Ruling Pine Ridge: Oglala Lakota Politics from the IRA to Wounded Knee (review)

During the past half century, the reputation of the Oglala Lakota (of the Pine Ridge Sioux Indian Reservation in what is now called South Dakota) self-rule has come under severe criticism, a fact which Akim Reinhardt bears witness to as a non-Indigenous scholar whose work reflects the ongoing opinions of the intellectual/academic class who have claimed interest in the subject of Indian affairs.

Ruling Pine Ridge is introduced by Dr. Clara Sue Kidwell, who quotes Robert Thomas (a now-deceased Cherokee scholar) comparing Indian reservations to the colonized Native populations of the British Empire, that is, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) to British colonial administrations “determined to keep Indian Reservations subordinate to exploit their resources.”

That reference, unfortunately, is the last the reader will hear of any decent and comprehensive analysis of the intentions of the perpetrators of colonization as a concept from the imperial Western Nations since 1492. That is unfortunate, because the colonization of the tribes has kept them in poverty and chaos for most of the twentieth century.

Rather than take on colonization, then, as a crime against the Oglalas if not humanity in general, it seems to be Reinhardt’s intention to examine the brief period of 1968 to 1973 to show the “deep dissatisfaction” of the Oglalas with their government. Even this limited intention seems to get bogged down when he cannot differentiate gossip from fact. Many of the people he interviews cannot make this distinction either. Reinhardt seems to like to write about “bickering.” For instance, in April 2008, Reinhardt posted a commentary on an online forum, “Historians against the War,” in which he takes on the “botched effort in Iraq” by suggesting that the Republicans and Democrats can be referred to as the “Demublicans and Repocrats” because they are “two bickering sides of the same imperial coin.” Here, too, he offers a lot of opinion but no analysis.

Ruling Pine Ridge blames the victims of colonial rule, rather than colonization itself, or its origins. The claimed (and unconstitutional) power of the U.S. Congress called “plenary” is not found in the index and is hardly mentioned in the text, nor is there any critical analysis of the “doctrine of discovery” which is at the heart of this entire history. Part 1 of this text is said to be an analysis of the development of the tribal council system on Pine Ridge in 1930 and 1940. Part 2 is an examination of the evolution of the council culminating with the “Occupation of Wounded Knee.” The sectioning of historical perspective may be the major flaw of the book, because the Wounded Knee uprising of the 1970s is neither the cause of colonialism nor the appropriate object of blame.

In his effort to tell the conflict of how the “meddlesome” Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) had to move its authority into the Oglala Sioux Tribal Council (OSTC) during the IRA period, Reinhardt says “the honorable thing to do would have been to fix it, not to throw it out altogether” (114), thereby missing the point of understanding that the seat of colonial history was to be blamed—not its victims. Neither is it understood why tragic victims such as Richard Wilson are forced into positions where they take no prisoners all the while lambasting their fellow tribesmen involved in a long guerrilla war. In spite of what writers like Franz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth have said for decades, it is still the intention of the U.S. colonizers to “fix” the unconstitutional system which has brought about repression and poverty for decades and it is still the intention of scholars like Reinhardt to write dissertations that are largely misguided, often mistaken, and always irrelevant.

Citing endless examples of corruption and shortcomings, the writer holds Dick Wilson as the person most responsible for chaos in this drama, though he was chairman only from 1972 to...