The Power of the Land

Identity, Ethnicity, and Class Among the Oglala Lakota

Paul Robertson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138979178
• eBook ISBN: 9781317775966
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Power of the Land is the first in-depth look at the past 120 years of struggle over the Oglala Lakota land base on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

Chapter 1

Makoce Ta Wowasake: The Power of the Land

Fault lines that have developed in Oglala society during more than a century of U.S. colonial rule over the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation were readily apparent at a February 1995 meeting at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Mission in Porcupine. Oglala, Minniconjou, Brule, Sicangu, and Hunkpapa elders and headsmen had traveled there to oppose a Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) proposal that threatened to take some of the small amount of land they had left away from them.¹ They wanted no part of a plan that bureaucrats in Washington D.C. were advancing to solve problems that the colonial system had created in the first place. They talked long, in strong voices, emotional voices. They spoke eloquently in Lakota, their mother tongue, and used gestures they do not use when they speak their second language.

Lakota elder Lucille Fire Thunder from Wounded Knee District gave a fiery speech in Lakota that day. She lambasted the Bureau for not allowing the people adequate time to review and respond to the proposal that would take Lakota land away from landowners-the deadline for input was a week away. Was she concerned that the officials from the Bureau could not understand what she said? “No,” she laughed, “It wouldn’t make any difference if they did. We heard what they had to say.” The point of the meeting, she said, was to educate each other, to decide what to do, and to find a way to stop the Bureau of Indian Affairs from taking their land.

Superintendent Delbert Brewer, Realty Director Frieda Brewer, and Land Operations Director Jim Glade represented the BIA’s Pine Ridge Agency office. They explained the proposal that had come from then Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Ada Deer, and recorded the people’s testimony. After their opening remarks, they sat back and listened. Ms. Brewer changed the tapes in the recorder as the hours passed. An interpreter from the BIA whispered to them occasionally. Some, especially younger people, gave their testimony in English. The officials were patient, prepared to let each person have their say. The Superintendent and the Realty Director are Oglala Sioux Tribal members and they know that these things take a long time.

Lakota elders Royal Bull Bear and Joe Swift Bird of the Grey Eagle Society, Chief Oliver Red Cloud, great-grandson of the famous chief, and Reginald Cedar Face, Secretary of the Black Hills Sioux Nation Treaty Council, sat behind a table alongside the Bureau officials.² The officials were twenty to thirty years younger than they were. Their relative youth, fancy dress and exclusive use of English set them off from the elders and from the majority of those who testified that day.

All four Lakota elders at the table were “treaty men,” descended from chiefs and treaty signers. In their view, the 1851 and 1868 Treaties their ancestors negotiated at Fort Laramie are sacred agreements that were sealed by the cannupa (sacred pipe), and are the legal and moral basis for Lakota sovereignty. “Treaty people” are quick to point out that Article VI of the U.S. Constitution says that “all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land.” To them, the treaties are a basis for sovereignty and for a Lakota form of government-something the Oglala Sioux Tribal government (OST) organized under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 (IRA) lacks. But the IRA government is a factor in their lives and they regularly provide their advice, criticism, and support to elected leaders. The treaty people had helped put a war bonnet on OST President Wilbur Between Lodges when he was inaugurated in 1994; he was at the Porcupine meeting too.

Edward Starr, Lakota Landowner Association Secretary and recent recipient of a Master’s Degree in Tribal Leadership and Management from Oglala Lakota College, used an overhead projector to explain four stages of colonialism. Since he wanted to make sure everyone understood what he had to say, he spoke in Lakota and English and distributed a flyer listing the four stages: “1, Military force is used to control the people. 2, The land is taken away. 3, A colonial administration is established to divide and conquer the people. 4, A native elite is created.”³

Lakota Landowner Association members had occasion to discuss the Porcupine meeting several days later. They expressed doubt about whether the OST would do anything to protect their rights-the OST had known about the proposal for over three months but had not taken any action. They figured that the taking of testimony was a sham, an action taken to cover the Bureau and not a good faith effort to take the wishes of the people into account.⁴ They decided they would have to act to protect their interests because they could not depend on their elected officials or the Bureau. They felt Starr’s outline of colonialism was accurate: Yes the government had taken away land and now seemed bent on taking away what little they had left; yes, the colonial administration that was the BIA does oppress them, and the fact that it was staffed at the level of the Pine Ridge Agency with many of their fellow tribal members shows how the people are divided; and yes a native elite had grown up, as evidenced by OST and BIA officials who, they said, did not support the interests of the 80% who are unemployed.⁵

Meetings like that in Porcupine are opportunities for the people to come together and conduct business in the Lakota language, and to address the issues of land, treaty rights, and culture that they hold dear. Lakota people do not leave those issues and traditions to the elected representatives of tribal government. They regularly engage in grassroots action to support their own agendas. They support Treaty Councils, Lakota Landowner Associations, and Grey Eagle Societies that share their goals. It is through their work and commitment that a dream of unity among the bands, a collectivity that the Lakota today call the oceti sakowin (seven council fires) is kept alive. It is largely through their work that the importance of land, culture, and treaty rights are continually reaffirmed. They are part of a long unbroken tradition of affirmation of things that are Lakota, and of resistance to the assimilative thrust of U.S. policy and colonial domination.

The themes that emerged at the Porcupine meeting come up endlessly in discussions and countless public meetings on the reservation and have, with some variation, been a focus of concern for more than 100 years. Land, treaties, culture, language, federal legislation, IRA government, mixed bloods, full bloods-all those themes came together that day in Porcupine, as they invariably do at such gatherings. Some Oglalas, especially elders, sum it all up in a phrase: “It all goes back to the land.”

