Silencing Lakota1

Silencing the First Nations:

Western Standards in the Western Frontier

Emily Barrick

5/2/15

(Choate, 1883 and 1886)

Abstract

Carlisle Indian School was only one of many Indian boarding schools designed to assimilate the indigenous people of the United States. The Great Sioux Reservation made up all of South Dakota west of the Mississippi; and protected the rights of the Sioux to hunt in unceded Indian territory in Wyoming and Nebraska. The brutal deaths of the Lakota leader Sitting Bull and other prominent members of the tribe at Wounded Knee effectively ended the Indian Wars (Edwards, 2012), silencing the tribes and taking their sacred land. The Keystone XL Pipeline is being built by TransCanada from Alberta to Nebraska and through the traditional Sioux land. The U.S. court system deemed that the Black Hills as well as the rest of South Dakota west of the Missouri River was taken from the Sioux Nation without due compensation in a 1980 Supreme Court decision. Environmental racism is “the process whereby environmental decisions, actions and policies result in racial discrimination or the creation of racial advantages”. Racism internalized by the powerful group (white Americans being the case here) allows them to dismiss arguments based solely off the interests of a minority group.There is a gross underrepresentation of Native Americans in the literature on their own culture and history.Western education from the bottom up—from the romanticization of Thanksgiving to the difficult odds Native American students have to overcome to get any form of higher education—needs to be reformed.

Introduction

Three boys, dressed in their native garb, pose for a picture in 1883 (Choate, 1883 and 1886). They are brought to a school far from their homes and their families; their braids are cut, their feathers and furs are replaced with “the clothes of the White Man” (Public Broadcasting System, 2006), and are beat when they speak Lakota. They learn how to speak English, how to be farmers, how to be businessmen. They are even renamed, told that they are now ‘Henry’ or ‘Chauncey’, and by the end of the three years, they are right gentlemen. They are no longer savages. They could even be considered white if it weren’t for their dark skin and dark eyes (Choate, 1883 and 1886).

Carlisle Indian School was only one of many Indian boarding schools designed to assimilate the indigenous people of the United States (Landis, 1996). Native Americans were see as others throughout American history, the ideas of land ownership was a foreign concept, and many tribes were hostile toward settlers and the expansion of the United States. Boarding schools were a way of both assimilating the young Native Americans and keeping their parents in check on the reservations by essentially holding their children for“ransom” far away from the reservations (Public Broadcasting Station, 2006).

However, these boarding schools mostly closed decades ago, closed down by the scathing government reports of abuses and misuse of power (Bear, 2008). Perhaps, these closures show a progression of the American perspective on Native Americans and their cultural identities and ownership of their land.

Sioux Nation

The Sioux Nation, although they all share a common cultural background, is split into three main linguistic groups: Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota (Edwards, 2012); the Lakota are then subdivided further into seven groups including the Oglala, Itazipcho, Hunkpapa, Miniconjou, Sihasapa, Santee, and Oohenugpa. Although all of these subdivided groups share common language and culture, they have their own unique experiences and histories among themselves.

The Sioux Nation is a controversial and hypothetical area of land where the Sioux lived prior to contact with settlers, which included much of the modern states of South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, and Minnesota(Powers & Garret & Martin, 2005). The Great Sioux Reservation made up all of South Dakota west of the Mississippi; and protected the rights of the Sioux to hunt in unceded Indian territory in Wyoming and Nebraskaas shown in this map (snowwowl.com, 2005). A very important area within the Great Sioux Reservation was He Sapa,or the Black Hills, which is located near the border of South Dakota and Wyoming near the ‘S’ in ‘Sioux’. The reservation was established by a treaty signed in 1868 at Fort Laramie in Wyoming (Powers & Garret & Martin, 2005), for the “undisturbed and exclusive use” of the indigenous people.

Although scholars believe that the Lakota originated from eastern Minnesota and migrated to eastern South Dakota in the seventeenth century due to conflict with the other Sioux tribes as well as the approaching white man (Edwards, 2012), Lakota oral tradition disagrees. One Lakota medicine man named Pete Catches explained that the Lakota saw the He Sapa(Black Hills), as central to their religion (Gonzalez, 1996). Catches stated that “seven spirits came to the Black Hills… The first spirit gave the whole of the Black Hills to the Lakota people forever an ever, from this life until the great here-after life,” as he described the oral tradition of his people. The spirits each came with gifts, including the “fire” within the ground, or volcanoes; the water in the land, such as the Hot Spring which is used for healing; the air that they breathe, which manifests itself in the Wind Caves in the Black Hills, where the “Earth breathes in and out”; the rocks and minerals, including the gold; medicine; the animals which sustain the Lakota, such as the buffalo and the eagle to all the smaller animals. The last spirit “brought the Black Hills as a whole-brought it to give it to the Lakota forever, for all eternity, not only in this life, but in the life hereafter. The two are tied together” (Gonzalez, 1996). The Lakota religion was originally honored by the Fort Laramie Treaty, which gave them total access to He Sapa, and their traditional hunting ground.

