Colonialism, Resistance, and De-Colonization

Concise History of Colonization Efforts Against the Oglala Lakota Oyate on Pine Ridge, March 2000

Identity, Class, and New Deal Politics on Pine Ridge Reservation
Sub-commandante Marcos: History is not for sale

A Concise History of Colonization Efforts Against the Oglala Lakota Oyate on Pine Ridge
With Comments Regarding Current Political and Social Conditions

by Debra White Plume - March 2000
(editor's note: Debra White Plume is an Oglala Lakota living in Wounded Knee District on the Pine Ridge Reservation)

Following years of war with the U.S. Government, after what is called by our people the Greasy Grass, known to history as the Fall of Custer at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, after the murder of Crazy Horse, began the era now known to us as the Reservation Era. By 1877 all Lakota had come in to the Army Posts. Three efforts began during that time: Convert the Lakota from a hunter/gatherer people to farmers; Christianize the Lakota, and Educate the Lakota

The desired outcome of these three efforts was to colonize the Lakota. The dictionary defines a colony as "any region politically controlled by another country". The definition of colonialism is a "policy by which a nation maintains or extends its control over foreign dependencies''. This is what the U.S. government had in mind when it made laws and policies to govern us on the reservations where we were placed.

One of the first actions of the U.S. government was to enact a law in the early 1800's to place an Indian Agent on each reservation, who would serve as the arm of the federal government.

During the early years of reservation life, the traditional social life of the Lakota continued in the midst of these three efforts aimed at colonizing our people. The U.S. government, through reports from their Indian Agents and the leadership of organized Christian religions, began to see there was something missing in the area of reform. They soon identified the missing element as law enforcement.

Other than the Indian Agent and his staff, the only arbitrators or authority to negotiate disputes were Headmen of Tiospaye. Indian Agents saw this as the Headmen taking authority away from them. To remedy this situation, to answer the pleas of the B.I.A. Agents, the U.S. Congress passed into law the Indian Police in 1878.

In the eyes of the U.S. government the Indian Police would serve several purposes. Indian Police would provide law and order based on the laws of the Indian Agent. The authority of the Indian Police could take authority away from the Headmen, further dissolving the Lakota Tiospaye system by weakening the role of the Headmen, who usually arbitrated dissension among the people. The presence of the Indian Police would give the Indian Agent a break.

The Indian Police, over time, began to serve as agents of the colonization process. They reported to the Indian Agent anything happening on the reservation. Indian Police, and later on, the Courts of Indian Offenses, served as a bridge between the Lakota culture and the American culture. Indian Police stood first in the line to assimilate their families. Indian Police were required to send their children to school. Indian Police were required to cut their hair. Indian Police were not allowed to wear moccasins and were not allowed to wear any type of clothing except white man clothing.

In the early reservation days, the federal government extended their force over the people through the Indian Agent and Christian Religions. In turn, the Indian Agent and Christian Religious leaders extended their force through the Indian Police and Christian Missionaries.

In those days, any of our people who wished to travel out of their assigned living areas or to another reservation had to have a Travel Pass. It was decided by the federal government that our people could not have guns or knives so our men had to have permission of the Indian Agent to hunt. And our women had to have permission to purchase knives to have around the house.

In those early reservation days, the Indian Police reported to the Indian Agent who among the people were not attending church services. In 1878 the Episcopal Church established itself on Pine Ridge. In 1879 the Catholic Church established itself on Pine Ridge.

Three years after the Indian Police were established on Pine Ridge, beginning in 1881, Indian Police would arrest any Lakota for violation of the law that forbid our practice of our spiritual ways of life. We were not permitted to have a cannupa. If the Indian Agent or Indian Police reported a Lakota for having a cannupa or participating in ceremonies, those individuals were often sent to the insane asylum, so we have a lot of our people buried at the Yankton, S.D., which was the location of the insane asylum. Indian Police also turned in to the Indian Agent any Lakota involved in other forbidden medicine practices of our people, such as healing ceremonies? the Buffalo Dance, the Kettle Dance or ceremonies to find objects or look into the future.

If the Indian Police found out someone had traveled without a permit, that person would go to jail for 6 to 9 months. Sentencing posed a problem in those days, because there were no Indian Courts or jails for the Indian Agent to turn to to enforce laws, because the Agent did not want to utilize Lakota ways of solving problems.

The U.S. Congress passed into law the Court of Indian Offenses, and so individuals could be sentenced for their crimes. There were no jails, so the Indian Agent would clean out a store room or a spare room at the Agency, and jail a man in there. There were no locks on the doors, if a man accepted his sentence, he would just stay in that room without having to be locked in. If a man did not accept his sentence, he would be chained to a tree. Anyone caught drinking alcohol would be sentenced to a year and a day in jail.

It was around this time, the early reservation life, that the old people said the old Lakota way was dying because we could not bury our dead the way we were intended, that the white man had even taken that away and required us to bury our dead in the ground.

SO, time passed and life went on, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, in this way. The Christian Missionaries and the Indian Agent, or the white people in the surrounding area, would send a plea to the U.S. Congress so Congress would pass a law. The Indian Agent through the Indian Police and Indian Courts would enforce those laws; gradually taking responsibility away from us for determining our own way. After many years of this, the Headmen began to lose influence with the people.

Families were split up by the law compelling parents to enroll their children in school A lot of children were sent to Holy Rosary Mission or away to places like Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where they often remained for 12 to 15 years. The Indian Boarding Schools had jails for students who broke the rules, such as speaking their language.

About the same time the Indian boarding schools opened, the Allotment Act of 1887 was passed. This Act broke up our land base as a people and moved the land into individually owned parcels. Once all the heads of households had been assigned land, the B.I.A. started to lease out land to nearby white people, and land retained by our people through treaties was distributed to white people.

After the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre, years passed with our people just existing on the land grief stricken, unable to live an openly spiritual life, with more and more rights taken away. And more and more laws passed to govern us. Our way of life essentially went underground.

In 1915 the Oglala men started to go to World War I. This is when our men became exposed to the outside world, to money, and to what money could do. Our elders say that was when a worldly and selfish attitude started in our men who came home. They say that was when mental illness came to our people, previously mental illness had been rare among the Lakota.

In 1914 to 1916 the telephone came to Pine Ridge. The elders then said that for sure our people were beginning to change because some of the men took jobs working on the telephone line and some even talked on it. Before this, Oglala people did not like the telephone or telegraph and thought of it as bad medicine because they knew the U.S. military used it against us.

In 1975 another significant occurrence was noted. At that time, an elder leader giving advice to a younger leader, gave him the common teachings to leaders that Lakota leaders never turn their back on their people, to never be jealous, petty or to think of taking revenge. This elder leader also advised the younger to pray to God, rather than Wakan Tanka. The elders said that such an incident made it clear that the white man's way was making deep in roads into Lakota culture. It was seen as a sign that we were loosing our deep connection to our ancestors and the lifeway of our ancestors.

By 1999 young Oglalas were drinking and fighting each other. The leaders and elders were shocked and saddened by this as in the old days the Oglalas never fought each other., they would just separate and form their own Tiospaye.

It was also in 1929 that the White Buffalo Calf Pipe was brought here to Pine Ridge. The B.I.A. Agent permitted the people to gather around it, but forbid the opening of the bundle, as he was afraid. This order was enforced by the Indian Police.

In these days of the late 1920's through the 1930's, many sicknesses came to our people and many hundreds died. The people were confused a lot because there were so many new laws, no one knew for sure what was going on.

The beginning of the 1930's was also the time period when it became harder and harder to have ceremonies because there were more Indian Police to enforce the law, there were Tribal Courts to convict people, and a lot of the old people had died by then, the people who knew how to be free Oglala Lakota people. A lot of the families were without their children because their children had been sent away to boarding schools. Into this environment came the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, which passed on Pine Ridge by very few votes and very few voters.

By now, the old people remaining were dismayed and unhappy because the drinking of alcohol was being done by more and more people who conducted themselves in an intoxicated and shameful manner. By now, more of the people who had been sent away 1S to 18 years before. had returned from Carlisle and other places and many of them did not speak their Lakota language anymore, couldn't remember their ceremonies and did not know who their relatives where because they had been gone for so long, having le* at age 4, 5 or 6.

In the era of the Indian Reorganization Act's early years here, our people were also being swept over by Tuberculosis, and hundreds had been sent to TB Centers and never returned, and many hundreds died here.

With the establishment of the Indian Reorganization Act the U.S. federal government extended its policy and authority over our people through the B.I.A., who then extended their authority over our people through the I.R.A. government. While our people served on the I.R.A. government and made laws over us, the I.R.A. could only operate within the lines drawn by the federal government. So the federal government controls the I.R.A. by drawing those lines, and by only funding tribal projects that fit inside those lines.

In 1953 it became legal for Indians to purchase liquor. In 1954 Congress passed the Relocation Act. Now the Bureau of Indian Affairs started signing people up to go away on Relocation. By now, people on the reservation had become accustomed to participating in policies of the B.I.A., because in the earlier days of the reservation, the Indian police would report to the Agent any Lakota who was not participating in B.I.A. policies and programs.

SO, gradually over the years, with the development of federal law, our people changed from looking to ourselves and our Tiospaye and traditional leaders for decision making, to that of the B.l.A. Agent, then to the I.R.A. government. We lost our freedom to make our own plans, settle our own disputes, and to teach character building, values, and ways of life to our children and grandchildren because our way of life had been made into a crime. So, over the years, our traditional peace makers were made into law enforcers. Instead of serving their nation as a peace maker they became concerned with adding up crime statistics.

There are now thousands of administrative laws that govern our lives. These laws are enforced by the l.R.A. government, Tribal Police and Tribal Courts. Indian Police were used to end gambling, end social and religions dances, enforce school attendance and end the influence of medicine men, holy men and Headmen. Courts of Indian Offenses convicted and sentenced people for participation in feasts, dances, religious practices, polygamy and were used to replace traditional forms of dispute settlement. B.I.A. Agents, then the I.R.A., took over decision making, planning, law enforcement, and with Christian Churches, reduced the influence of traditional leadership, medicine men and holy men. Our families had been splintered by the Allotment Act, the compulsory Education Act, boarding schools, and finally, by the Relocation Act.

The combined efforts of the B.I.A. and Organized Religion undermined traditional parenting and family relationships, using their laws to dismantle the Tiospaye way. Such conditions bring us to today's world of living in a colonized society. The structures and systems we live in are all within the lines drawn by the federal government.

In the face of our history, with the conditions that are now upon us, as a people we need to ask ourselves if our capacity to govern ourselves has collapsed. Do we have the capacity to draw upon and live according to traditional structures? Are we able to pull together and work collectively to form a non-military political response to I.R.A. government? Can we pull together in an organized political action to address the collapse of economic and social order. What are our choices of action? Can we conceptualize our personal, individual -as well as collective- transformation to create a new world that is descended from our ancestors and built on spiritual power What means can we use to pursue our collective dreams? We are in a pivotal time? I don't think it would be wise for us to attempt a large scale transformation in a compressed period of time, it took us many generations to reach this point. It would behoove us to proceed with great care. At the present time we are a disunited people. To begin the creation of a transformed world for ourselves, we need to examine the current structure and systems, and ask ourselves who benefits from maintaining the status quo? Who receives gratification from the status quo? From leaving things the way they are? Who will be the greatest defenders of the status quo? We need to look at building social cohesion, making a way for all to live in a free environment.

The B.l.A. control over our lives evolved to include the I.R.A. government. As the l.R.A. current system's power to control grows, so grows the willingness and eagerness of it's participants to maintain the structure which gives them the power to control. They seek to maintain the status quo and so they seek to protect the status quo.

Many people feel the current system is not only unresponsive to our needs, but is also corrupt, self-serving, and that it determines on it's sole authority the distribution of our assets.

To change the status quo, a commitment to action is needed, a commitment to change is needed. We need to work together, reservation wide, to create the conditions for a new era. While pockets of resistance and cultural preservation exist, as a people we have experienced the loss of land, authority to self-govern; conflict resolution; traditional systems; peace making; law enforcement; personal growth; spiritually-based processes; cultural learning; the loss of language, values; economic self-sufficiency; and most important of all, the loss of spirituality.

We need to recognize that the extended family way, the Tiospaye Way, is a central and essential way of life. We need to conduct family building, culture building; we need to use our laps, hold our grandchildren on our laps and teach them our Lakota language and identity; and teach them what the federal government did to us through the B.I.A. and I.R.A. We need to look at our ancestors and start learning to return to that way of life as a people.

To fail to take advantage of the conditions we are in would be disastrous for us. Perhaps we would be failing to walk through a doorway that has been opened for us. Who knows when such another opportunity may be upon us, such a time may not come again in our generation. Hecetuye.

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6- Identity, Class, and New Deal Politics on Pine Ridge
Chapter 6 from The Power of the Land. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, by Paul M. Robertson, 1995.

