The Plot Against Native America, page 15
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From the occupation of Alcatraz to the Indigenous Youth Council protest at Red Cloud, Native American activists have made it clear that they have no intention of melting down in America’s melting pot. But there are different approaches to the challenge of remaining distinctly Piegan, Lakota, or Diné. The daughters of the men who founded the American Indian Movement in 1968 personify two of these paths. One of them is working within the system and the other is working to dismantle that system. They were interviewed during Marsha Small’s first visit to Red Cloud by Crystal Echo Hawk and Lashay Wesley for their American Genocide podcast.9 Tashina Banks Rama said that her father, Dennis Banks, who died in 2017, told her that it was his generation’s job “to go and beat these doors down and fight our way into these institutions and have native people be heard and recognized. It’s your generation and the next generation’s job to walk into these institutions and work them from the inside with the same mission.” As a Red Cloud School administrator, Banks Rama said she’s able to advocate for change “at the table” when dealing with the Jesuits and Church officials who operate the institution. The school, which enrolls more than 500 Lakota students, announced in July 2023 that it’s changing its name to Maȟpíya Lúta (Red Cloud in Lakota). This is in keeping with its Lakota language curriculum and immersion program. Sierra Concha, Banks Rama’s daughter and the school’s literacy project coordinator, said that this work is important “because we’re reclaiming not only our language but our Indigenous knowledge systems—things that come with language and are tied to every part of our identity like songs, prayers, and stories. Our language is the very core of our being and who we are as unique Indigenous people.”10
Ensuring that Lakota remains a living language has become pivotal in the struggle to combat assimilation; fewer than 2,000 of the 200,000 Lakota people living in 2021 were fluent speakers. The boarding school era is responsible in part for the decline of Native fluency in not only Lakota but Siksiká, ‘Ōlelo Hawai’i, Tlingit, Cherokee and many other Indigenous languages. Concha’s grandmother was sent to Holy Rosary as a child as was her mother. When he was five years old Dennis Banks was forced to attend the Pipestone Indian Training School in Minnesota, where he spent as much time running away back home to his Ojibwe family as sitting in a class. According to his account he was beaten every time the school caught him.11
Banks Rama sent all ten of her children to Red Cloud in her effort to give them the sort of hybrid education that might allow them to function successfully in both cultures. “Now we have native policy makers, legislators, lawyers, and business people—people who understand the system,” she said. “Tribes have a better understanding of their sovereignty now and how to assert their sovereignty when dealing with the federal government.”12
One of these Oglala leaders is Tatewin Means, the daughter of AIM founder Russell Means, who died in 2012. She served as the attorney general for the Oglala tribe and ran unsuccessfully for South Dakota attorney general in 2018. She is now the chief executive of the Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation, which has built solar-powered homes in its small community near the reservation town of Porcupine. The nonprofit is also focusing on worker training, an immersion program in the Lakota language for kids, and food sovereignty, a system in which the people whose labor produces food also control how it’s distributed, as opposed to the for-profit system imposed by corporations. In the American Genocide podcast Means told Echo Hawk and Wesley that she wants the churches removed from Pine Ridge, especially the Catholic Church running Red Cloud School. “These churches still have that paternalistic ethic that they know best. That they are doing us a favor by taking our children and saving them from us… The answer isn’t more of the colonizer oppressor system the answer is more investment into our traditional lifeways like our language, like our food sovereignty.” She said at Thunder Valley “we are as close as possible to how our ancestors lived and interacted with one another. That we are able to truly shed those influences of colonization. That includes Christian influences. That would have no part of our community. That we could drive through this land base and not see a church. That’s a part of my liberation dream.” She said, however, that it’s very hard to hold the Church accountable because they “have people protecting them.” Some Native people, she said, are staunch advocates of the Church. “They will tell the Jesuits ‘Don’t leave. We need you.’ ”
Although Means and Banks don’t agree about what role if any the Church should play at Red Cloud they are united in their position that it must pay financial reparations to the Lakota. “What does reparations look like?” Banks Rama asked. “Is it money? Absolutely it’s money. But it’s also other things—mental health, wellness, spiritual health.” Means said that reparations “could go to immersion programs, could go to food sovereignty programs, to building our energy infrastructure.” If they truly care about our people, she said, what’s the issue? “Or do they only love us if we’re going to be Christians?”
The Youth Council and others at Pine Ridge believe that there are more graves on or near the campus of Red Cloud than the Jesuits are revealing. Maka Black Elk, director of the school’s Truth and Healing Initiative—disputes this allegation. “We have no reason to believe that there are any graves outside of the cemetery. The narrative out there from some of our naysayers is that this is a crime scene and that there’s bodies everywhere with no evidence of that whatsoever… It speaks to the mistrust that some members of the community have for this institution.” People also want to know how much land the Church owns on the reservation, how much tribal trust and treaty money the Federal government paid Holy Rosary to assimilate Oglala children, and how much Church properties are worth. And most importantly, they want to know how many children died at Holy Rosary, and from what causes. Like the staff at most Indian boarding schools the Catholics kept exhaustive records. But these documents are stored in the archives of the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions at Marquette University, a Jesuit institution in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 850 miles east of Red Cloud.
