor inlay in the national Native American museum being built on the Smithsonian mall in Washington, D.C.

The sacred pipe religion, an expression of the interrelatedness of people and their ties to the natural and spirit world, includes traditions of:

• Hanbleciya, or vision quests, where individuals fast and pray in solitude for as long as four days in an effort to promote dreams handed down from the spirit world that offer guidance on how to live.

• Inipi, purification ceremonies such as the sweat lodge.

• Wiwanyang wacipi, the sun dance ceremony, which culminates with dancers offering physical sacrifice for their family and tribe by piercing muscles of the chest or back and tethering themselves to a tree or pulling buffalo skulls like a gang plow until their flesh tears.

The religion has become an attractive vehicle for spiritual hitchhikers who think Tunkasila, the Grandfather God of the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota, has answers Jesus Christ, Mohammed and the Buddha don't. Native American Ceremonies are not just a religion, I don't even think that ceremony or religon are the right words to use. It is simply a lifestyle a way of life, honoring all things all people all the time. 

Erickson carves the rich red stone he harvests into pipes. Some of them are simple elbows and T's, others ornate, fanciful eagles, bears, bison and horses. These are viewed variously as sacred objects or as art by the people to whom Erickson sells or trades them.

"A lot of people come to me, and they want the pipe in their life," he says. "White, black, it doesn't matter as long as their heart is into it. My responsibility is to carve the pipe. My responsibility is not what they do after that."