Assessing the significance of conflicts over IRA Government

The Oglala Sioux Tribal government (OST), a representative form of government organized under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 (IRA), has been a focal point for conflict for over 60 years. Before the vote on the question of whether to accept the IRA in 1935, Oglalas split into two camps. "Old Dealers" supported their own Oglala Council, and campaigned against the measure. "New Dealers" advocated for a break with the past, and identified themselves with the progress the IRA seemed to hold out (it was the era of the "New Deal" and the IRA was the "New Deal for Indians"). The vote was close: 1,169 for to 1,095 against. Many full bloods opposed to the measure are said to have stayed away from the polls in protest. To this day on Pine Ridge Reservation, many Oglalas, especially Oglala full bloods, characterize the IRA as an imposition of a white man's form of government.
But the IRA government, the Oglala Sioux Tribe, is a force to be reckoned with, and through contracts with the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), and other government agencies, it administers over 50 tribal programs, from education, to environment, to health and public safety, to a huge, multi-million dollar water development project. In an environment where the unemployment rate hovers around 80%, control over the jobs those programs represent translates into substantial political clout. The OST also administers the allocation of Indian preference grazing permits, giving it substantial control over the most significant natural resource on the reservation, about 1.6 million acres of grazing land, land about equally divided between tribal land, (owned by the tribe as a corporate entity), and individually owned allotted land.
Conflicts over IRA governments, which were adopted by over 200 different tribes, are frequent on many reservations. Conflicts over the legitimacy of those governments have plagued the Hopi, the Sicangu Sioux of Rosebud Reservation, the Flathead and the Blackfoot, the Sac and Fox, the Pueblo of Santa Clara, the Oglala, and many other groups. But perhaps such conflicts should come as no surprise. What governments, after all, are not "focal points for conflict?"
What might be more surprising than conflict over the IRA might be its relative absence. In fact, some groups appear to have avoided the conflicts that mark the experience of the Oglala and other groups. On some reservations, where representative IRA governments and the notion of allegiance to a central government are certainly as alien as they are to the Oglala, they have somehow been integrated with traditional notions about leadership, and with traditional organizational principles. Loretta Fowler's ethnohistorical account of Arapahoe politics, for example, shows that the Arapahoe were able to adapt the IRA to their traditional age-grade system, and they have avoided the conflicts and schisms characteristic of the experience on many other reservations. She reports that at Northern Cheyenne, where there is a mixed blood, full blood split, full bloods control the IRA government, and have applied traditional Cheyenne notions about the "good man" to the role of elected IRA leaders, perhaps helping to explain the relative lack of conflict over the IRA on that reservation. But why have some groups been more successful at integrating alien institutions than others?
One explanation advanced in explanation for conflicts over IRA governments rests on the disjunction between more traditional values, and those inherent in a representative form of government. Steven Feraca, for example, attributes Oglala full blood opposition to the IRA to traditionalism, and mixed blood support to greater acculturation. Raymond DeMallie, following Feraca, relies heavily on the opposition between "more acculturated mixed-bloods" and "traditionally oriented" full bloods for his explanation. But DeMallie also cites certain Oglala beliefs about government, leadership, and nationhood, beliefs that are at odds with the IRA as it evolved on Pine Ridge Reservation:

Oglala living in the various district communities, do not as a whole believe in a representative form of government. They do not identify with the tribe as a political group and would prefer to run their own affairs at the local level, under the direction of local leaders whose support comes from community faith in their abilities.
Nearly two decades after DeMallie's report, notions of local identity remain strong on Pine Ridge Reservation, and running for office, serving for monetary compensation for a fixed period of time, a short two years in the case of the OST Council, continue to be characterized by Oglalas as opposed to Lakota notions of leadership. But what stands in the way of integrating those values into the IRA government, as Fowler suggests occurred at Northern Cheyenne? The effectiveness of the Oglala Council in mobilizing support from across the reservation for an Oglala agenda in the early days of the reservation shows that local loyalties did not produce the kind of conflict associated with the IRA government on Pine Ridge Reservation in those days.
In Organizing the Lakota, Thomas Biolsi presents a different kind of explanation for conflict over the IRA governments on Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations, one that rests on the question of the effectiveness of those IRA governments to govern. He argues that resistance to the IRA on Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations stemmed from the ineffectiveness of the IRA governments themselves:

Because the OIA actively disempowered tribal governments and prevented them from controlling the critical resources in the artificial reservation economies or from truly representing the people or guaranteeing civil liberties with appropriate courts, tribal governments appeared as oppressive and parasitic to their would-be constituents in ways that the OIA did not.

Is the perception of some Oglalas that the IRA government is oppressive, mistaken? Are Oglalas who are currently struggling for their rights in the land, for example, reacting to "appearances," or to the inequitable power relations they experience?
There are other scholars who credit the IRA, and the governments organized under it, with much greater efficacy than Biolsi does. Fred Eggan claimed that because of the IRA " Indians are in a much better position in almost all respects." Wilcomb Washburn agreed, and went so far to assert that IRA governments had become " autonomous, functioning political organisms, capable of maintaining themselves against the power of their white neighbors and against the power of the states and the federal government." Karl Schlesier claimed the exact opposite, writing that IRA tribal governments " are maintained only through the BIA bureaucracy and Indian lackeys operating against their own people," and that "The Oglala are a case in point."

Recent losses of jurisdiction over tribal lands to states, highly exploitative energy development schemes, and dumping of toxic wastes on reservations would seem to cast doubt on glowing assessments like those made by Eggan and Washburn. Reflecting on the OST's recent loss of jurisdiction over Washabaugh County, its willingness to give up the right of jurisdiction over non-member Indians to the state of South Dakota in matters related to the new Prairie Winds Casino, its inability to effectively address the continuing, outrageously high unemployment rate of 80%, and its failure to move ahead on the Black Hills Claim issue during the past few years, might give pause to those who might otherwise give apply such a rosy assessment of the IRA government on Pine Ridge Reservation.
Studies by Stephen Cornell and Joseph Kalt suggest that some IRA governments are much more effective than others The White Mountain Apache, the Flathead, and other tribes, have been successful in securing economic well-being and in preserving cultural integrity. They have achieved that success through the vehicles of both representative governments, and more traditional forms of governance. That success is the complex outcome of many factors, the authors argue, but the signal factor seems to be the fact that " they have aggressively made the tribe itself the effective decision-maker in reservation affairs." If the sanguine generalizations of Eggan and Washburn seem unwarranted, so does the bleak view of Schlesier. But why are some tribes better able to assert their sovereignty than others? Why have they been able to assert their sovereignty instead of being disempowered by the BIA, as Biolsi argues is the case for the Oglala Sioux Tribe?
In this chapter I want to continue the exploration of the struggle over the land base begun in previous chapters, to connect that struggle to the OST government on Pine Ridge Reservation, and its precursor, the 21 Council. The discussion spans the years of reservation history, but focuses particularly on the period immediately prior to and following the adoption of the IRA, and on an ongoing contemporary struggle over the land base. Through that strategy, I want to be able to accomplish three things: First, to gain insight into the conflict over the IRA government on Pine Ridge Reservation, i.e., the OST; second, to be better able to address the various claims about the IRA made in the published accounts cited previously; and third, to be able to make a statement about the relationship of intra-ethnic difference between mixed blood and full blood Oglala to the emerging local power structure.

Just as I did in the introductory chapter, I want to point out that I come to this chapter with a point of view that has been influenced by my involvement in ongoing issues on Pine Ridge Reservation. In particular, the discussion of the Lakota Landowner's Association that runs through the second part of this chapter is not a dispassionate account. I was intimately involved, as was my wife Eileen Iron Cloud, and my father in law, Edward Iron Cloud Jr., in the Association's work. We attended meetings, organized meetings, talked about the issues over KILI Radio in Porcupine, and were otherwise involved on behalf of the Association. Many of the data presented were gathered in the course of my involvement with that group.

Changing market conditions and new OIA programs, 1920s-1930s
The large cattle outfits, that took over Pine Ridge Reservation lands with the help of the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) during World War I, lost big when the bottom fell out of the cattle market in 1920. Their subsequent departure left a relative vacuum on Pine Ridge Reservation lands. Some mixed bloods had been able to hold onto their herds during the period of the big leases, and in 1920 they owned the majority of 15,000 head of Hereford cattle on the reservation. But Oglala full bloods, whose herds were seriously depleted before the large cattle companies came in, and who had suffered the loss of most of their remaining stock during the heyday of the big leasers, owned only about 1,000 head in 1922.
Part of the slack left by the exodus of the big corporate backed operations cattle outfits was taken up by smaller white-owned outfits. Some of those smaller outfits were headquartered on the reservation, but most were apparently operated by absentee ranchers from reservation border towns in Nebraska and South Dakota. A number of such operations were already active on the reservation before the big outfits came in during World War I. Their owners hailed from the Nebraska towns of Gordon, Rushville, Cody, White Clay and Chadron, and from such South Dakota settlements as Buffalo Gap, Rapid City, Belvidere, Kadoka, Vetal, Interior, Scenic, and LaCreek.

In the changed economic climate, Pine Ridge Agency Superintendent Henry Tidwell worked to recruit outside cattlemen to the reservation. Meanwhile, Oglalas continued to petition for the removal of the outside cattle interests from the reservation. Much as they had after the large companies took over the land during the World War I era, they leveled charges that cattlemen refused to pay lease monies, violated contracts, trespassed their stock on Oglala lands, and destroyed their crops in the process. Just as in the past, their complaints went unheeded. When Oglala Council leader James Red Cloud complained to Assistant CIA E.B. Meritt during a 1925 hearing in Washington D.C., the latter did not even deign to respond.

The fact is that the OIA exercised only limited control over the leasing situation on Pine Ridge Reservation right up into the 1930s. In some cases Oglala allottees leased their lands directly to ranchers or farmers, bypassing the OIA entirely. In other cases outsiders and Oglala mixed bloods used allotted land and tribal land at will, without paying the allottees whose land they used, resulting in, according to a 1931 OIA report, an estimated loss in revenues to Oglala landowners of around $50,000 a year.
In many of the cases where individual Oglalas did enter into direct leases with ranchers, a patron-client system developed. Clients were for the most part full blood Oglala landowners, as most mixed blood Oglala had lost their holdings after they were fee patented, usually against their will (a practice known as "forced fee patenting"). Full blood Oglala landowners client to white ranchers realized in kind payments, especially beef, and sometimes monetary advances, in return for the use of their land. The depression era contributed to those arrangements as well, and in 1937 a report from the Pine Ridge Agency Lease Department noted that lessees were frequently unable to pay their leases, and that "Many have settled with trade in lieu of cash."
But the combined contribution of patron-client relations, lease monies Oglalas realized from their lands, and the negligible amount of rations issued by the OIA, were far from adequate to meet Oglala needs. The early pattern of migrant labor in the potato fields of Nebraska, and for other seasonal work, intensified during the 1920s and 1930s. Oglala elders recall that whole communities were nearly abandoned when families trekked to the fields and lived in tents while they brought in the harvest. Landless mixed bloods and landed full bloods labored side by side. The depression era years were hard ones on the reservation, and Civilian Conservation Corps and Works Project Administration projects were important sources of income for mixed blood and full blood alike. Even before the onset of the Great Depression, in fact, times were very bad. In the winter of 1926, things were so bad that Oglalas were eating their horses, something that they were loath to do, because of the cultural value of respect for horses.
Some of the newly landless Oglala mixed bloods moved to the area around Pine Ridge Agency and settled down, adding to the nucleus of the colonial town, and helping make Pine Ridge Village what it is today, a largely mixed blood settlement that grew up around the Bureau of Indian Affairs. James Red Cloud complained about that development, and asked that the new settlers be moved out onto the land to farm. Pine Ridge Superintendent Jermark replied that they were landless, and noted that they had " built small houses, or acquired houses from others on the agency and school reserve within the town of Pine Ridge." Interestingly, both Red Cloud and Jermark characterized some of the mixed bloods as agitators, a kind of label typically applied to some mixed blood Oglala men, and white men married to Oglala women, by OIA officials since the reservation era began.
In the 1920s, and early 1930s, the extension work of the OIA focused on gardens, root cellars, and canning kitchens. Pine Ridge Superintendent Ernest Jermark instituted a five year plan for the years 1925-1929. Farm chapters, women's auxiliaries, and 4H clubs were created across the reservation. The "Industrial Program Publicity" that was generated in the farm chapters speaks volumes about the approach that the OIA used (Figures 3-7). Figure 3 shows a fanciful depiction of the five year plan itself, a stereotyped plains Indian man ascending the steps of progress, closely pursued by the grasping hand of pauperism and beckoned by the open palm of the beneficent Superintendent Jermark, who exhorted his charge to "Keep on coming. These steps are your only salvation." Besides the threat of pauperism, the stern figure of Uncle Sam points at the colonial ward, asking questions and posing threats: "Are you farming? Are you trying? I'm going to find out. Get Busy! (Figure 4." And for Oglalas who may have had an urge to graze cattle, as they had in the recent past, the OIA reminded them that the "Trail of Today" was a straight furrow made by a moldboard plow; the grazing economy that Oglalas once enjoyed was marked by an "X" formed by branding irons. "FoF" and "ID" were the brands of the Indian Department(Figure 5). Another drawing juxtaposes a smiling Oglala farm family busily working the land with a rabbit shedding tears outside a boarded up community dance hall. The rabbit dance, a lively dance performed by couples, was popular then and remains so today. The unwritten message is clear: "It is your culture that is keeping you down. Abandon it and follow the white mans ways (Figure 6)." But, in the ideology of the OIA, there was more than culture that kept people down. Part of the problem, according to the Industrial Program Publicity, was that Oglalas were ungrateful for the generosity of the U.S. government, and in spite of all the advantages that conferred on them, they complained. Their white contemporaries, with none of the advantages the government had bestowed on the Oglala, could have worked wonders if only they had been similarly favored (Figure 7).
Gardening was not something novel for Oglalas. They had, after all, been doing that in the early years on the reservation, and doing it well. Besides the unpredictable weather, periodic grasshopper infestations, and limited irrigation, the main impediment to that occupation was the depredations to their enterprise caused by the outside cattle that had, thanks to the OIA, taken over the reservation.
Depression era drought on the northern plains drove out many homesteading whites, including those who had come to Pine Ridge Reservation to break the dense prairie sod for their crops of wheat and flax. Off the reservation, cattlemen were feeling the pressure of the drought, and once again, as they had in the World War I era, they sought access to the grasslands on Pine Ridge Reservation for their stock. On May 14, 1934, Pine Ridge Agency Superintendent McGregor reported that the shortage of grass in the drought-stricken country west of the Missouri had fueled an " unprecedented influx of cattle and sheep men who, during the past 3 or 4 weeks, have simply swamped the Lease Department with applications for permits and farm pastures, ranging in size all the way of one or two sections up to a half township, and more." While the lease department was swamped with paperwork, the reservation grasslands were apparently overrun with trespassing cattle, analogous to the situation in the 1890s. On May 28, McGregor notified CIA John Collier, that the drought had led to an " influx of stock during the past few weeks." Lease applications did not slow during those depression era years, and lease applications continued to pour in. The Lease Department at the Agency reported that although there was no competition in bidding for leases, "Drouth and grasshoppers to the east and west of us has brought an influx of cattle men such as we have never known." The Lease Department reported that there were between 1,500 and 2,000 allotments under grazing permits, for which the paperwork had not been fully completed.
Some of the problems associated with outside leasing of Oglala land in the early 1930s were reminiscent of those occasioned by the big lease era in World War I. Pine Ridge Agency Superintendent James McGregor had to agree with an Oglala delegation that visited his office in October, 1933. McGregor's interpreter translated the remarks of the delegations' spokesperson:

In regard to the present grazing units, the Indians came to find that it is a detriment on their behalf the lessee is not obliged to fence his unit, but that his cattle are allowed to range outside of the unit, but when an Indian makes any complaint about it, he is a bad Indian, and is told to fence his allotment. And furthermore that the Indian is being threatened that the lessee has the authority to round up the Indian horses and auction the said horses at sale regardless to whether the Indian wants to or not, and this is a detriment. According to the regulations of the units, it is stated that, if we don't want to lease our land within the boundary of the unit that we are instructed to fence our allotments, but times are hard at present and we have no money whereby we could get barbed wire fence to fence around our allotments, but it seems that we have no representation in regards to the grazing units.
Grazing units, contiguous tracts encompassing the parcels of several or many landowners, and administered by the Division of Forestry in the 1930s, were a boon to the lessee, but often a scourge to the Oglala landowners. Requirements that landowners fence their land if they did not want their land permitted as part of a range unit, requirements that were, as the spokesman for the delegation to McGregor's office noted, unreasonable, often constituting de facto usurpation of control of land from the Oglala landowner, a problem that persists until this day on Pine Ridge Reservation.