A reporter from Indian Country Today spent hours in these dusty old repositories searching for information. Mary Annette Pember, a citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Ojibwe in Wisconsin, learned that although there is a ton of old papers in the collection some of these documents are heavily redacted with black marker. And there are other documents that Church officials refuse to let the public see. Marquette’s archivist told her that sealing these records was not an attempt to protect the Church but rather an effort to protect the privacy of certain individuals. Pember said that the privacy claim has been an obstacle for researchers. She wants access to the quarterly reports sent by the boarding schools to the Bureau of Catholic Missions beginning in 1900, records that would reveal the names of the children enrolled. Federal boarding schools such as Carlisle have made this information available to anyone searching online. Pember said that by cross-referencing names with death records it would be possible to determine if someone was buried at Red Cloud without a grave marker. (The Indian Boarding School Truth and Healing Commission Bill would give the Federal government the power to subpoena the Church for its records.)
However, in searching through unrestricted diaries and correspondence Pember found references to twenty children who died at Holy Rosary, only ten of whom were named. The causes of their deaths are not listed. These were Ignez Blackface, Sophia Bush, Lawrence Clifford, Harley Cook, Clara Klondalario, Ellen Shangro, Rosa Red Elk, Louisa White, Clara Yellow Bear, and Zora Ironteeth, who died in 1917 at the age of seven. The gravesite of only one child—Zora—is marked on an old map of the cemetery at Red Cloud. But Pember could not find any marker in the spot where the records said Zora was laid to rest. Had there ever been one it likely weathered away, she speculates, especially if it had been made of wood. But she has established one fact: at Red Cloud there is at least one unmarked grave of a child.13
In October 2022 Marsha Small returned to Red Cloud to excavate the basement under Drexel Hall where she, Jarrod Burks and their crew had detected anomalies the previous May. The first step was to remove the floor by cutting it into sections with a water-cooled concrete saw and carrying the sections up and out of the building by hand. A week later they were joined by Burks and three assistants along with tribal police detectives and two FBI agents who had worked with tribal authorities on previous cases (the FBI is responsible for investigating federal crimes committed on some 200 Indian reservations.) “I’m scared,” she told a reporter from Wired magazine. “I’m scared we’re gonna find something, and I’m scared we’re not gonna find something. Because if we don’t find something, they’ll say the church bought us off.” Small’s crew removed a shallow layer of sandy gravel, and then marked off sixteen one-square-meter squares in the exposed dirt. The squares were excavated in succeeding depths of about eight inches down to about three feet under the surface of the original concrete floor. The soil was ladled into buckets and taken outside to a large tent, where workers sifted it through screens. They found the bones of rodents and bones larger than those of a human that were likely bison or livestock deposited before Drexel Hall was built. But they did not find any human bones or evidence that the ground had harbored graves. Small and Burks concluded that construction debris accounted for the first anomaly and the second one was due to the burrows of rodents.14 Had Pourier been mistaken about what he had seen? The excavated room is shown on a schematic drawn for the 1997 renovation of Drexel Hall marked with the word “Graveyard.” Banks Rama said the label referred to an old, now-discarded Halloween tradition at Red Cloud, whose decorations were stored in the basement.
After the findings were published the school again insisted that it was concealing nothing. “The report affirms that no evidence of graves existed in the soil and that there was no evidence of graves ever having been removed,” the administration stated on the school’s website. “Maȟpíya Lúta continues its commitment to pursuing all avenues of truth-seeking.” But Small would not dismiss the possibility that children had been buried under Drexel Hall. “What I see on the horizon is that community rising up against that church. And if they do it right, they’ll kick ’em out. Then they’ll bring me in, or they’ll bring somebody else in, and we’ll find bodies. They still have that breath of fire.”15
Chapter Seven THE LORD’S VINEYARD
While Mount Rushmore’s carved heads stared at Donald Trump, he told a campaign rally on the eve of Independence Day in 2020 that “Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.” As the crowd chanted “USA! USA! USA!” and “Four more years!” he announced that federal agents had arrested one of the four men who tried to topple the bronze statue of Andrew Jackson near the White House during protests following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Trump did not mention that Jackson was a slave owner who orchestrated the 1830 Indian Removal Act, which directed the U.S. Army to evict 60,000 Indigenous people from their homelands in the Southeast and force-march the survivors to Oklahoma. Or that a week after his inauguration he had hung a portrait of Jackson in the Oval Office.