Unfortunately, treaty rights rarely remain in the American consciousness. In 1875, only seven years after the Fort Laramie Treaty, gold was discovered in the Black Hills, and the consequent illegal westward expansion of gold diggers into the Lakota’s land brought conflict between the United States and the Lakota, who “actively participated in the defense of their lands under such leaders and strategists as Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Gall, American Horse, and Rain in the Face” (Darity, 2008) and effectively kick-started the Indian Wars and the fight for sacred land.

The most famous battle of the Sioux Indian Wars took place at Little Bighorn River, Montana, in 1876, between 7th U.S. Calvary regiment led by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer (Darity, 2008) wherein the three day battle against Crazy Horse and his Lakota and Cheyenne warriors, General Custer lost both the battle and his life (Darity, 2008; Darity, 2008), giving hope to the resistant tribes. However, the American loss at Little Big Horn also brought more attention to the hostility of the tribes to the American settlers coming to the Black Hills and lead to increased military action taken by the United States. Subsequently, an order for Crazy Horse’s arrest went out in 1877 and a scuffle during his arrest caused his death (Darity, 2008); the morale of the Lakota people took a sharp plunge.

The 1870s saw the rise of the Ghost Dance movement, which unified many Native American tribes through a religious belief of a coming liberation for the Native Americans, and may have inspired strong resistance in the Lakota tribe (Edwards, 2012).The dance was a revivalist attempt to restore the old way of life (Jones, 2005); a circle dance that was practiced that originated from a Nevada reservation, and spread through much of central United States all the way to the Lakota.The Ghost Dance made the white settlers nervous because it was bringing together a huge number of people for a mysterious new dance and an unfamiliar religion.

When the Lakota tribal leader Sitting Bull was confronted about the Dance by the U.S. Army in 1890, a conflict broke out and the ensuing battle (massacre) resulted in the death of at least 150 Lakota, mostly women and children (Edwards, 2012) many of whom were not even killed by the soldiers, but rather froze to death in the snow as shown in the photo on the next page (Campbell, n.d.) which depicts the frozen bodies of Lakota who died during the ‘battle’. The brutal deaths of the Lakota leader Sitting Bull and other prominent members of the tribe at Wounded Knee effectively ended the Indian Wars (Edwards, 2012), silencing the tribes and taking their sacred land.

The end of the Indian Wars led to the relegation of the tribe to several reservations where they remain today. These reservations are shown on the map on page 4 (snowwowl.com, 2005), and include the Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, Pine Ridge, Rosebud, and Lower Brule reservations. The Great Sioux Reservation was drastically reduced due to the allure of gold and the hostilities between the Sioux tribes and the United States (Darity, 2008). Resentment between settlers and Native Americans contributed to the slaughter of buffalo, which reduced the resources of the tribal people considerably. The forcible removal of the Sioux from their religious grounds in the Black Hills wore away on the Sioux resolve.

In the years that followed, boarding school recruiters targeted children from hostile tribes such as the Lakota as of the early 1880s (Bear, 2008). The poverty and the unstable condition of the reservations of the Sioux made the reservations in western South Dakota prime recruiting grounds, further removing the new generation of Lakota from their traditional culture.

Modern Lakota Activism

Today, the Sioux are one of the largest tribes in the United States, yet arguably the poorest area in the United States with “60 percent of people live at or below the poverty line” (Merchant, 2011). The Cheyenne River Reservation is in Ziebach County, a remote area of northwestern South Dakota, has jobs in construction that can be found in the summer, but the rest of the year leaves the inhabitants tending to farm animals and hoping the winter doesn’t become too bad.

Poor life on the reservation does make it difficult to raise children, and many Lakota claim that racial tensions combined with the difficulties of living on reservations make South Dakota Sioux a target for disproportionate Child Protective Service seizures (Lakota People’s Law Project, n.d.). The fact is, in 1978 the Indian Child Welfare Act was passed, which “stipulates Indian children be placed with extended family members, tribal members or in a home with at least one Native foster parent”, with the explicit object of keeping the child in a home of their cultural background (Rena-Murray, 2014), but this act is rarely ever honored. “South Dakota has allegedly continued to ignore stipulations in ICWA … placing about 87 percent of Native children in non-Native homes” (Indian Country News, 2014). The blatant disregard of the rights and culture of Native Americans by the state of South Dakota is essentially a modern version of the Indian boarding schools of earlier times in its erasure of the cultural roots of the Lakota people.

Another major issue for the Lakota is the Keystone Pipeline, which puts the natural resources of several South Dakota reservations at risk (Jumping, 2013), and goes directly through He Sapa.

Keystone XL Pipeline Background

The Keystone XL Pipeline is being built by TransCanada from Alberta to Nebraska as shown in the map on the previous page (Keystone XL, 2013) to transport the oil extracted from the tar sands in central Canada. The dotted blue line shows the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline, from Hardisty, and through the western half of South Dakota; according to the map on page 3, the pipeline will go through the traditional Sioux land. The pipeline project is a very controversial subject because it has a foot in both the political, capitalistic world and the environmental and social justice world.