In a less dramatic way, the grazing situation in the 1930s recapitulated the Oglala experience during the World War I era. Once again, landowner interests were undermined by massive trespassing, by illegal subleasing of land to outsiders, by destruction of crops by outside cattle, and by weak U.S. administration of grazing lands. Some Oglalas were forced to abandon their homes because range unit boundaries circumscribed their homesites. The influx of cattle and sheep simply put so much pressure on the areas along the creeks where the people lived, and gardened, that conditions were intolerable. In 1939, Regional Forester George Nyce gave this critical appraisal of the situation that developed on Pine Ridge Reservation in the early 1930s:

Due to the poorer condition of the outside range a great number of outside livestock were brought into the Pine Ridge Reservation under a trespass arrangement. In some cases the only evidence of a contract was the 'application to lease' forms which were used in preparing leases, and in a number of cases more cattle were brought onto the reservation than were paid for by the owner. This general condition resulted in a chaotic state of affairs and those connected with trying to administer grazing in 1934 resolved that a similar condition should never again be allowed to exist. One very serious mistake made in 1934 was the careless way in which range units were defined. In some cases the range areas advertised included Indian homes and many of the units should never have been put up for bid as by so doing and accepting bids on certain ranges the Indians within the units were forced to move out and seek another abode. we are still trying to settle trespass cases resulting in 1934 through the failure to properly advertise the range and draw up an approved grazing contract.

The overall picture of U.S. administration that emerges from Nyce's appraisal is one of incompetence and of disregard for the well-being of the Oglala landowner. The inefficient bureaucracy served the interests of non-Indians first, just as it had during the big lease era of World War I, and with predictable results. But a new wind was blowing in the Indian Service. Under the extraordinary stewardship of reform-minded CIA John Collier, attempts were made to turn the land situation around. The goal of Collier's efforts in land reform went directly to the heart of the control issue. This was his challenge to Department of Agriculture and OIA officials at the August, 1938 Land-use Conference at Glacier Park, Montana: "The Indian Service must manage in the allotted and unallotted areas to find some scheme of tenure or management that will enable the Indians to use their resources, or everything else is in vain." Like-minded officials on Pine Ridge Reservation shared Collier's vision.
In 1937, Pine Ridge Agency Superintendent W.O. Roberts embarked on an ambitious program that excluded from lease the homesites and surrounding lands of between 1,500 and 1,600 Oglala families, affecting around three-fourths of the 2,065 homes on the reservation. That meant, roughly, that the allotted parcels that those homes were situated on were exempted from lease. Extension agents held meetings with the landowners about the plan, and Roberts claimed that most Oglala were supportive. Of the 1,600 or so families involved, not more than 20 objected. Communities decided by popular vote whether they would be involved in the blue land plan. Roberts wrote that "The attempt was made to bring the Indians into groups and talk to them about this matter, putting the situation before them and allowing the democratic principle to work."
Oglalas may have been behind the blue lands plan, but white ranchers were diametrically opposed to it. Fred Hans of Gordon, Nebraska, a border town about 18 miles from the southern border of Pine Ridge Reservation, complained directly to the Secretary of the Interior. Roberts responded to Hans, quoting a revealing passage from Hans' own January 16, 1937 letter to Interior:

'The reason for this [i.e., withdrawing land from lease] is that they claim they desire to make a more self supporting Indian which all sounds sweet and possibly would be so had they any practical material to work with. I think the Department at Washington is aware of the fact that give an Indian 25 head of good white face cows and plenty of land for them to run on, dig him a good well, put a good pump on it, build him a nice new house, build him some nice new barns and fence it all nice, and give him some rations and a few clothes and some medicine and in six weeks he will be out of every thing and back to Uncle Sam for the same thing over again.'
Roberts characterized Hans' remarks as typical of the prevailing opinion of whites in the area. He pointed out that Tom Arnold, a prosperous white lessee on the Rosebud Reservation, (who, in 1917, secured trespass authority for a large operation on Pine Ridge Reservation), had made a recent presentation before the State Planning Board, wherein he developed " the thesis that a lease hold on the reservation constitutes a vested right [emphasis in original]." In his letter to the CIA, Roberts went on to report that his intimate discussions with leading ranchers, stockmen, and businessmen in the area showed him that " they view Indians as a worthless lot, undependable, unindustrious, thriftless. They feel that the way to remedy this condition is for the white man to use his land."
The results of that white use of reservation land had, Roberts argued, led to " tremendous over-grazing, plowing of lands that should not be plowed, domination of water ways and the like." He judged the situation of Oglalas on Pine Ridge Reservation " so desperate as to rate disaster proportions," and said that he regarded " as our most important immediate step the procedure of land use and range management based on the needs of Indians and not the convenience of white men.[emphasis in original]."

oberts defended the "blue land" plan (his map outlined them in blue) to the CIA, maintaining that " neither community or individual gardens, to speak of, would have been possible because of the use or occupation of the land by white owned stock." The people, he said, expressed a lively interest in the plan, a plan Roberts contended corresponded " to the needs and desires of Indians as well as a sound administrative range supervision."

The 21 Council and the first IRA government on Pine Ridge
Racist white ranchers were not alone in their opposition to the blue land plan. It was generally supported by the Oglala Sioux Tribal Council (OST), Roberts reported, but two influential mixed bloods on the Council, both of whom resided in Bennett County, found serious fault with the initiative. They were OST President Frank G. Wilson, and OST Vice-President, Harry Conroy. Both men charged that Roberts' office, by setting aside the blue lands from lease, had helped send the Charter down to defeat in the 1937 election. Conroy claimed that hundreds of white men had taken to the "Indian field spreading propaganda telling the Indians that the Indian Service, under the Reorganization Act, was exercising powers over their properties and denying them the due process rights. Under the circumstances it was not hard for the Indians to swallow this poison." Wilson claimed that " the unlettered tribesmen generally construed this plan [i.e., blue lands] as a part of the intended new deal Whether this arrangement was purposely designed to discourage the Indians from incorporating we have as yet no positive proof." The Charter went down to defeat by a substantial margin, receiving only 1,092 "yes" votes to 1,524 "no" votes.

It seems clear that Wilson and Conroy were upset about more than the defeat of the Charter. Both men were angry with OIA officials over what they claimed was bias, and favoritism shown to Oglala full bloods. Conroy claimed that James McGregor, the previous Superintendent, worked through " his old Indian lieutenants to help defeat the charter March 16th." Similarly, Wilson alleged that Roberts was working to defeat the charter by allying himself with "known reactionary factions" on the reservation, and that Roberts had recommended using federal funds to pay the " costs of transportations of Old Unofficial reactionary Chiefs Council delegation to Washington, D.C. in the near future." Wilson's elaboration on the previous point nicely illustrated his sense of difference from "unlettered tribesmen," and also points to concerns he had about interference with the operations of the OST government:

We also object to ration Indians take the liberty of representing non ration, progressive, intelligent members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe in matters of vital tribal importance. The New Council [i.e., the newly created IRA government, the OST, which was seated in January, 1936] has never and does not intend to surrender its right to speak and act in behalf of the Indian people of this reservation."
The real conflict was over who would control Oglala affairs, including the land base. Would it be the OST or the OIA? And if it was the OST, what did that mean? Who were the intelligent, progressive members of the tribe that Wilson believed should represent the rest? He left no doubt about that in a letter to Commissioner Collier:

The Indians living on the reservation consist of many types and classes, from the most primitive to those that are educated. The educated ones form the class that is now landless. They are the younger generation and for the most part, are making their own way. The Indians who have inherited large tracts of land are mostly old Indians who already have land of their own and they are antagonistic toward any progressive movement on the part of the educated, landless, class. The Indians who opposed the acceptance of the charter are peyote users, those who receive pensions and those who receive rations. They are afoot, do not own stock and are not earning their own living. The Indians who want the charter are those who are cultivating their own allotments, or rented land, stockraisers and those who are working at various trades to make a living and are doing so by their own efforts.
Streamlining and simplifying somewhat, it is fair to conclude that, in Wilson's view, the class that should lead was primarily constituted by landless mixed bloods, mixed blood stockraisers, and other Oglalas who Wilson judged industrious. Wilson's calculus was strikingly similar to that which colonial officials had employed for decades.

Wilson's problem with Roberts did involve the issue of control over Oglala affairs - would the OST or the OIA be in charge? - but the struggle was not really about Oglala sovereignty. For Wilson, and others who supported him, the IRA government, the OST, represented an opportunity to advance the interests and the agendas of a particular constituency, a largely mixed blood constituency, the class Wilson referred to as intelligent and progressive. Newly powerful elements in the OIA like Roberts, whose policies were aimed at helping the landed, impoverished majority, and who thereby sought to undo the very situation that Wilson and his supporters felt was an avenue they could profit from, were on a collision course with the developing local power structure on the reservation.

The ideological, and political-economic gulf between Wilson and Roberts, and between Wilson and his supporters, on the one hand, and Oglala landowners, on the other, was starkly demarcated by their different positions on land tenure practices in the Corn Creek Community in the northeast portion of Pine Ridge Reservation. At issue was the future expansion of the Corn Creek Cattle Association, a cooperative enterprise involving about 20, largely full blood families. The families had pooled their allotted lands, husbanded their own cattle, obtained a loan from the OIA's reimbursable fund (made possible by the Indian Reorganization Act), and were cooperatively raising a herd of 760 cattle. A range management plan, developed in concert with Association members and Roberts' staff, made provisions for expansion of the Association's range through the lease of a portion of the adjacent Allen Timber Reserve [unallotted trust land].

When Association members attended the OST Council meeting on November 1, 2, and 3, 1939, to make application for the use of the timber reserve land, President Frank G. Wilson told them their application could not be approved until their Association and its Constitution had been approved by the OST Council. What he did not tell them, or the Council, was that he had privately agreed with Emery Amiotte, a mixed blood Oglala rancher resident in the community of Long Valley, some 40 miles distant, that he could use the timber reserve lands in question; Amiotte had taken him up on it, even though he had previously been apprised of the Association's plans by the Pine Ridge Agency's Extension Agent and Range Supervisor. Amiotte, like many of the other cattlemen on the reservation, was used to having his way. In 1935, several years before the Corn Creek dispute, he was running his stock on allotted land without permission of the landowners. When Agency personnel approached him on the matter, he argued that he could use the land free of charge, maintaining he did not need a lease.

Roberts continued with the range management plan for Corn Creek. But when a Civilian Conservation Core crew started fencing off the timber reserve area for the Association, Wilson himself told the crew's foreman to stop. Roberts advised the CCC foreman to continue the work. Wilson wrote to U.S. Representative Francis Case, saying he wanted Extension Department head Russell Coulter, who had been working with the Corn Creek Association, removed. Wilson's letter to Case addresses the control issue: "We have enough tribal lands being used by the government now. We want them to pay or release what they are using."
Wilson, of course, said nothing in his letter to Case about Amiotte. Neither did he acknowledge that his plan would give control over the contested reserve area to Amiotte, instead of to the 20 full blood families of the Corn Creek Association. Instead, he invoked the sovereignty issue. But sovereignty for who and for what?

Another dispute, also involving timber reserve land and tribal land, provides a clue. On October 1, 1938, Peter Dillon, a mixed blood member of the OST Council, and 23 other mixed bloods and full bloods, submitted a petition directly to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, in which they protested the permitting of a range unit to the mixed blood rancher, Joseph Livermont, Jr. Petitioners stated that they owned allotted land adjacent the range unit, and that permitting the unit to Livermont would deny them their customary access to that land. They characterized the decision as made by a "Dictatorship," and charged that the award of the range unit to Livermont had been done solely by the Executive Committee of the OST, whereas they felt such decisions should be made by the whole council. Although the contract for the unit was signed on behalf of the Council, by Wilson, and OST Secretary Charles Little Hawk, there is good cause to believe that the petitioners were right, that the Executive Committee was acting alone in the matter, a contention supported by the ensuing discussion. 

Unlike the Corn Creek affair, the Peter Dillon case did not directly involve any Agency supported initiative; besides, Superintendent Roberts suggested, the petition really just reflected the interests of Dillon and two other mixed bloods. He supported the decision as being within the purview of the Council. Whatever the particulars of the case, though, Wilson was apparently willing to use the power of the OST, and the mechanism of the grazing unit system, to further the interests of one rancher over the interests of other Oglala mixed bloods, or full blood and mixed blood both.

Differences between Wilson's interests, and those of Oglala full bloods, were evident in relations between the Council and communities in the reservation districts. In a detailed, thoughtful report on the reasons for the defeat of the Charter, Charles Brooks, a mixed blood Oglala, and the Head Community Worker from Pine Ridge Agency, emphasized the important role of tiospaye on Pine Ridge Reservation. He argued, as had H. Scudder Mekeel, the former head of Collier's Applied Anthropology Staff, who had campaigned for the adoption of the IRA government, that the "tiyospaye or natural groups should be given special emphasis" in the tribal constitution, and that the failure to recognize those groups was central to the discontent being expressed with the IRA. Brooks' analysis was that part of the fallout was the defeat of the Charter. Wilson, Brooks reported, had "Time and again stated in the council that the community idea [natural groups or tiospaye] is based on communism." 

Thus did the OST's mixed blood President Frank G. Wilson characterize the hallmark of full blood Oglala kinship organization, the tiospaye, a feature that distinguished them from early mixed blood Oglala who settled on the reservation, and later mixed blood immigrants like Wilson himself, who had, as Roberts noted, become part of the Bennett County political structure.

The differences over tiospaye, or community, were cultural but they had political consequences. Article VI of the OST Constitution does make provision for the recognition of organized communities, but in 1937, the eight communities that asked for recognition received "scant attention." At stake was the question of the growth of central authority versus community control, of "representative democracy" along the lines of the U.S. model, or of a continuation of Oglala modes of organization that were rooted in community, in tiospaye, in kinship. Mixed blood control over the OST militated against those elements of Oglala society that were associated with Oglala full bloods. Whereas the older Oglala Omniciye, or Oglala Council, was controlled by full bloods, and represented the interests of tiospaye and community, the Oglala Sioux Tribe had fallen under the sway of Oglala mixed bloods, and naturally tended to represent their interests, which were not unlike those of the white ranchers, businessmen, and homesteaders they ultimately sought to replace.

Right from the first, there were complaints that the IRA government on Pine Ridge Reservation served the interests of mixed bloods over full bloods. Though full bloods far outnumbered mixed bloods in that first OST Council under President Frank G. Wilson, charges that he and the predominantly mixed blood Executive Committee controlled it were frequent. Wilson's heavy-handed style surely played a role as well. Roberts styled Wilson as "loud, officious and arbitrary," behavior that, he reported, added to the "uneasiness of the full blood people." 

Henry Standing Bear, a full blood member of that Council, and longtime Oglala Council supporter before that, wrote to Collier expressing his concerns about the Council's lack of parliamentary procedures, something that he felt was needed to check " the arbitrary actions of the President and also to [sic] the Executive Committee." Superintendent Roberts' assessment was that Wilson had " arbitrarily assumed authority that never was intended in the first place and in the appointment of his committees and in other ways he has seen fit to use only mixed blood people." Mixed bloods, Wilson argued, " should not be tied down to the level of the full bloods."