Trump’s public adoration of Old Hickory was only one of the insults to Native Americans his presence in the Black Hills represented. His sycophant, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, wanted to appease business owners who feast on the Rushmore tourist trade by pressing the National Park Service to issue South Dakota a permit for a massive fireworks show on the mountain following Trump’s speech. Citing water contamination and wildfire risks to the ponderosa forest the agency had refused to issue any such permit since 2009. Noem enlisted Trump’s help in pressuring the Park Service, which finally caved. Trump dismissed concerns about forest fires. “What can burn?” he asked. “It’s stone.”1
After the Park Service reinstated the ban in 2021 Noem sued Interior Secretary Deb Haaland. But the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Haaland. A month after the event Trump tweeted that adding his face to the four U.S. presidents depicted on Mt. Rushmore would be “a good idea.”2 Protesters who used vans to block a road to Trump’s event argued that for Native Americans the best idea regarding the faces on Mount Rushmore would be to remove them. For one reason, they were carved by Gutzon Borglum, a notorious admirer of the Ku Klux Klan who once said: “I would not trust an Indian, off-hand, 9 out of 10, where I would not trust a white man 1 out of 10.”3
During an interview Nick Tilsen, a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation and founder of the Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation at Pine Ridge, told a Lower Brule member and university professor named Nick Estes that “What South Dakota and the National Park Service call ‘a shrine to democracy’ is actually an international symbol of white supremacy.”4 Tilsen was arrested at the roadblock along with twenty other activists after police in riot gear backed by Air National Guardsmen fired pepper balls at them and carted them off in handcuffs as Trump supporters yelled: “Go back to where you came from!” An Oglala Lakota member named Freddie Longworth yelled at the police. “Respect our right to exist or expect our resistance,” a slogan that was beginning to gain traction across Indian Country. “RespectExpect” was spray-painted in 2021 on Trump’s beloved statue of Andrew Jackson.
Tribal leaders believe that Trump’s visit was retaliation for Native America’s tenacious decade-long opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline, a project that was finally abandoned in 2021 by Canadian-owned TC Energy. And they saw Trump’s speech before a crowd of 7,500 unmasked partisans during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic as retribution against the Pine Ridge and Cheyenne River reservations for barring outsiders in an effort to halt the spread of the virus, which had been ravaging the Navajo Reservation, among others. Noem threatened to sue the tribes for the checkpoints they set up on state and federal highways. But knowing she would lose in court she backed down.5 Harold Frazier, chairman of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, accused Trump of “putting our tribal members at risk to stage a photo op at one of our most sacred sites.”6
Protesters who used vans to block a road to the event for three hours carried signs that said “You are on stolen land” and “Honor the treaties.”7 These were references to the 1851 Horse Creek Treaty, which established a homeland for the Sioux and seven other tribes on a vast swath of land across what would become five Plains states. Because the treaty was broken soon after it was signed sporadic violence culminating in Red Cloud’s War compelled the U.S. to negotiate the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, which created the Great Sioux Reservation. The Sioux were granted sole possession of He Sapa, the Lakota name for the Black Hills, and were promised that non-Indians would not be allowed to trespass. After Custer was killed at the Battle of Greasy Grass Congress retaliated by passing a law in 1877 that confiscated the Black Hills, confined the Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota people to the reservation and opened He Sapa to a flood of miners who would eventually extract gold worth almost 100 billion dollars from ravaged earth.
In 1920 the tribe filed a lawsuit in the federal Court of Claims seeking compensation for the government’s theft of the Black Hills. Finally, in 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the “Sioux Nation of Indians” was entitled to $17.1 million plus interest, which in 2023 amounted to more than $2 billion, for the illegal taking of their land. “A more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be found in our history” the Court concluded in its summation of the government’s shameless plunder. Although that kind of money might address some of the lingering multi-generational ills caused by Indian boarding schools, the tribe doesn’t want it. What it wants is the return of He Sapa. The slogan appears on T-shirts and posters across Indian Country. “The Black Hills are not for sale.”
As the moment in 1889 approached when South Dakota would be declared one of the United States, the railroads, White settlers, and local businessmen looked at what remained of the Great Sioux Reservation and saw the opportunity to steal even more land. Policy makers in the nation’s capital were no longer fearful of the armed resistance by the Sioux that resulted in the Indigenous triumphs of Red Cloud’s War or what Whites called the Battle of the Little Big Horn. As a result, an 1889 bill passed by Congress without the consent of the Sioux Nation carved up their territory into six reservations—Cheyenne River, Crow Creek, Lower Brulé, Pine Ridge, Rosebud, and Standing Rock, each one the new home of the seven bands of the Sioux. This act of thievery reduced their land by more than nine million acres, an area the size of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island combined. While White residents greeted the centennial of South Dakota statehood with parties and speeches, including one by President George H. W. Bush in Sioux Falls congratulating his audience for building “a good state,” Native American residents did not join in the festivities. “For American Indians what is there to celebrate?” asked Lakota Times editor Tim Giago.8
