Discord in Dakota

The Lakotas and the Black Hills: The Struggle For Sacred Ground
by Jeffrey Ostler

Reviewed by Catherine Bailey

lakotasblackhills150px
After years of negotiating broken treaties with shiny-pated bureaucrats from Washington, the nineteenth century Lakota eventually came to equate bald-headedness with mendacity. In The Lakotas and the Black Hills, Jeffrey Ostler illuminates the cultural misunderstandings and outright chicanery that pushed the Lakotas out of their ancestral Black Hills in South Dakota. His clear, concise account of the conflict elucidates the often-labyrinthine clauses of the treaties and brings to life the people and events involved in the battle over the Lakota homeland. It’s a battle that has stretched on for nearly one hundred and fifty years, and it shows no signs of abatement.

Drawing on oral traditions, archaeological evidence, and early written accounts of the region, Ostler presents the cultural evidence tying the Lakota to the Black Hills. During the early twentieth century, many of the traditions linking the Lakota to their claimed homeland went underground or fell out of practice. During the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, however, the Lakota began to actively reestablish their presence in the Black Hills.

The Lakotas and the Black Hills effectively places the actions of the various parties within the political and cultural context of their times. The United States, for instance, secured Lakota signatures on the 1876 reservation treaty only after threatening to withhold food aid to a people already teetering on the edge of starvation and dependent on government rations after the destruction of the buffalo herds. The government land grab did not end in the nineteenth century, however. In the 1940s, the government snapped up another 133,000 acres of reservation land for a gunnery range and has since declined to return it. For the Lakota, who had turned out in droves to serve in both World Wars and who had planted victory gardens along with the rest of the American citizenry, this new betrayal sparked indignation and heralded the upsurge of the movement for indigenous rights that took off in the second half of the twentieth century.

Today, the Lakota press their case through legal claims, activism, and public education. Rates of murder, poverty, and alcoholism on the Lakota reservation are still among the highest in the country, yet the Lakota refuse to accept monetary compensation in place of the Black Hills, which they argue were taken from them unlawfully. Advocates such as former Senator Bill Bradley have pressed for legislation to return autonomy and ownership of some of the requisitioned land and resources to the Lakota. While no success has come of it yet, the Lakota’s commitment to regain some part of the Black Hills remains constant. As Ostler’s history of the conflict shows, public opinion toward indigenous rights has become vastly more supportive over the past century, and it seems possible that persistence may eventually win the day for the Lakotas.

Excerpt: For several weeks, the two sides traded fire while trying to work out a deal. Though AIM supporters were occasionally able to smuggle food through the government blockade, the occupiers faced increasingly difficult conditions. In late March, to renew their spirits, Leonard Crow Dog called for them to hold a Ghost Dance, the first time the ceremony had been performed in close to eighty years. At the end of the four-day ceremony, Means said that although the whites thought of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre as marking the “end of the Indian,” it wasn’t true. “Here we are at war, were still Indians, and we’re Ghost Dancing again.”

Buy the book: Skylight Books, Powell’s, Amazon

Catherine Bailey is a trained anthropologist and archaeologist. She currently works as a freelance writer and teacher in Los Angeles.

*Photo by weary as water.


×

Send A Letter To the Editors

    Please tell us your thoughts. Include your name and daytime phone number, and a link to the article you’re responding to. We may edit your letter for length and clarity and publish it on our site.

    (Optional) Attach an image to your letter. Jpeg, PNG or GIF accepted, 1MB maximum.