Wilson used his tactics and his style to push an agenda that was far different from that of many Oglala full bloods. His use of the presidency to administer the selective use of the range unit system on behalf of single, mixed blood individuals, against the interests of full bloods engaged in cooperative enterprises, as in the Corn Creek Cattle Association case, was aimed at advancing the interests of those whom he considered the "intelligent, progressive" class.

Differences expressed by Oglala mixed bloods and full bloods over the pre-IRA experiment with elective representative government on Pine Ridge Reservation, known as the 21 Council, or Council of 21, were similar to those expressed over the IRA government itself. On December 31, 1928, after Pine Ridge Agency Superintendent Jermark had ordered a meeting for reorganization of the Oglala Council, an election was held and three representatives from each of the seven districts were selected. The 21 Council, also referred to as the "Business Council," was soon the object of attack by supporters of the older Oglala Council.
Supporters of the old council charged the 21 Council did not represent all the people, that its delegates represented their own narrow interests and failed to consult the elders, made quick decisions, ignored treaty matters, was generally ineffective, did not return to the districts to inform the people about business conducted, and conducted itself in otherwise disrespectful ways, even making threats against Oglalas who criticized them. Supporters of the older Oglala Council organized a petition drive, which eventuated in two OIA sponsored meetings to consider the matter of the 21 Council; it was roundly defeated at each of the meetings, and the Oglala Council restored.

The 21 Council responded to its critics in a March 10, 1931 letter to the CIA, authored by the mixed blood Secretary of the organization, James La Pointe of Wakpamni District, and countersigned by 17 other delegates to the 21 Council. The letter characterized the detractors of the 21 Council as mostly "elderly, illiterate gentlemen" fighting to revive the Oglala Council. Those individuals were impugned as "Ignorant and illiterate, the only emotion they seemed to have developed was a sense of self-importance and cheap ostentation;" they were as out of date as a "1910 model automobile All that the old fellows like to do is feast and sleep." Of the earlier gatherings of the Oglala Council, the letter claimed, "They danced, feasted, slept and danced some more; their councils were replete with traditional ceremonies which called for plenty of eating and sleeping but no heavy brain action." Further, LaPointe contended, when the Oglala Council operated in the past "Their weren't any problems to speak of in those days with which the Indians were confronted. The government was feeding the Indians in those days and they didn't have a thing to worry about but to hitch up their ponies and drive to the government stations to get their provisions." He cited the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, which unilaterally made U.S Citizens of all Indians who had not been made citizen through forced fee patenting or other mechanism, as having given the people " equal advantages with the most despotic old chief." Responding to the criticism that the 21 Council did not work on treaty issues, La Pointe wrote that " these old Indians are less informed on these treaty matters than anyone" and that, besides, since the U.S. never intended on keeping the treaties anyway, " they aren't worth the paper they are printed on." In conclusion, the enlightened LaPointe allowed, "In due justice to some real nice old people on this reservation I'll admit that there are some real sensible, broad-minded and reliable old Indians who realize the importance and the necessity of education in tribal affairs." But lest he give them too much credence, he went on to say "But, as a whole, the old people would just as soon keep this reservation steeped in ignorance if they can have enough control to be called 'chiefs.'"

The extreme alienation from Oglala history, from Oglala culture, from the important principle of respect, and from the high regard Oglalas have for elders, that the 21 Council letter suggests, represents something more than reflexive racism. The phrases "internalization of oppression," and "self-hatred," come to mind. Another mixed blood member of the 21 Council, one of the countersigners of the longer piece written by the Secretary, sent his own letter to the CIA as well. Hermus Merrival ridiculed "illiterate old men's" oral knowledge about the treaties, claiming that the "Business Council" knew much more than they because they had a " full volume of Kappler's Indian Laws and Treaties ." Of the Oglala Council he had this to say:

They are illiterate, many of them depending on the government for rations. The meetings called by the old Oglala Tribual [sic] Council are usually conducted in a haphazard way and culminate in a dance and feast, with no beneficial results to the Tribe as a whole and to the disgust and embarrassment of the civilized members of the Tribe.
In contrast, the Business Council would " bring the Tribe a step closer to their goal - civilization and a final recognition from the government of the competence and good citizenship of the Tribe as a whole."

Struggle for control over the reservation land base continues
"This is our land. It belongs to us, not [to] the ranchers. We should stand firm. We don't need their lease money. This is our land."
Guy White Thunder, Oglala Lakota elder, 1995
Q. "Who is more important, the landowner or the rancher?" A. "The rancher is more important."
Lakota woman to OST Land Committee Member, 1992
Several "Lakota Landowner's Associations" (LLA) have come and gone on Pine Ridge Reservation since the 1960s. Members are landowners, identify as full blood, and speak the Lakota language. They identify as "Lakota landowners," and distinguish themselves from ieskas (lit., "interpreters," but used in this context as a referent for "mixed blood") who, some members say, "sold their birthright," a reference to the loss of land that mixed blood Oglala suffered after the U.S. forced them to take patents to their land in the first two decades of the century. Like the various Lakota Treaty Councils, they view the 1851 and 1868 Treaties as the foundation of their relationship with the federal government, and the legal basis for tribal sovereignty. Some members feel that the Oglala Sioux Tribe (OST), which is organized under the IRA (Indian Reorganization Act of 1934), is not a legitimate government, and does not represent their interests. Members are keenly aware of the losses of land they have experienced as a people in the pre-reservation era, and see a continuing pattern of disenfranchisement of Lakota landowners on the reservation. Each of the Lakota Landowner's Associations have worked preserve the reservation land base, and to secure some degree of control over it.

The most recent LLA formed in the community of Kyle in September, 1994. The group grew out of the frustrations several women experienced when they tried, unsuccessfully, to enlist the support of the BIA and the OST in addressing grievances they had about the use of their land by ranchers. One woman's repeated reports of trespassing cattle on her land had gone unheeded by the BIA's Land Operations Office, and by the OST Land Committee, a standing committee of the OST Council. Another was outraged that the rancher who has a permit to run cattle on the her land, has been mining and selling the gravel deposits from her land, without her consent. She made a formal complaint to the BIA, and followed it up, but nothing was done. A third woman conducted her own research into how her land was being used, and found that it was being overgrazed. Her research showed that the cattle were owned by off-reservation whites, and that the rancher running the cattle was a mixed blood tribal member. She calculated that the permittee was making tens of thousands of dollars in profit by illegally running the outside stock. She lodged complaints with the BIA, and with her elected representative to the OST Council - all to no avail. When the women discovered their shared problems, they enlisted the support of an Oglala elder who had recent experience fighting against strip mining and toxic dumping on Pine Ridge Reservation, and the newest Lakota Landowner's Association was organized.

The LLA's membership and support grew steadily as members spread the word in their communities, and over KILI, the community controlled radio station located in Porcupine District. Like the founders, most new members have stories that speak to their lack of control over, and access to, the land, both their own heirship lands and tribal lands. And like the founders, most have experienced frustration when they turned to the system for answers.

One issue that has caused a great deal of concern to LLA members is a recent spate of horse impoundments by the BIA. Oglalas who live out on their land and have a few head of horses have literally awakened one morning to find their horses gone, impounded by the BIA for trespassing. Federal regulations permitting such impounding exist, but they have never been enforced, and have not been a cause for concern in the past. One case, in January 1995, involved nine horses that were running on a range unit permitted to a white rancher. Their owner came home one day and found a notification from the BIA Superintendent, Delbert Brewer, who is an OST member, that his horses had been impounded. He was shocked. He thought he had an understanding with the rancher. When he checked the Code of Federal Regulations governing grazing, he found that understanding or not, if ownership is known, prior notification of intent to impound is required, a provision protecting the owner's interests. The Superintendent simply disregarded the federal regulations.
Attorneys familiar with the impoundment issue believe that the BIA is culpable, because it has not given individual owners prior notification. But in the one instance where the owner of impounded horses appealed the BIA action, he lost at the Pine Ridge Agency, and at the BIA's Aberdeen Area Office. His, and other recent appeals made to contest other BIA actions regarding land, usually stop at the Area Office because people making the appeals lack the finances necessary to take their appeals to the Department of the Interior.
Those who have been victimized by the horse impoundments call it theft; they see a pattern at work. They believe that they are being harassed because they have dared to venture out onto their land to live. Ranchers on Pine Ridge Reservation have had the land base pretty much to themselves over the past quarter of a century. In some cases, where there were once entire communities living on the land, there may be only a few homes today.

No Water Community in White Clay District, for example, is completely depopulated. But people still identify themselves as members of No Water Community, even though no one lives within the boundaries of No Water today. They are descendants of No Water's band (tiospaye), which settled in the area now known as the community, after the agency was established in Pine Ridge. White Clay District continues to recognize No Water as one of its legitimate sub-units (There are several communities within each District.) Members of No Water Community live in the HUD housing, or in other communities, but some may go back there to live again. Former OST President Gerald One Feather (1970-1972) is working with the American Friends Service Committee, and with Treaty organizations from other reservations, to develop a vision for tiospaye to do just that. He says that "Tiospaye exist today partly as relationships [kinship] and and partly as ideas. To fully realize tiospaye the people have to move back to the land."

During the past few years, some Oglalas have begun to move back to the land. Some have come back from urban areas and others have been moving out of the over-crowded HUD housing projects that were built during the late 1960s and 1970s. In some cases they are beginning to form extended family and tiospaye settlements on the land, something that, they say, constitutes a serious threat to the ranchers who want the land to themselves.
Dreams of re-establishing ties with the land are strong; the tug of land owned, owned by ancestors, or lived on in the past, is compelling. Some dream of moving their extended families and their tiospaye back to the land. Some of the cabins elders were born in, or younger people grew up in, still stand. Sometimes there is a well, or a spring on the site; and often the family has pictures. And there are always the stories, stories of hardship, of self-sufficiency, of a time when people visited more often, and followed the Lakota ways more faithfully. But people who want to bring their dreams to fruition find that moving back to the land is often very difficult. When they begin to look for a homesite they find out just how difficult.

One LLA member in his fifties has wanted a home on his own land for years. He finally saved enough for a down-payment, and bought a modular house, intending to put it on the five acres he inherited. "It has been my dream to live on my own land with my children," he said. But his plans did not include the bureaucratic tangle he encountered when he tried to access his land. He went to the OST Land Committee first, and was directed to the OST Housing Authority. Housing sent him to BIA Land Operations. Land Operations sent him to the rancher who has a permit to the range unit his five acres are in. When the rancher refused to sign the waiver, he went to Plains Legal Aid in Pine Ridge Village; an attorney advised him that the "BIA has its protocols," and so he came to the LLA.
There are procedures to follow for securing homesites, but following those procedures does not guarantee results. Just "knowing the system" is not enough. Some who certainly know it have found it very difficult, and in some cases impossible, to get a homesite for themselves. One woman, who worked for years for the OST government, has a college degree, and, probably as important an asset as anything when you are sent from office to office, and are told to come again and again, a car, spent more than two years trying to secure a homesite. She was determined to succeed and kept at the task doggedly until she did. "I know the system and look how hard it was for me. Just think how hard it would be for someone else, who doesn't have my advantages." Another woman has been trying to get a suitable homesite for seven years. Since her story was printed in the Mila Yatapi News, (Knife Chief Community News), a newsletter published by Knife Chief Community in Porcupine District in February, 1995, she has learned that many share her frustrating experience.

If homesites can be difficult to acquire, finding housing can be tougher yet. The double scarcity sometimes creates painful dilemmas. There are around 1,500 persons on the waiting list for government housing on Pine Ridge Reservation, but less than 100 new units are available each year. Once a persons' name reaches the top of the eligibility list, which takes years, there is not much time to find a suitable homesite. Families end up settling for sites that are very close to the highway, and that they would never have selected except that they were turned away, again and again, by white and mixed blood ranchers who refused to sign waivers. They could opt to wait for the next year's housing allocations, but imagine passing up a chance to a house, knowing that the way things work, there is no guarantee that they would actually get the house, or a more suitable site for it. In 1993 one OST Council member took a resolution to the Council that would have made it easier to get a homesite, but it never made it out of committee.
There are signs that Indian and non-Indian cattlemen are nervous about the growing tendency of people to move back to the land. They complain that their cattle get out of pastures because people living on their range units leave gates open, that they are being hurt economically because land they are accustomed to use for grazing their cattle is being taken up for residential purposes. One mixed blood cattleman, who also has a number of relatives who are ranchers on the reservation, told me that he is absolutely opposed to making it easier to get homesites on the land. He put it this way: "The full bloods don't understand the ranchers. If they [i.e., the full bloods] go back out on the land to live, you don't know what kind of people you will get out there. They will shoot everything in sight, and the deer population will suffer." Earlier the same day he had an almost identical conversation with a full blood Oglala woman. He was apparently unaware that she just happened to be one of the people who lives out on her land, away from the main road, with her family. She was struck by the irony of the situation, and retorted that cattlemen are the ones with reputations for "shooting everything in sight, especially people's dogs, and the wild game." Besides, the desire to move back to the land is not something that full blood Oglala have a monopoly over.

The rights of Oglalas to select a site for their own homes on, in the expression of LLA members, their "treaty lands," has been contested on Pine Ridge Reservation for over one-hundred years. In 1885, after Agent McGillycuddy stopped issuing canvas so that the people could no longer use tipis, and would have no choice but to build log cabins, he had several hundred of the cabins torn down because he wanted the people to live in dispersed settlements, not in the tiospaye settlements he called villages.
The huge influx of outside cattle during the era of big leasing in World War I forced some people to leave their homes, because the environment around them had been so completely degraded that it had become economically useless. In the late teens and early 1920s, pursuant Cato Sells' racist 1917 Policy Declaration that forced a fee patent on those Indian persons possessed of one-half or more white blood, and who were otherwise deemed "competent," hundreds of mixed blood families were taxed off their lands, and had to move.
Again in World War II, other Oglalas, both mixed blood and full blood, were forced to move off their land. In 1942, the Department of Defense decided that a strip of land 40 miles long and 10 miles wide along the northern border of Pine Ridge Reservation would serve nicely as a bombing and aerial gunnery range. The U.S. government filed a Petition for Condemnation of the individually owned lands in that strip with federal court on September 8, 1942, and by October 24, 1942, the last of 125 Oglala families had been evacuated (some left several months prior to September). According to a report submitted to the United Nations by the Women of All Red Nations (WARN is an AIM affiliated organization of Indian women) in 1981, "The Indians were moved out of their homes almost overnight." Ever the guardian of Indian people's rights and well-being, the OIA "'warned'" Superintendent W.O. Roberts to keep payments to evacuees "'down to the lowest possible level.'" Two years later, Roberts reported that

'almost all of the 125 families so dispossessed and who were making their own living prior to the action of dispossession are now either living on the money which they got for their lands, or have exhausted it and now are on relief. Only about a dozen families have been satisfactorily re-established.'
During President Eisenhower's administration, commonly known among Indian people as the "Termination Era," because of the federal legislation that made possible the dissolution of the special relationship that exists between Indian tribes and the U.S. government, the BIA embarked on an ambitious relocation program. Operation Relocation, introduced in 1952, aimed to solve the "Indian problem" by moving Indian people off reservation, to urban areas, and into jobs. Dillon Myer, architect of the solution, apprenticed for the job at the helm of the War Relocation Authority in World War II, the " agency responsible for the removal, incarceration, and relocation of Japanese-Americans and Japanese aliens in the U.S." . Once Myer was sworn in Commissioner of Indian Affairs, he surrounded himself with cronies from the Relocation Authority, and must have moved quickly to develop his plan, because at the end of his first year " former Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes referred to him as '"a Hitler and Mussolini rolled into one.'"

