The Sioux in South Dakota History (review)

These articles from the South Dakota State Historical Society on the Sioux, or Lakota, make a series of major contributions toward understanding some of the lesser known developments over the twentieth century. The first three articles by major scholars with deep experience in their respective areas reflect a “Struggle for the Land” as the theme for part one of the edited volume. Hoxie’s “From Prison to Homeland” on the Cheyenne River Reservation before World War I demonstrates the massive land transfer (also called “takings” or even “theft”) under allotment and cultural change or adaptation from Sioux control to government assimilation policies and an often mixed white and Indian land holding. Hoxie sees the accompanying institutional life, whether “admired or hated,” as forming tribal identity on a reservation level and therefore necessary to sociopolitical development. He questions why the 1889 agreement did “fail” to “absorb” the Lakota on Cheyenne River, without critically assessing how Lakota leaders were systematically resisting such coercive assimilation even while making selective and strategic adaptation.

Anderson’s discussion of the “Waldron-Black Tomahawk Controversy” revolving around the “Status of Mixed Bloods” makes a set of contributions toward understanding how tribal membership and land laws became connected to blood quantum and federal policy, including “white men with Sioux wives” and the “68-ers” who often enjoyed full acceptance in Lakota society. Importantly, he identifies that superintendents could remove mixed-bloods of “questionable moral character” but also that many of these families were accepted as having “the Indian woman” as head of the family, which of course could hold true in totally traditional pretreaty camp circles as well. Interestingly, Waldron’s descent from “Santee” Dakota mattered less than her attempts at assimilation and her avowed support for the 1889 and other “agreements” the government pursued.

Finally, Lawson’s detailed analysis of the “Fractionated Estate” and problems of “Indian Heirship” finishes the opening trilogy, accurately identifying that land moving out of trust was “almost always to non-Indians” (to this reviewer implying conspiratorial direction) and thus a primary source of “conflict and confrontation” for American Indians and reservations in general. The complicated laws arising partly from governmental edicts meant to protect some holdings often ignored “tribal customs” in an attempt to “eradicate communal land holdings” (51) which only created “bizarre and much less efficient form of common landownership” that further ignored the resource needs of future tribal members. It also fed into leasing patterns to non-Indians and some idleness for the Indian landowner, as well as continued alienation from Indian ownership. Interestingly, these policies also contributed to a taking away of given (“traditional”) names which amounts to a form of culturicide. Lawson carefully delineates how ongoing government policies and interpretations of law further complicated descendancy and heir land use, creating an unimaginable “mess” for land use, planning, or income production.

There is a strong tendency in some of the following articles to reaffirm dominant or hegemonic interpretations of “Sioux culture” even while describing individual topics with great precision. For instance, Mellis’s generally very accurate discussion of the social adaptation to the rodeo by many Lakota refers to cattle-raising as a distraction to the “restricted” traditional “activities like sun dances and scalp dances” (88) when these were in fact banned by law and heavily suppressed. Bromert goes a step further in calling these religious practices (104) the “so-called pagan cults of the Ghost Dance and the Sun Dance” when discussing the interesting adaptations to CCC workforces after the 1934 IRA during the Great Depression. An ironic prelude brings up Catholic schools fighting the Protestants for control over education on the reservations. This may be as good a framework of analysis, when the article states on “Standing Rock in 1940, 97 percent of the population was still dependent on some form of relief,” countered by my own grandmother stating that those (Indian) farmers and ranchers “never turned away people willing to work for food or necessities” that sustained a majority of the...