Supporters argue that the pipeline will provide American jobs and will be environmentally safer than using trucks or other transportation methods, which are at higher risk for spills (Palliser, 2012). With many American Congressional bills pushing for the pipeline to be approved by the Oval Office, the president is put in a spot: either they choose an economical position and pass the Keystone XL Pipeline bills, or they take the environmental side and do not pass it(Berwald, 2015). However, the major reasons for the Keystone Pipeline do include environmental reasons. Although the Keystone XL Pipeline will push forward the extraction of the tar sands in Alberta, Canada, the Canadian government plans on extracting this anyway. Transporting the oil via pipeline is safer than truck or train, which is why it is strongly supported by environmentalists who are familiar with the different methods of oil transportation (Palliser, 2012; Berwald, 2015)

Althought TransCanada projected the jobs created by the Pipeline to be several thousand per month of construction, a Cornell University study found that the actual jobs created will be only a fraction of the estimate, as shown in the grahp above (Wald, 2013). While the blue bars, which show the prediction that TransCanada released on jobs created by their project, show thousands of jobs created for each construction time period, the height of which is 20,000 during the month of April, the purple and red bars, which depict a Cornell University study and Federal government research respectfully, only predict around 5,000 jobs for about one month total. Apparently TransCanada’s numbers were a little skewed.

In light of all the good debate going on about the Keystone Pipeline-- whether economically or environmentally— one thing is continuously and systematically left out of the mainstream discussion: Whose land is it that TransCanada plans to build the pipeline on?

Lakota and the Keystone Pipeline

The U.S. court system deemed that the Black Hills as well as the rest of South Dakota west of the Missouri River was taken from the Sioux Nation without due compensation in a 1980 Supreme Court decision (Ostler, 2010; Akwesasne Notes, 1980). Mario Gonzalez, the attorney for the Lakota tribe, argued that the Treaty of 1868 made in Fort Laramie stated that the Great Sioux Reservation which made up all of South Dakota west of the Missouri River (see map on page 3) could not be ceded without the consent and signing of at least three fourths of the adult males in the Sioux tribes, which did not happen (Akwesasne Notes, 1980). Gonzalez won the case, and the tribe was offered payment in exchange for the land, plus interest, which comes to approximately one billion dollars. However, Sioux refused to accept the money offered by the government, even though the Lakota are probably the poorest people in the country (Ostler, 2010; Merchant

, 2011). Mario Gonzalez expounded:

In essence, the Black Hills Case boils down to this -- the initial taking was unconstitutional and therefore we have been the rightful owners from 1877 until the present time. The taking by the government was null and void from the beginning. And now the government is trying to pay $17.5 million plus 5% simple interest. By accepting this award, at this time we will be accepting the sale of the Black Hills. Since the government didn't get it lawfully in the beginning, it is still ours. By accepting the money now, we sell. That's what it boils down to. And we are not about to be duped into this kind of fraudulent conveyance. We are going to go out fighting for the Black Hills, we intend to fight like the Oglala Lakota did over 100 years ago, and if we lose, nobody will ever be able to accuse us of not fighting to try to retain our Black Hills.

Sara Jumping, a Lakota journalist, wrote about the fighting efforts of the Pawnee Nation and the Ihanktonwan Dakota against the Keystone Pipeline (Jumping, 2013). The title of her article is “Stopping the Keystone Pipeline: The Battle of Our Time”, and her wording already expresses her belief that the Keystone Pipeline is a priority for her generation for preserving her culture. The Black Hills are still important to the Lakota today, and through movements such as Owe Aku, which means ‘Take Back the Way’, the Lakota and partnering tribes are working to stop, or at least redirect, the pipeline away from their sacrd land and their water sources. Jumping concludes her article with a call to action,

We must let our tribal leaders know, that they should not be bought for a few jobs in the shortterm, when their role is to make decisions based on what is best for next seven generations. That is what we expect of them. We must continue to protect the land, the water, the air, the animals The Ogallala aquifer is worth more than any money. Our children and grandchildren cannot drink oil.

Conveying a similar message of Lakota resistance to being bought outis this rendition of a propaganda poster, depicting a Sioux brave wearing his feather, traditional clothing, and long hair (poasterchild[1], 2013). In the background is a teepee with several Native Americans going about their business. The brave is holding a dollar bill in one hand, and a sign in the other. The top of the image reads “Hey, Christians! What do you think about selling us Bethlehem for a lousy $1.50 an acre?” The sign that the brave is holding reads “What? You don’t want to sell it because it’s sacred ground?” and “Well, we don’t want to sell the Black Hills either! Return the land now!” The image draws a strong parallel between the sacred land and beliefs of the Lakota and the sacred land and beliefs of Christians, who are a majority of Americans. Lakota beliefs are so easily dismissed, while Americans would never dream of dismissing Christians or Jews in the same way. Why? Why are Lakota beliefs held in such disregard?