Many families were relocated during the termination era; OST member Ted Means estimated that " nearly half the Indian population " was removed to urban areas by relocation. Many of the families who relocated from Pine Ridge Reservation were unemployed, but some of them had been living on their own land, grazing cattle and raising gardens, and would not have relocated, save that their livelihood was cut out from under them. Oglala families, both full blood and mixed blood, who were making a living through communal sharing arrangements, or through individual lease agreements, were approached by BIA officials who informed them that they were using too much land for the number of animals they had. People recall that BIA officials told them that the hay lands they had been using had been placed in a range unit, and that was that.

One Lakota elder recalled how the action affected eight related nuclear families, all of whom lived in cabins near a creek that bordered their allotted lands.

In 1955 we were forced, around '54 we had a fight of trying to get units. And this is where, again, a Bureau official sitting down and getting a ruler and a red ink pencil and drawing lines. 'This will be a unit and this will be.' So finally, we couldn't borrow any money, my father, my uncles, they went all over trying to get, borrow money to [get the unit]. So we had to sell out, October of '55. Boss farmer went out there, land operations. They rounded up all the cows and horses and they put spray paint on their back and they shaved the brand and semis came and they drove them up So I stayed drunk for about November and December. I went into service 1956. And that kind of, my dad got mad and burned down all the haystacks, all the corrals, sheds, hay racks.

The white rancher who took over the range unit that included the families' allotments still uses that land. The tiospaye, or group of related nuclear families, that used it in the 1950s has dispersed.

Some of those who were displaced from their land relocated to Cleveland, Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, and other urban areas. The pain of those relocations is keenly felt today. Just as in the case of the Aerial Gunnery Range, the displacements affected mixed blood and full blood alike. In cases where relocation was joined with forced removal from the land and livelihood, the memories, and feelings of anger and sorrow of those who have returned, and who cannot access their land, add to what Lakota elder, and former OST President Johnson Holy Rock calls "a long history of injustice that goes back to the Wounded Knee Massacre and beyond, and that must be considered when we talk about attaining justice."
Prying people off their land and sending them to cities, did of course benefit the ranchers. Oral accounts claim that the South Dakota Stock Grower's Association (SDSGA, formerly the Western South Dakota Stock Grower's Association) was behind the BIA move to put the land that was taken during the relocation era into range units, large tracts which people engaging in subsistence pursuits could not afford to rent.

Interestingly, one SDSGA director during that period was Porcupine resident and stockgrower, Mert Glover. His father, John Glover, erstwhile manager of the Newcastle Land and Livestock Company's 7L spread, the same that in December, 1917, was given legalized trespass authority over more than 400,000 acres of land belonging to Oglala allottees on Pine Ridge Reservation, stayed behind after the 7L pulled out in the 1920s. He ranched on the reservation until the 1970s, and judging from the fact that he eventually owned 10,000 acres of fee land in Porcupine District, he did fairly well.

The most obvious impact on Oglala residence patterns on Pine Ridge Reservation today are the "cluster housing" projects. In the late 1960s and 1970s, one or more such projects were built in every District. The reservation population was growing rapidly, and some families had already returned from relocation. The need was there, and federal dollars were plentiful. The low-rent HUD housing developments, with names like Sunrise, Sharps, Cherry Hill, East Ridge, and Upper Crazy Horse, were much needed, but also a source of controversy. One such project, with over 60 units, is "Evergreen," in Porcupine District. Families started moving into Evergreen in the summer of 1974.
Severt Young Bear Sr. recalled that the Porcupine District Council voted against cluster housing many times. Wounded Knee Legal Defense Offense Committee (WKLDOC) records corroborate Young Bear's account:

In the Porcupine District alone, the district council voted 13 times against the cluster housing and in favor of homes being built on an individual's land. The tribal gov't ignored all of these resolutions and went ahead and built cluster housing in the Porcupine District. Since they have been opened there has been constant trouble as there has been in all of the housing projects. The trouble reached a peak again on Christmas eve when several people were stabbed resulting in the death of one. The houses are cheaply built, there is no grass or trees, and people are not used to living so close together. This is just another example of how the wishes of the people in the districts are constantly ignored by the tribal government.
Young Bear said no one disputed that housing was needed; they just wanted some control over the planning. Why? Because, he said, people want to live in their own communities, with their own tiospaye, and on their own land.

Participants at a November 23, 1971, Porcupine District meeting resolved unanimously that they wanted individual houses, not housing clusters. Ike Iron Cloud, a full blood Lakota elder, summed it up: " if the Bureau and Tribe go along with it, the individual houses would be ideal, because, the stockgrowers and Bureau wants [sic] you to forget your land, because then they can use it, it would be better for us to build individual houses." Minutes of the meeting also record the following exchange between unnamed persons: "Will we get houses if we hold out for individual houses? Yes, if we stand together for what we want." Yet despite the consensus of the people, Porcupine District's OST Council representative voted with the OST Council for cluster housing; it is a source of small satisfaction for some that in successive runs for public office he has never received more than a handful of votes.
Porcupine District was not alone in its opposition to cluster housing. A reservation-wide survey of District residents carried out by Geraldine Janis, then director of the reservation Community Health Representative (CHR) program, showed that Oglalas "were over-whelmingly against " the concept. Ike Iron Cloud's contention that the stockgrowers and the BIA wanted the people off the land and into cluster housing so they could have the land to themselves was a general sentiment in the 1970s, and it is a standard explanation that Oglalas give for cluster housing today.

Lakota Landowner's Association members believe that cluster housing was really about moving them off the land, and out of their extended family and tiospaye settlements, so that white and mixed blood ranchers could have free access to the entire reservation land base. Members express concern that access to their individually owned lands, and to tribal lands, is being progressively curtailed. If the proposal made this year by two OST Council members, both mixed blood ranchers, to set aside tracts in each District to accommodate homesite needs, is passed it would be a mechanism for containment of those who want to move back to the land. Landowners feel that current regulations governing homesite selection are already too restrictive.
Under rules established by the OST in 1990, no homesites are authorized where there are "existing dams, dugouts, wells or running streams," if the land is permitted to ranchers (most grazing land on the reservation is in range units, and is permitted). The regulations in effect from 1980-1985 contained no such restriction. Moreover, the analyses of current LLA members, and my own, shows that from the 1970s to the 1990s, tribal grazing regulations increasingly favor white and mixed blood ranchers, at the expense of Lakota landowners. LLA members, conscious of the work of earlier Lakota Landowner's Associations, say that the trend reflects the relative quiescence of Lakota landowners during the past 15 years or more.
Except for a few exceptions, land issues have not been high profile campaign items in OST elections during the past few years, but they were during the 1973-74 OST presidential race. There were 180 degrees of difference between the mixed blood candidates, American Indian Movement (AIM) leader Russell Means, and incumbent Richard (Dick) Wilson. Means championed the notion of a treaty-based, traditional government over the IRA, the same basic notion that was articulated by supporters of the 1973 Occupation of Wounded Knee. The basic notion was to decentralize power to communities and Districts, to, as people say, "stand on the treaty," and to be on a nation to nation basis with the U.S. The BIA would have to go, and so would the ranchers who leased the land, because the land would be used to support the people as a whole and would not be rented out. One of Means' campaign promises was to help people move back to the land, out of the cluster housing. His strongest support came from Treaty Councils, influential Lakota full bloods and elders, Lakota landowners, and people that had fallen out of favor with the tribal government, and had suffered the loss of tribally controlled jobs, during Wilson's 1972-1974 administration.

Much like the first OST President, Frank G. Wilson, no relation, Dick Wilson was a cheerleader for the IRA government. Treaties, which figured so strongly in the nationalist platform of Means, and which he counterposed to the IRA government, were essentially a non-issue for Wilson, who maintained that " the treaties in their entirety are incorporated right into our Constitution, in that we're allowed to deal directly with the Federal, State or any other Government on behalf of Indian people." What that meant for landowners was business as usual. Wilson posed no challenge to the Bureau's policies, nor to the control over the land by the ranchers. In fact, Wilson claimed it was not feasible for the people to ranch and farm the land themselves, citing the fractionation of land through heirship, much the same argument other authorities have made in explanation for the alleged proclivity of Oglala people to lease their land to outsiders. Despite the wishes of the people in the Districts, Wilson's 1972-1974 administration pushed cluster housing hard. His stand for the status quo earned him strong support from Pine Ridge Village, from beneficiaries of the Wilson-controlled programs that came into the reservation during the Great Society era (by his own reckoning, the OST employee roster jumped from 14 to 752 during his first administration, and political appointments were the rule of the day), and from ranchers. Ranchers on the reservation, plus, some say, white ranchers who lived off reservation, were strong Wilson supporters.
Means took the primary election, but Wilson won re-election. Charges that the election was mishandled were ignored by the BIA, though an investigative team from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights substantiated "massive irregularities." The Commission noted that "The reasons why the BIA chose not to act on the allegations of massive irregularities are not yet clear." It would have been within the Bureau's purview, and in accord with its prior habits in tribal elections elsewhere to undertake an investigation, but the Bureau chose to proceed as though the election was valid. One of many problems, in an election where it was determined that one-third of the votes cast were improper, was that persons who were not tribal members were allowed to vote, including among those, according to WKLDOC, white ranchers.

Hate groups, including the John Birch Society, and the Posse Commitatis were said to have been actively working with ranchers on the reservation during Wilson's tenure as OST President. In 1975, a criminal investigator from Pine Ridge Village reported that an organization of white ranchers, known as the "Liberty Group" was operating out of the community of Batesland.

In probing the connections between Wilson and ranchers, it is worth noting that his uncle, on his father's side, had a very sizeable ranching operation on the west side of the reservation for many years. Frank D. Wilson (no relation to OST President Frank G. Wilson [1936-38]), a person of mixed blood, had been a thorn in the side of Superintendent W.O. Roberts in the 1940s. Roberts held that he was undermining the Red Shirt Table Cooperative. That model program was organized by Roberts, and, for a time at least, provided the means for both mixed blood and full blood families to make a living from the land. Wilson's descendants continue to be involved in the cattle industry on Pine Ridge Reservation. One of them, in fact, is the current head of the SDSGA. LLA members are aware of connections like these, and they see in them, part of what they variously refer to as a "ring" that represents the real power on Pine Ridge Reservation.

It is no secret, and is a continuing source of angry frustration for LLA members, that outside cattle interests benefit by accessing reservation grass through reservation-based white and mixed blood ranchers who front for them. The practice lends itself to abuses like overgrazing, and endangering local herds that run the risk of exposure to infectious diseases like brucellosis, (which causes cows to abort their fetuses), from unregulated outside herds; but it does offer quick short-term profits for outside ranchers, and for those who are willing to act as fronts.

Fronting for outside cattle interests has a long history on Pine Ridge Reservation. Full blood Oglalas complained that mixed bloods and whites were fronting for outside cattle interests in the early 1900s, and even Pine Ridge Superintendent Henry Tidwell, who was otherwise more than solicitous to cattle interests during the big lease era, threatened cancellation of leases if the practice of taking in outside stock without OIA approval continued. In 1934 Superintendent James McGregor noted that some of the ranchers who secured leases that year had practically no stock of their own and planned on bringing in outside stock. In 1976, BIA Superintendent and tribal member Anthony Whirlwind Horse notified a mixed blood rancher that it had come to his attention that the latter was illegally running 243 head of cattle belonging to "a white man" on his range unit. There was, however, no suggestion that anything would be done about it. In fact, an investigation done that same year concluded that there was no mechanism in place to stop illegal subleasing. Lakota landowners contend that the practice continues today.

Other evidence for the continuing vitality of the practice comes from some of the ranchers themselves, who see in it a threat to their own interests. A 1995 complaint by one mixed blood rancher, alleging a long-standing practice of illegal sub-leasing by another mixed blood rancher, argues flatly that outside cattle should not be allowed in. The size of Indian-owned operations should be increased, she writes, and besides, her own herd stands at risk of exposure from unregulated, and consequently perhaps, unvaccinated animals from outside.

LLA members are against subleasing too, but for a somewhat different reason. They see it as a practice that allows a few ranchers, including whites and mixed bloods, to profit from the use of their land, both individual and tribal, at their expense. They are angry at being excluded from the land so that a few outsiders and a few insiders can profit. "The Indian permittee becomes a middleman in a real estate game. He parlays his lease into what amounts to ownership of land. He leases the land for a higher price than he paid the actual owner without the owner benefitting from the second transaction." Should they not enjoy the fruits of the land themselves? Consider too that some of them were replaced by white and mixed blood ranchers because they did not have the capital to rent the large units (around $12,000 per annum for a 100 head unit today, and that is a small unit), and because, they were told, they did not have enough animals. If you sub-lease, which is illegal though unregulated, you do not really need all that much capital. The whole argument breaks down.

LLA members point to their over-grazed land, to ranchers "who act as though the land belongs to them," land from which they, the "full blood Lakota landowners," have been progressively excluded, and they want to turn that situation around. What particularly irritates some Lakota landowners is the fact that those who act as though the land belongs to them, the largest class of ranchers on the reservation, are "the real ieskas." Those individuals are said to "look white," to have only "a drop" of Indian blood. They also refer to them as "cowboys," a reference to their big hats, cowboy boots, tight-fitting jeans, and pickups. Sometimes humorously, and sometimes not, they compare themselves to the ranchers using the phrase "Cowboys and Indians."
Since the 1970s, mixed blood ranchers have greatly expanded their use of the reservation land base vis-a-vis white ranchers. In fiscal year 1994, only 67 of the 364 range units permitted on Pine Ridge Reservation were to non-members, something that the OST Land and Allocation Committees take credit for, noting that it shows that they have accomplished their objective, which long-time Allocation Committee member Melvin Cummings says is "Indian land for Indian use."

But a 1974 study of land use and purchase patterns on Pine Ridge Reservation conducted on the watch of mixed blood tribal member, and Agency Superintendent, Al Trimble, found that such statements could be very misleading. Yes, it was true that 68% of the total allotted land was being used by Indians, but what did that really mean, the author asked. The central finding was that there was an inverse relationship between blood quantum and the amount of land used. Full blood operators were "singularly absent," and almost " 90% of all the Indian land [was] being utilized by operators who [were] less than 1/2 degree of Indian blood quantum!" Of all of the "Indian land in Indian use," only 12% was being used by those of 1/2 or more blood quantum, while 25% was being used by those of less than 1/8.