For many, the land is a sine qua non of Lakota culture. Looking out over his own land in Porcupine, the late Severt Young Bear Sr. reflected that “This land is my last stand. Custer had his last stand and this is mine.” His grandmother had lived in an adjacent one-room log cabin that was still standing. “She lived there and she refused electricity, she told the stories, and she kept the language alive,” Young Bear remembered.⁶ As past OST President and Lakota elder Johnson Holy Rock puts it, the “land base is a place set aside for us, a place to live, our homeland.”⁷

The diminishment of the homeland-both the treaty territory and the reservation land base-and the progressive disenfranchisement of the majority of Oglala people from it is a source of much pain and sadness. “The history of Native America” Vine Deloria, Jr. once remarked “is the history of the land.”⁸ Much of that history is a history of land theft and of outside interests taking control over the people’s lands and resources. It is also a history of resistance, of attempts to hold onto and take back the land.

Land and the conflicts that have swirled around it during the past century on the Pine Ridge Reservation are the unifying themes of this study. The overriding argument is that ethnic, economic, and political differences that are central to Oglala society today are intimately connected to the extension and administration of U.S. colonial rule and to the integration of the land base into the market system. The period covered runs from the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 to the imposition of the IRA government in the 1930s, to the conflict over a tribal grazing ordinance in 1995, and finally to the takeover of OST Tribal Headquarters in January 2000. The raw materials for the events and case studies that are presented were gathered through ethnographic and participatory research on Pine Ridge Reservation and through expeditions to the mother lodes of archival materials at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. and Kansas City, Missouri.⁹

This study is an “ethnohistory,” an enterprise wherein “‘their’ history and ‘our’ history emerge as part of the same history.”¹⁰ That recognition is basic. Any examination of a history that so clearly bears the marks of colonial domination and the consequent struggle for dignity and decolonization must come to grips with the central importance of those intertwined strands.¹¹ Georges Balandier pointed that out forty years ago when he argued that understanding the history and culture of colonized peoples presupposes that we examine the “colonial situation.”¹² Vine Deloria, Jr. did the same a decade later in Custer Died for Your Sins. His satirical account of anthropologists challenged them to look beyond abstractions like the “caught between two worlds” notion and to explore systematic exploitation of resources and continued white control of reservation lands and resources.¹³ The resultant of that exploitation was not a simple product of imposition. In history as in life, outcomes rarely match intent.

The metaphor of a dance and the notion of dialectic are useful guides for examining histories marked by asymmetrical relations of domination. Despite gross inequities in power, the history of colonized peoples is not and should not be victim-history. As Peter Worsley phrased it, “… each colony was the product of a dialectic, a synthesis, not just a simple imposition, in which the social institutions and cultural values of the conquered was one of the terms of the dialectic.”¹⁴ Another term of that dialectic was resistance to it. Yet another is the creative use that those caught up in the colonial situation make of its characteristics in order to fashion their own futures. Propositions about the colonial situation and relations of domination are guideposts to inquiry and tools for analysis that help inform the effort to expose the sometimes hidden workings of local and extra-local forces that have jointly shaped current political and economic realities on Pine Ridge Reservation.

Chapter Overview

Chapter two, “Roots of Ethnic Difference,” explores terms Oglalas routinely use to mark intra-ethnic differences among themselves. The categories “mixed blood” and “full blood” have been in use for at least 150 years. Their differing values, interests, and agendas have been a significant factor in recent Oglala history. Important differences were already apparent before the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 was signed.¹⁵ Colonizers seized upon those intra-ethnic differences and used them for their own ends; their actions created further differentiation in Oglala society.

Oglala elders argue that the people were relatively self-sufficient in the early years of the twentieth century, a view at odds with many published accounts which suggest they were dependent on the largesse of the federal government. Chapter three, “Cattle, Grass, and Ethnic Conflict at the Grassroots,” follows the lead of Oglala oral history to written accounts of government agents, Indian Rights Association workers, visitors to the reservation, and of Oglalas themselves to develop a picture of the reservation economy between 1879 and 1915. The chapter concludes that Oglalas made productive use of what they had in a mixed economy of subsistence and wage-labor pursuits and that the thesis of ration dependency is a myth.

Chapter four, “The Oglala Omniciye and the Struggle for the Land,” describes the effects of regional political and economic influences on the early reservation economy. The struggle of the Oglala Omniciye, (Oglala Council), and its remarkable ability to support Oglala interests against those of the OIA and outside ranching interests contradicts the notion that the Oglala lacked effective leadership in the early reservation era. Differences between mixed blood and full blood Oglala were growing during those years of increasing mixed blood immigration from other states, and were evident in disagreement over the General Allotment Act and the organization of Bennett County. Actions of the OIA and outside cattle interests were instrumental in the decline of subsistence cattle herds the people depended on and migrant labor became increasingly important.

Chapter five, “Doing Their Patriotic Duty,” graphically illustrates the oppression Oglalas experienced at the hands of the colonizers and the outside interests they supported. It provides insight into the collaboration of the U.S. colonial regime with those interests at the expense of the Oglala people and their land. The impact the takeover had on the people, the economy, and the environment is described through the voices of the people and through repor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• List of Maps and Plates
• List of Tables and Figures
• Chapter 1 Makoce Ta Wowasake: The Power of the Land
• Chapter 2 Roots of Ethnic Difference
• Chapter 3 Cattle, Grass, and Ethnic Conflict at the Grassroots
• Chapter 4 The Oglala Omniciye and the Struggle for the Land
• Chapter 5 Doing Their Patriotic Duty: The World War I Takeover of Oglala Lands
• Chapter 6 Representative Democracy and the Politics of Exclusion
• Chapter 7 Land and Power in the Era of the IRA
• Chapter 8 A Nation in Crisis, Poised for Change
• Abbreviations Used in Footnotes
• Bibliography
• Index