The same study showed a similarly skewed pattern in Indian land purchase. Though non-Indians were not purchasing land at the time, allotted land was being sold to tribal members. The OST policy of offering users first option to buy land within the grazing units they were permitted was linked to the fact that over 80% of all land sales were being made to individuals of less than 1/2 degree of Indian blood. Ranchers of more than 1/8, but less than 1/4, degree of Indian blood accounted for almost 43% of such sales. Of 164 land sales reviewed, only 19 were to non-ranchers. Most of those sales were of small tracts, probably for residential use, and most of the buyers had jobs. If the trends in land use and purchase were allowed to continue, the study concluded, " within a short span of time Oglala land [except tribal land] will be overwhelmingly controlled and owned by Indians who are less than 1/32 degree of Indian blood."

The skewed purchase pattern was linked to tribal policy that gave operators first option to buy, and was derivative of the land use situation. But why was the land use pattern so skewed? In explanation, the study pointed out that " those people of lesser degrees of Indian blood are least handicapped by their Indianness. They are more readily served by banks and lending institutions." Another significant group of operators were Indian women married to non-Indians; they controlled 13% of the grazing permits. The same logic applied to them. Their spouses were not hampered by the racism of the regional lending institutions that service the reservation economy.

Another very important reason for the ascendancy of mixed blood ranchers appears to be linked to the administration of the grazing unit system itself. C. Bryant Rogers' 1976 investigation of the award of grazing permits through Indian preference on Pine Ridge Reservation, revealed that the Pine Ridge Agency " at present makes absolutely no effort to ensure that applicants for grazing permits by allocation or Indian preference bidding comply [with eligibility criteria specified in the Grazing Ordinance]." The Ordinance clearly placed the responsibility on the Bureau, but the head of the Land Operations Office said he was leaving it up to the the OST Allocation Committee. But the Allocation Committee had " scrupulously avoided involvement in such determinations." It was therefore possible that non-Indians, and non-enrolled Indians of small blood degree, could have asked for, and received, preference allocations or bidding privileges.

Rogers' investigation also showed that the proof of ownership requirements, which included a provision that award of Indian preference was contingent on proof that the livestock to be grazed were owned by the economic head of family, were not being enforced by either the OST or the Bureau. It was a wide open opportunity for a non-Indian spouse who was in the cattle business, and who happened to be married to an Indian person, even if that person were not an enrolled member of the tribe, to use Indian preference. Rogers' report concludes that "The entire process of issuing and administering grazing permits followed by the Pine Ridge Agency and the Allocation Board is loose and unstructured."

Rogers' "loose and unstructured" finding sounds remarkably like the discussion in Chapter 2 about the "loose regulatory climate" that surrounded the reservation land base on the Pine Ridge Reservation in the early 1900s; it also seems an apt description of the grazing situation described in this chapter for the 1930s.
The situation has not gone entirely unchallenged. In 1980, pursuant a series of BIA failures to keep adequate land records and to enforce land lease collections, the OST demanded a management review of the Pine Ridge Agency BIA. An OST task force followed up, detailing the problems that BIA non-compliance was causing tribal government. But task force members' efforts to bring the BIA into line proved fruitless. In June of 1981, Dennis Bush, Chair of the OST Land and Natural Resource Agency wrote directly to Interior Secretary James Watt, noting that " the Tribal Council at one time requested a management review of the Bureau of Indian Affairs at this agency and the investigative team investigated the Tribe rather than the BIA." Bush requested the Secretary's intervention, but Watt,.famous in Indian Country for his line about Indian reservations being examples of failed socialism, never responded.

Pressuring the Bureau to improve its handling of the grazing situation has done little to improve the lot of most Oglalas who have an interest in their land base. In 1994, one young member of the LLA, who has a few head of cattle himself, and who has been trying to get the BIA and the OST Allocation Committee to subdivide the unit of a neighboring white rancher for several years, described his frustration with being repeatedly told that such subdivision is contrary to good range management practices, and then having to stand by while a mixed blood rancher, who has a sizeable herd already, was awarded part of the same unit he had been asking for. He and other LLA members explain that by reference to the pull the mixed blood rancher has, though, they say, they "can't prove anything." It is a familiar story. The mixed blood rancher has a relative on the OST Allocation Committee, and that relative has a close connection in the Bureau's Pine Ridge Office.
At an LLA meeting in January, 1995, another young Oglala member shared this general analysis:

The lessees [i.e., ranchers, permittees] are making a lot of money. The lease rate is cheap. They especially make a lot of money when they sub-lease, and lots are doing it. They are all tight, are all related. The ones running cattle in [District] are related and those in [District] are related and they are related to the ones in the Bureau. If they wanted to do something about it [the sub-leasing] they could, but they won't. They are all related. They give you the runaround on this reservation when you're Indian [i.e., full blood]. This is discrimination from your own people. When you try to get your uncle and auntie's land out you can't, even when you have the papers signed. They give you the runaround. It is hard.

Opportunities for Oglala full bloods who want to break into the ranching business are limited by their restricted access to capital, and by the institutional control over grazing that mixed bloods exercise. Mixed blood control relates directly back to their dominance on the OST Allocation Committee, which determines eligibility for awards of grazing privileges, and by their relations with the BIA office in Pine Ridge. The end result is that the regulatory climate is "looser" for some Oglalas than others.

LLA concerns with land use patterns were overshadowed in January by the alarming revelation that the BIA was proposing yet another initiative on fractionated heirship lands, one that if enacted would divest them of small fractionated parcels of heirship land that they owned; the initiative posed a direct threat to most of the Lakota landowners on Pine Ridge Reservation. Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs, Ada Deer, officially notified tribal leaders on October 20, 1994, but the word did not get out generally on Pine Ridge Reservation until January, when the Pine Ridge Agency sent out 3,000 notices to landowners, including a one-page form asking for input into the new proposal. The BIA proposal would legalize the forced expropriation of small parcels of land from Indian landowner's, ostensibly because the BIA lacks the technical capacity to keep up with the book keeping required to keep track of the hugely fractionated land bases of tribes that were allotted pursuant the Dawes Act.

But Lakota Landowner's Association members, and the people in general, want none of the BIA plan. One tribal member, Ivan Bettelyoun, points out that the computer technology for keeping track of very small interests is available, and cites the use that large corporations make of that technology to keep track of their shareholders as an example. Others say that a small parcel may be a headache to BIA officials but it means something to them. "I own eight acres of land, and under the BIA proposal that could be taken away. I disagree with that. Eight acres is a lot. One acre, two acres, it doesn't matter. You could put a house there and live on it," one obviously, and understandably, angry young woman said at an LLA meeting. The only tribal members that I have heard about who spoke publicly in favor of the proposal are a retired former BIA Superintendent, and one OST Council member. Otherwise, Oglalas seem nearly unanimously, and very vehemently, opposed to the proposal. The Lakota Landowner's Association, the Grey Eagles Society of Elders, the Black Hills Sioux Nation Treaty Council, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs held meetings in every District on the reservation in January and February, 1995, and the people registered their overwhelming disapproval at every meeting.

At one of those meetings, on January 23, 1995, at the Wounded Knee District CAP office, LLA member and Teton Sioux Nation Treaty Council spokesperson Tony Black Feather specifically linked the BIA's proposal with the interests of ranchers:

What the BIA is doing is a delaying tactic to usurp and take more land from the Indians. They created this problem of fractionated land and now the next step is [to] reduce individual landownership and give it to tribal governments because the cattle industry controls these lands.
Lakota elder, and long-time Treaty Council activist, Garfield Grass Rope, from the Lower Brule Tribe, told the group of about 50 persons that "The government already cut and dried this thing in taking away your land, our lands. They did not come to protect Indian interests or lands, they want fractionated land to go to the tribes and pay you for it." Like Black Feather, Grass Rope equates the interests of "tribes," qua institutions, and the BIA. The view that both entities work in concert, and against the interests of tribal members is prevalent in the discourse on Pine Ridge Reservation, especially in the discourse of Lakota full bloods.
Later on in the meeting, a Lakota elder from Porcupine District added ethnicity to the discussion:

All along I say that people power is our hope. The BIA workers only come because they want land, our land. Small lands will be made into tribe land. Since Columbus came we had hard time, we are shy, wisteca, and bashful. We listen to what the BIA want us to do. Each district need to support the few landowners remaining on the reservation. We have land but we are unable to use it for our own use. There are more half-breeds, they can do what they want with us. This government is over 50 years old, is it time to change it? IRA placed all this as it is today, one man destroyed it, Frank G. Wilson. We can say we don't want the IRA. Go to the radio and talk because people need to hear these things.

He said later that he made reference to Oglala mixed blood Frank G. Wilson, first President of the Oglala Sioux Tribe (1936-1938) as organized under the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) of 1934, in order to draw attention to Wilson's opening up of the tribal enrollment, thus making tribal membership possible for those with small degrees of Indian blood. In his view, the BIA is against the people, and the OST is controlled by "half-breeds," who "do what they want with us." The only place to look for help is from "people power," which is in the Districts, an arena where full bloods are more likely to express their will, as opposed to Pine Ridge Village, which is the home of OST headquarters, the BIA, and a large population that strongly supports the Pine Ridge Village agenda, which is frequently diametrically opposed to that of the full blood leadership in the Districts.

The belief that the OST government might not be an ally for landowners in the matter of the BIA's draft proposal on fractionated heirship was prevalent among many of the participants at the meetings on the draft proposal on fractionated heirship lands. The interests of the OST and the BIA, it is suggested by some LLA members, are linked in this matter of divesting people of their small holdings. The BIA's proposal, to take land away from individuals, and to turn it over to tribal governments, certainly has the ingredients to set tribal governments and their members against each other. When the original version of the Indian Land Consolidation Act was passed in 1983, the National Tribal Chairman's Association voted to support it. The OST President at the time went along with the NTCA, but repudiated the the Act later, and the OST Council went on to pass a resolution stating that they would not accept lands taken from individual tribal members. At any rate, Oglalas are not leaving the handling of this issue, that threatens their status as landowners, in the hands of their elected representatives.

In February, 1995, members of the Grey Eagles Society of elders, the Lakota Landowner's Association, and Treaty Councils met in Porcupine with a similar group of representatives from five other tribes, to discuss the BIA's initiative. They came to consensus against it, and passed a joint resolution asking that the February 15, 1995 deadline for comments be extended for one year, so that they would have time to study the heirship issue and make thoughtful recommendations. The meeting focused attention on the problem, and was probably what moved the OST Council, which, after all, knew about the proposal since the previous October, to act. OST President Wilbur Between Lodges was at the Porcupine meeting, and he agreed with the request for a one year extension. Soon after that, the OST passed a resolution asking for a four month extension of the comment period, rather than a full year. To ensure that their voice would be heard, Grey Eagles Society members travelled to Washington D.C. to lobby for the one year extension. OST Land Committee members also made the trip, presumably to lobby for the OST recommendation.

When OST Land Committee members returned from Washington, they announced that they had been successful, and that the Bureau had granted a six month extension on the comment period. Since their return, however, a Washington, D.C. based BIA worker, who was at the meetings, reports that while Grey Eagle Society members spoke out strongly against the BIA's proposal, some of the OST tribal officials there were actively supporting it. Besides noting the success of the Washington trip, David Pourier, mixed blood rancher from Porcupine District, and Chair of the OST Land Committee, reported at a February 22 meeting of the OST Council that while he was in Washington, he discovered that the BIA's draft proposal was coming from "small tribes who are telling the big tribes what to do."
That story, which sounds like a divide and conquer tale that the BIA could plausibly have put out, does not fit at all with what Mike Jackson, a staffer for Indian Affairs in Senator McCain's Office, who has been working on this issue for some years, claims. Jackson says that the BIA has been working on this proposal for several years, and that it is a cost saving measure. He says that 80% of the BIA's realty service budget is eaten up by the 17% of trust land that is in fractionated heirship. In 1994, the BIA persuaded the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to set up a $12 million dollar fund that they could use to buy the small parcels from individual landowners. If the BIA does not move on it during this legislative session, they could lose the OMB's promised support. Bureau officials presented their first draft to the congressional committees and to the OMB in the summer of 1994. The Bureau's drive to protect its own interests in the current climate of Republican led social contract focused budget slashing seems to be driving this latest initiative.
The current initiative from the BIA is the third in a series of similar measures. The first, the Indian Land Consolidation Act of 1983 (ILCA), was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987. The Court concluded that ILCA represented an unconstitutional taking of land in violation of fifth amendment rights.

 The second, actually an amended 1984 version of the 1983 Act, has been tied up in court battles. The current initiative is likely to end up in court too, if it becomes law.
Theresa Carmody, who works with the First Nations Financial Fund, says that influential national Indian organization is opposed to the Bureau's proposal. The problem, as always it seems, is that the bureaucrats have proceeded without adequate input from the people. Carmody reports that the Bureau formed a taskforce on fractionation three years ago; First Nations "pushed for landowner input, but they did not want any participation from the outside."

There have been some other positive developments on the national level The National Congress of American Indians asked for an extension on the comment period, the Intertribal Agriculture Council (IAC) has asked for an extension, and is working with its member tribes to develop a coordinated response. Nevertheless, LLA members are skeptical about getting serious support from the national level.
They are particularly skeptical of IAC involvement. The IAC lobbied for years on behalf of the "Indian Agricultural Resources Management Act of 1993," a piece of legislation that the OST Council, one of the member tribes of the IAC, endorsed in 1992, a fact LLA members just became aware of at one of their meetings in February, 1995. One member at that meeting had a copy of the Act, and members were not pleased to find that one passage authorizes the Secretary of the Interior authority to approve lease contracts for between 10 and 25 years, if " such lease or permit requires substantial investment in development of the lands and/or crops by the lessee and such longer tenure is determined by the Secretary to be in the best interest of the landowners " LLA members would like to decide what their own best interest is. One of the changes the LLA is recommending to the current OST Grazing Ordinance is that the contract period for grazing leases be reduced from five years to a period of one to three years, a provision they believe will give landowners more control. With a 10-25 year period, they say, they might as well not own the land at all. Through the efforts of tribal governments (probably, in the case of the OST at least, through a few individuals that represent the interests of ranchers), working through national organizations like the IAC, the interests of ranchers have been codified into the Indian Agricultural Bill, without any input from the landowners. Could the same thing be going on behind the scenes as far as the BIA's draft proposal on fractionated heirship?

When LLA members heard that Ada Deer planned to meet with tribes from the Aberdeen Area on the fractionated heirship proposal in a Rapid City hotel on October 28, they made plans to be there. BIA officials at the door told LLA members that they would not be admitted into the meeting room unless they could pay an admission of $75.00 each. They refused to pay - their pockets are not that deep anyway - and simply walked into the meeting. OST Land and Allocation Committee members were there, and were piggy-backing the session with a meeting to revise the OST Grazing Ordinance. The treatment the landowner's received is not unusual, and is reminiscent of earlier OIA treatment of Oglala landowners. Superintendent Tidwell's behavior comes to mind. BIA officials and OST committees frequently meet in hotels in Rapid City, a practice that enables them to collect per diem, mileage, and to enjoy other perks, and that enables them to meet without undue influence from their constituents.

In October 1994, a month after the Lakota Landowner's Association organized, the OST Land and Allocation Committees began work on revising the OST Grazing Ordinance, which.was due to expire on April 1, 1995. Among other things, the Ordinance stipulates grazing rates for tribal land, regulates activities like hay cutting, wood gathering, and hunting and fishing on range units, sets Indian Preference priorities for bidding on range units, establishes eligibility requirements for allocation of range units (tribal members with less than 300 head of cattle, or equivalent, are eligible for allocation of range units at the minimum established rate, i.e., without competitive bidding), and establishes the rules for removal of land from range units, including for homesite purposes. LLA members saw the revision of the Ordinance as an opportunity to address a number of concerns that had surfaced at their meetings.

Once in the meeting, they were able to mention several pertinent concerns, and to press Land and Allocation Committee members for a further opportunity to give input into the revision of the Grazing Ordinance. OST Councilman Gerald (Jump) Big Crow, from Pine Ridge, a member of the Allocation Committee, said the Ordinance should "go back to the Districts." Committee members agreed. Referring an issue "back to the Districts," is a standard way of getting the input of the people, through the District Council meetings in each of the reservation's nine Districts.
After several weeks passed without any indication that the issue would actually be referred back to the Districts, LLA members pressed their OST Council representatives for an opportunity to have their say. But the OST Land and Allocation Committees continued to work on Grazing Ordinance revisions, and there were no signs that they would welcome input from the Lakota Landowner's Association. By the end of November, when OST Tribal Attorney Marvin Amiotte forwarded a revised version of the Ordinance to the Land and Allocation Committees for their review, it seemed that the promise to take the Ordinance back to the Districts for the people's input was not going to be kept. Nor were the concerns expressed by LLA members at the Rapid City meeting reflected in Amiotte's draft. Except for a change making permittees responsible for fencing off cemeteries from their livestock, a responsibility the current Ordinance placed on relatives of the deceased, no concessions had been made to the landowners. At a December meeting, LLA members concluded that the document was a "cattleman's Ordinance, made by cattlemen, for cattlemen."

When LLA members realized that they were being shut out of the process, they sent a letter to all 16 OST Council members, noting that revising the Grazing Ordinance should not be the job of "one man" (a reference to Amiotte), and asked again for an opportunity to give their input. Soon after that, two OST Council representatives informed LLA members that when the letter was brought up at a meeting of the OST Land Committee, it was decided not to honor the request for input, because the request was not accompanied by a "constitution and by-laws."
The LLA did not have a constitution and by-laws, and the notion that they needed those in order to give input to their elected representatives was specious. Nevertheless, the stipulation was repeated several times by various OST Council representatives over a period of weeks. When LLA members contacted one of the tribal attorneys for his opinion about the alleged requirement for a constitution and by-laws, he adopted a pragmatic, rather than a legal approach: "If they asked for one those, then there must be a serious issue at stake." Pressed, he agreed that he had never heard that tribal members needed to produce a constitution and by-laws in order to give input on legislation, but he stopped short of giving an opinion.
Another attorney, doing pro bono work for the LLA, assured members that no such requirement existed. Although most LLA members were certain that they did not legally need a constitution and by-laws, some felt that they would never be given a voice if they did not have them. So the LLA did seriously consider drafting up a constitution and by-laws at several of its meetings, something that was never done. Some members said that by doing so they would play into the hands of those who were denying them input, that the documents would be used against them. Some argued that because theirs was a Lakota organization, it had no need for such documents. Generally, though, there was a sense of deepening frustration with the IRA government that would not listen to the people.

In January, one OST Council member, who has been supportive of his LLA constituents, attended a Landowner's meeting. Quizzed about the refusal of the Land Committee to meet with the Lakota Landowner's, he reiterated the story about the OST Land Committee's refusal to listen to the LLA unless they produced a constitution and by-laws. He disagreed with the requirement himself. When one member reminded him that he had been elected to represent the people, and that he needed to bring his influence to bear so that the people could be heard, he became very emotional, stood up, made a fist, and said in a loud voice:

It's a mafia. They stick together and it's like a mafia. I went to a Land Committee meeting to talk about this, [grazing ordinance] but they decided to have an Allocation Committee meeting instead, and they shut the door on me and kept me out. It's like a mafia. They run it like a mafia.

That Councilman, just like the LLA members, had been shut out. In light of the revelation from the Council member, two LLA members said it was not worth the work of trying to get input to the OST Council, that they would not do anything anyway. It would be better, they said, to work with the United Nations. They stuck with it, but the encounter certainly made group members wonder if their voices would ever be heard. Weeks later, two other OST Council members, who had also been supportive of the LLA, giving them information and encouragement, claimed that they had been purposefully excluded from participation in some of the meetings that the OST Land Committee, Allocation Committee, and BIA officials had held for the purpose of revising the Grazing Ordinance.

It was apparent that the Land Committee was not interested in hearing input from the Lakota Landowner's Association; so they decided to draft a grazing ordinance themselves, and to try to get public support for their version. They met weekly, sometimes several times a week, going over the current ordinance, discussing, recommending, and writing. They came from around the Pine Ridge Reservation. At one meeting in February, some members came from 70 miles away during a heavy snowstorm to participate at the White Clay District Community Action Program office. Once they had their document prepared, they held meetings in the various districts, explained the contents over KILI radio, sent copies to OST Council members and to the other elected officials, and again asked the Land Committee for a chance to discuss their version of the ordinance. By mid-February, public support was building. LLA members from Medicine Root District presented a resolution at their District Council asking for support for their ordinance. The vote was 30 for and none against. The District directed its two OST Council representatives to vote for the proposal when it came to the OST Council. OST Vice-President Mel Lone Hill agreed to put the Lakota Landowner's version of the grazing ordinance on the agenda for the OST Council meeting scheduled for February 22, 1995. The OST Land Committee and Allocation Committee version would be on the same agenda.

On February 21, 1995, on the eve of the Council meeting, LLA members made attempts to get a copy of the Grazing Ordinance that the OST Land Committee planned to present to the OST Council for adoption the following day, but those attempts failed. According to a Lakota Landowner's Association flyer,

Between 4:00 and 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, February 21, when we asked for a copy of the Grazing Ordinance that the Land Committee was scheduled to present to the Council on February 22, we were told that it was not yet available, that changes had been made during a meeting with the BIA earlier in the day, and that a clerk in the BIA Land Operations Office was typing the Grazing Ordinance. We were told that the Land Operations Office would deliver the Grazing Ordinance to the OST Land Office on the morning of February 22. The Grazing Ordinance that the Land Committee planned to present to the OST Council on February 22 was still not available as of 4:30 p.m., close of business, on February 21, 1995.

On the morning of February 22, LLA members and supporters attended the OST Council meeting at Wakpamni CAP Office. The OST Land Committee Chair produced the Grazing Ordinance that LLA members had been unable to access the previous day. Though the meeting was being broadcast over KILI Radio, the Chair and other Land Committee members took over one and one-half hours to read the draft ordinance over the radio, something that those familiar with OST Council procedures had not seen before. The tension in the Wakpamni CAP, where the meeting was being held, was high. Once the reading was done, there was a move to approve the Ordinance as read.
One LLA member asked the Council representative from her District to give her the floor. He did. She asked why the Council was not even considering the LLA version of the Ordinance. It was on the agenda after all. Other LLA members were also recognized. They warned the Councilmen that if they did not listen they could be recalled, that they would find themselves out of office. After a heated and lengthy discussion the Council decided, thirteen to two, that the OST Land Committee, OST Allocation Committee, BIA Superintendent, and BIA Land Operations Director needed to sit down and work out differences with the Lakota Landowner's Association. The Grazing Ordinance that was introduced to the Council by the Land Committee was tabled and a date set for negotiation.
If the LLA members had not been in attendance their version of the ordinance would not have even been considered. During the debate following the reading of the Land Committee's version, one Councilman turned to the OST Vice-President, noting

You said the landowner's [draft] was just on the agenda for informational purposes. Their ordinance has never even come to the Land Committee and so we can't consider it. In each District you have the same people. These groups of people are the landowners of each District but they are a small voice of all the 20,000 landowners throughout the reservation. This grazing ordinance, in my opinion, does not hurt or tie any landowners hands. We have tried to listen to the individuals who have come forward to us. They didn't really quite touch the surface of what the ordinance is about.I don't see myself where we have damaged, held up, stepped on, any landowner's rights. The tribe is trying to protect the landowners. This ordinance will do it.

Earlier, the same Councilman and a member of the Allocation Committee claimed that they had already taken into account all of the landowner recommendations.
The Allocation Committee member, one of the four mixed blood ranchers on the 7 person committee, said some things that illustrate the differences between ranchers and the LLA members very well.

There was also a little group of individuals out there who never come to the Council and they have a right too and they are landowners. I am a landowner. I own five sections of ground. Was I asked to join the Association? No. I could have had all the cowboys on this reservation [here] too, but all they want is a fair shot. When we set down to work on that ordinance there isn't one person on that committee that didn't have the landowner at heart. When you look at landowners, don't forget the land user. I know individuals who own as many as ten sections yet they keep it in trust. I know what it is to have nothing and I know that to get something you have to pay for it. [emphasis added]
Five sections is 3,200 acres, more land than any ten of the Lakota Landowner's Association members have. LLA membership is open to all comers, but ranchers, who stay away from Council meetings unless they are part of the tribal government like the Allocation Committee member who spoke, also stay away from mass meetings on treaties, and, with some exceptions, from other meetings and events that are an integral part of the life of the Lakota communities on Pine Ridge Reservation.
At the Council meeting, several Lakota Landowner's Association members said that "ieskas" and "ieska ranchers" (using ieska in the sense of "mixed bloods"), had more support from the Council than the Lakotas (meaning, in that context, "full bloods"). One Councilman, a full blood according to some LLA members and a mixed blood according to others, whose sympathies were with the ranchers, lectured them about the upcoming meeting, saying: " I hope we leave the mixed blood, full blood behind us. That is in the past. We all have relatives who are mixed bloods. We have to leave that home."

The promised meeting of OST and BIA officials was held at Oglala Lakota College on March 7, 1995. Lakota Landowner's Association members were hopeful that they would at last be heard and that there would be a meaningful encounter with their Council representatives and the BIA. They put a lot of work into preparations for the day, drafting a twelve point plan for the conduct of the negotiations, and selecting a co-chair and five negotiators, in accord with the plan . OST President Wilbur Between Lodges endorsed their plan several days before the meeting.
Among the first arrivals at the meeting were a group of about 25 of the "cowboys" that the Allocation Committee member mentioned at the OST Council meeting in Wakpamni on February 22. They sat down in the front row seats. Their attire set them off sharply from the LLA members and other Lakota landowners at the meeting. Most wore jeans, cowboy boots and large, black cowboy hats; they kept those hats on throughout the meeting.
LLA members and other Lakota landowners filtered into the meeting gradually and took seats in the rear, and along the sides of the round conference room. There were no cowboy hats or boots among them, and, unlike the cowboys, a few of the men wore their hair long, in pony tails.

There was an unmistakable atmosphere of tension in the room. LLA members did not know the ranchers, and vice versa. At one of the subsequent LLA meetings, members said they had never seen those ranchers before. The ranchers are generally not involved publicly with the Community, District, or OST politics. The tension of coming face to face with the ranchers whose interests they were challenging, was aggravated by a position paper the ranchers circulated. The ranchers rejected the LLA proposal, argued that it would hurt them economically, and suggested that LLA members knew nothing about ranching. But the most provocative thing to LLA members was that the ranchers had addressed their position paper to the Council from the "Oglala Lakota Ranchers." The ranchers are not "Lakota" in the eyes of LLA members.

The meeting began with OST Vice-President Mel Lone Hill acting as chair. KILI radio was broadcasting the meeting live, at the request of the LLA. OST Land Committee members, Allocation Committee members, and the BIA Superintendent and Land Operations Director were all present. From the first it was apparent that the Oglala Lakota Ranchers were going to be accorded a good deal of deference. Vice-President Lone Hill announced that the Oglala Lakota Ranchers had brought their version of an ordinance and that they had come to give their input. Over the objections of the LLA members, he proceeded to read their entire position paper over the airwaves. That took about fifteen minutes.

Immediately after that he told OST Land Committee members to decide if they wanted to go along with the twelve point negotiation format from the LLA, the same that OST President Wilbur Between Lodges had already approved. While the Land and Allocation Committee members left the room with several LLA members to discuss the matter, Lone Hill said that the cowboys should have a representative too. "I need a representative from the Lakota ranchers." The cowboys looked back and forth at each other for a moment, apparently unsure of who was going to speak for them, until BIA Superintendent Delbert Brewer stood up and spoke on their behalf.
When the OST officials and LLA members came back into the room, Allocation Committee member, and OST Councilman from Pine Ridge Village, Gerald "Jump" Big Crow, made an announcement that stunned the Lakota landowners: "We came to hear concerns of landowners and Lakota ranchers. We'll not discuss this paper at all [i.e. the 12 point plan for negotiation that OST President Wilbur Between Lodges had approved]. There is not gonna be no negotiation." Then Tom Conroy Jr., OST Councilman from Wakpamni District, announced that "Out of respect for the OST Land Committee. the two co-chairs for the meeting will be Chairman David Pourier and Ruth Brown [Allocation Committee member]. We will not discuss this paper at all."
Two microphones had been set up, though, and Eileen Iron Cloud, the co-chair selected by the LLA, responded to the unexpected turn of events: "We'd like to be treated with dignity and respect. This is not a Council meeting. I will be co-chair of this meeting." At that point Iron Cloud turned the mike over to LLA Secretary Edward Starr. Starr, alternating from Lakota to English, told the people that our relatives experienced oppression in the past. Oppression. We see it today again. Our children will be growing up and soon some will be coming. We're being denied today, here, as Lakota Landowners. We're being oppressed as going on for the past 100 years. You're ruining the land, unci maka [ grandmother earth]. This ordinance from the Tribe is their ordinance [i.e., ranchers]. This is a tribal ordinance and doesn't mention Lakota Landowners. We can see oppression that is taking place today.
LLA negotiator Myrna Young Bear explained that "Our greatest interest is the Lakota people. Our government is respect, bravery, generosity. This is based on human rights, human pleas. We want to be part of this grazing ordinance. This [i.e., OST draft grazing ordinance] represents only a select few."

Collins Clifford, Allocation Committee member and rancher, responded to Young Bear, saying "I try to hire guys that won't work for me because they get relief, commodities." One of the Oglala Lakota ranchers yelled out, loud enough to be heard over KILI, listeners later reported: "They can sure borrow your gas all the time. They borrow money but you can't get them to drive a stake [i.e., work]." LLA members and others I talked with after the meeting said that the Oglala Lakota rancher was referring to the full bloods, the Lakota landowners.
LLA Vice-President Guy White Thunder echoed the sentiments of many who spoke later on in the meeting:

This land is our land. The Land Committee and Allocation Committee, they have no right to our land. This is our land. This belongs to us. This is what we're talking about. The tribal council and Land Committee is not listening to us. We are not gonna stop here. We're gonna keep pushing. We're not gonna let it die.
One OST official did speak out strongly on behalf of the LLA during the meeting. Pete Richards, OST Councilman from Pass Creek District, and OST Land Committee member, encouraged the people saying "You have the power. It is good you did this. I see no problem with negotiation. I see no problem at all. I am happy with that." Richards underscored his point by speaking only in Lakota, not bothering to translate for the ranchers. There was much applause from LLA members and their supporters.

Tom Conroy Jr. had the last word before the break for lunch: "All we're doing is going around in circles. The landowners out there forget who pays the bills. They forget who pays those bills. The ranchers work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They are Indian."

During the afternoon session, LLA members were able to explain some of the provisions they wanted included in the grazing ordinance. There was no sense that any of the provisions would be seriously considered by the OST. Vice-President Lone Hill referred to the OST version of the Ordinance as the BIA version, which was probably very close to the mark. It came out during the meeting that BIA Land Operations Director Jim Glade was a voting member of the OST Allocation Committee, though his name had name never appeared on any of the official lists of OST personnel. One concession was held out to LLA members. OST Vice President Mel Lone Hill announced that the Land Committee would hold another meeting with the Lakota Landowner's Association. That meeting would be a formal meeting of the OST Land Committee for the purpose of taking input. The date for the meeting would be set the following day. Repeated calls to the tribal office since then, asking for a date, have been met with statements to the effect that a date would be set sometime soon. Meanwhile, LLA members have begun a petition to gather support for their ordinance, and have begun to get approval for it from the District governments.

One of the key provisions of the LLA version of the ordinance would replace the Allocation Committee with a "Grazing and Land Protection Committee" elected from each District. No permittees or OST Council members would be allowed to run. Another would give preference to those who own a few head of stock, making it possible for them to get back to the land. Another would protect sacred sites and the source of springs, by requiring permittees to fence them off from their cattle. Another would give Communities and Districts first priority for grazing units, an idea that some LLA members feel could enable the people to take over the entire land base eventually and use it for the communal grazing of buffalo, akin to the use of the land base that their ancestors had made in the early part of the century.

Conclusions: The IRA, Ethnic Difference, and Class relations
"There is room for everyone at the rendezvous of victory."
Aime Cesaire

"Liberation is much more than becoming a mirror image of the white man whom we've thrown out and just replacing him and using his authority."
Edward W. Said

The endurance of attitudes and behaviors exemplified by certain mixed blood elected representatives to the OST is striking. Even before the OST began on Pine Ridge Reservation, those attitudes were evidenced by members of the 21 Council. Similar attitudes and behaviors marked other mixed blood elected leaders, notably the first IRA President, Frank G.Wilson, who served in the 1930s, and former President Richard Wilson, who served in the 1970s. Raymond DeMallie's description of cultural differences between elected representatives, versus leaders who have earned the community's faith in their abilities, is not only apt, but is applicable over a lengthy span of time, a time of otherwise great change.
Differences in cultural style figured heavily in the discontent that Oglala full bloods expressed with the 21 Council, and with the IRA government. 

The evidence marshalled in this chapter shows that those differences included issues of access, of decision making style, of beliefs about the efficacy of certain kinds of knowledge, and the all-important issue that Lakotas today refer to as "being with the people." Concretely, full blood complaints about the mixed blood style referred to the fact that they met and made decisions in haste, that they did not inform the people about their work, that they did not heed the elders (recall that the 21 council had a set of "Kappler's Indian Laws and Treaties" and derided full blood oral tradition about the treaties), and, of Frank G. Wilson, that he was loud. On Pine Ridge Reservation in 1995, similar complaints about certain mixed blood OST Council members are common currency. As the story of the recent Lakota Landowner's Association struggle demonstrates, the IRA government continues to conduct itself in ways that warrant critiques like those that were leveled six decades ago.

The mere existence of enduring cultural and behavioral differences between mixed blood leaders and Lakota full bloods, though, is insufficient explanation for the similarly enduring conflict over the IRA government on Pine Ridge Reservation. Based on the evidence in chapter four, "The Oglala Omniciye and the Struggle for the Land," I would argue that the Oglala Council did effectively integrate Lakota values, and, equally important, it did a better job of representing the interests of the Lakota people as a whole than the IRA government that succeeded it.
The Oglala Omniciye (Oglala Council), was an indigenous Oglala institution, and integrated Oglala notions of leadership into a widely recognized, by full bloods at least, central coordinating body. The IRA government on Pine Ridge has failed to do that for two main reasons. First, it is under the inordinate control of certain mixed bloods, whose values and behaviors are not recognized as Lakota values and behaviors by the majority of full blood Oglalas. Second, and crucially, the IRA government serves the interests of a narrow constituency, one whose interests are often opposed to those of a large segment of the Oglala people. The interests of that segment are articulated by various organized groups of predominantly full blood membership, including the Treaty Councils, the Grey Eagles' Society, and the various Lakota Landowner's Associations.

In the New Deal IRA government, a small elite element discovered an instrument that could be wielded to their advantage, and they have used it with great success to move their own particularistic agendas. An outstanding example of that success is the transition that has occurred in the past 25 year from predominantly white control of grazing land on the reservation, to predominantly mixed blood control. That success has intensified the conflict between mixed blood cattle interests and full blood landowners, crystallizing and changing the nature of intra-ethnic differences between the two groups.

The first OST President, Frank.G. Wilson, and others who have followed his basic agenda, were part of an emerging elite. They challenged the colonizer for control over local affairs, but they were satisfied with control that would advance their own narrow interests. Their agendas included furthering the interests of a narrow constituency, primarily mixed bloods, whom they styled more progressive and intelligent than full bloods. In their behavior, values, and outright contempt for Oglala full bloods, they bore a close resemblance to some of the Indian Agents of an earlier day.

Those are the reasons why the administrations of mixed blood leaders like Frank G. Wilson in the 1930s, and Richard Wilson in the 1970s, were so strongly marked by conflict. They were running head on into Oglala traditions. Those Lakota traditions that exist in intimate connection with the land, as the tiospaye does for example, sometimes pose a direct threat to vested mixed blood interests. The current struggle of the Lakota Landowner's Association to gain greater access to the land exemplifies that dynamic.

Conflicts concerning the land, and involving the OST, often array mixed blood and full blood opponents against each other. Such conflicts may appear to be solely ethnic. But the key relationship is one between a few powerful mixed bloods who control the reservation land base, and others who have gained significant control over tribal programs and jobs, on the one hand, and the majority of the Oglala, both mixed bloods and full bloods alike, on the other. The vertical intra-ethnic split between mixed blood and full blood Oglala exists in dynamic tension with a horizontal split between a small, elite group of Oglala mixed bloods, and the majority of the Oglala people. The two splits are distinct, but interacting. Each represents a relationship that, to paraphrase Eric Wolf, possesses force, and imparts direction.
But the horizontal split has particular salience with regard to the OST and conflicts over it. The OST is the arena where certain mixed blood Council members can advance narrow agendas, which are regularly, though often ineffectively, opposed by Oglala full bloods who are systematically excluded from the decision making arena. Though many Oglala full bloods believe that those narrow agendas are being advanced by a small segment of mixed bloods, who they sometimes characterize as operating in a "ring centered in Pine Ridge Village," those agendas are nevertheless regularly conflated with the more general notion of mixed blood agendas. In that horizontal split lies the explanation for the continuing struggle over the legitimacy of the IRA government on Pine Ridge Reservation, and for the fact that conflict over the IRA government is often perceived simply in intra-ethnic terms.
Thomas Biolsi's contention, that the phenomenon of resistance to the IRA can be explained by the ineffectiveness of the IRA government to deliver for the people, misses the mark because it generalizes the notion of ineffectiveness to the tribe as a whole. Conflict arises over the IRA government on Pine Ridge Reservation precisely because it is effective for a particular constituency, and ineffective, or less effective, for others.

The horizontal split on Pine Ridge Reservation also provides a more plausible explanation for conflict over the OST than Karl Schlesier's contention that it is run by "Indian lackeys operating against their own people." Schlesier gives the BIA too much credit, and local elites too little. He also underestimates the potential for mutually beneficial alliances between certain OST Council members, and BIA officials, officials who are also, in some very important cases, Oglala Sioux Tribal members. BIA Superintendent Delbert Brewer's action at the March 7, 1995 meeting on the OST Grazing Ordinance speaks volumes about that subject.
Recall that the mixed blood ranchers were apparently caught off guard after OST Vice-President Mel Lone Hill, going out of his way to cater to them, asked them to pick someone to speak on their behalf. When they hesitated, Superintendent Brewer was ready; he stood up to represent their interests! Another event, also resonant with the trappings of unequal social arrangements, was that of the attempt to keep full blood members of the Lakota Landowner's Association out of the meeting with Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs, Ada Deer, in Rapid City. Landowner interests were at stake, but input into decision making was being reserved for the OST Allocation Committee, and for the OST Land Committee, both of which were under the effective control of mixed blood ranchers.

The situation suggested by such events is reminiscent of those that are often associated with differences in social class. Class differences are said to be important on several reservations. Louise Lamphere and Lorraine Ruffing tie the Navajo Nation's representative government to the growth of an elite class of Navajo whose interests may tie them more closely to outsiders intent on exploitation of Navajo resources than to their own people. That phenomenon parallels the Pine Ridge experience, where mixed blood politicians have supported mixed blood ranchers, whose ties to outside cattle interests have put them at odds with full blood landowners. Patricia Albers reports that even on the relatively tiny Devils Lake Sioux Reservation, anti-poverty programs have created " incipient forms of internal stratification [and] a moneyed tribal elite has emerged ." That situation is analogous to the one on Pine Ridge, where certain mixed blood tribal politicians, exemplified by former OST President Richard Wilson, have harnessed the economic power of jobs for political ends. Might there also be parallels with typical class structures in third world nations, where tiny ruling groups, and small middle classes, prosper at the expense of the vast majority?

Mixed-blood control of the OST suggests a rough analogy with some third world nations, in particular Latin American nations, where historical processes have produced class systems marked by lighter skinned ruling elites, and a disenfranchised majority. Some of those majorities, as in the case of Guatemala, are Indian, and have traditions of resistance to colonial authority, and to the more recent ruling elites, that go right back to the earliest contact with Europeans, another parallel with Pine Ridge Reservation. Full blood descendants of 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty signers, and others who pursue a nationalistic agenda, rather than a narrowly partisan one, represent an unbroken line of resistance to the assimilative U.S. agendas. True, those struggles are not necessarily connected to class, and can be read as struggles over the right to define cultural identity, and the future of the people. They are, in that sense, nationalistic struggles.

But to what extent are figures like Richard Wilson and Frank G. Wilson Lakota nationalists? I would argue that because, in their quest for "progress," they sought to service a narrow constituency, and because the values they espoused were inimical to those of the people who sought to carry Lakota traditions forward, they are akin to elites in some third world nations, elites whose primary loyalties lay outside of their polities. Compare their actions with, for example, the FLN nationalists in Algeria, whose leaders had carried on the legacy of more than a century of struggle against French colonialism, and who led Algerians to independence from France in 1962. Richard Wilson's second term as OST President was likely stolen from Russell Means; the election at least was rife with error according to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. In the face of strong evidence that the election was invalid, the BIA did nothing, even though it was within its power. Recently, evidence to support the long held contention of American Indian Movement members that the Federal Bureau of Investigation supplied the goon squads who supported Wilson with ammunition for use against the Lakota people has also surfaced.

The issue of Lakota nationalism, or Lakota sovereignty, is one of the core issues in the question of the OST government. As Stephen Cornell and Joseph Kalt found, aggressive assertion of sovereignty is requisite to advancing the well-being of the people, and to protecting cultural interests as well. But on Pine Ridge Reservation, the assertion of a nationalistic agenda is being made primarily by those Lakota full bloods, and some mixed blood supporters, (Russell Means was the famous example. He was one of many.), largely outside the domain of the OST government that is recognized by the United States. The narrow agendas of mixed bloods who are in effective control of the land, tribal employment, and the OST Council, is roughly comparable to that of a comprador group, a group whose primary allegiance is to itself and to outside interests, rather than to its own people.
All of that said, it is important to point out that my account of the IRA government on Pine Ridge Reservation is lacking because it does not do justice to the role of those elected leaders who have tried to carry on a nationalist agenda, in the sense of a liberating agenda. Some elected leaders have tried, and continue to try to carry out such a vision. Their story needs to be told for a more complete and accurate picture of the significance of the OST, and of its potential to advance the interests of the Oglala Lakota people.


History is Not For Sale: Marcos

The following letter from Subcomandante Marcos, of the EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation), was read at the National School of Anthropology and History (ENAH) in Mexico City during an inermission at the roundtable - "To Whom Does the Cultural Heritage Belong? It is included here to show the universality of the struggle of indigenous peoples to control their own history and cultural heritage. The struggle against the transfer of land to the state of South Dakota is in part a struggle against allowing the state to privatize the cultural sites and burials along the Missouri River.

June 7, 1999.

To: The General Council of Representatives -
National School of Anthropology and History
Mexico.

From: Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos
CCRI-CG of the EZLN.
Mexico.

Brothers and sisters:

We received your letter (undated), wherein you speak of the struggle which different sectors of the ENAH are conducting in defense of the national cultural and historical heritage.

We studied the materials which you were kind enough to send us, concerning the legislative proposal that is attempting to privatize the history of our country. History is not for sale, and we join with you in the struggle to defend it.

I am sending you a proposal, through a group of students, for some activities that could be realized in order to publicize the problem we are confronting, and in order to call more persons and sectors to the mobilization, who will, most certainly, be interested in defending history from the danger of those who want to privatize it. We also want to ask you to extend our greetings, solidarity and unity to the brothers and sisters, the manual, technical and academic workers of the ENAH, and to the workers' unions of the ENAH. Hopefully, we will all be able to meet one day (students, manual, administrative, technical, academic, research, restoration and zapatista workers), so that we may exchange experiences and aspirations. The invitation for you to come remains open, for whenever you may want to do so, just let us know ahead of time, so that we can build the hotel.

Meanwhile, be sure in the knowledge that you can count on us in this struggle. Not just because you have reason and dignity on your side, but also because, if it can be said of any, then the one you are heading is a struggle of all.

And thus it is official: the EZLN joins with the CGR-ENAH, in order to say to everyone that we will not allow the sale of our country's historical and cultural heritage.

Vale. Salud and may, this time, the grey of the dollar not triumph.

From the mountains of the Mexican southeast.

Subcomandante insurgente Marcos.