A President in Indian Country: Calvin Coolidge and Lakota Diplomacy in the Summer of 1927

On the morning of August 17, 1927, a caravan of sleek dark automobiles bumped along a dusty gravel road in South Dakota’s rural southwestern corner. One carried the famously stoic President Calvin Coolidge, who just fifteen days earlier had declared from his temporary office in Rapid City that “I do not choose to run for president in nineteen twenty-eight.” The move stunned the nation and surprised even his wife, Grace, who had accompanied Coolidge to the Black Hills along with their adult son, John. Questions about this decision’s bearing on national politics abounded.¹ But on that hot August day, few members of Coolidge’s entourage probably concerned themselves with the coming election or the microscopic fractures that had already begun to weaken the roaring economy that had so far blessed their administration. For the second time in as many weeks, Coolidge would make history as he crossed a series of significant cultural and political thresholds. When his motorcade arrived at its destination on the Pine Ridge Reservation, it would be the first time in the nation’s history that a sitting American president had made an official visit to Indian Country.²

The summer of 1927 straddled two eras in the histories of federal Indian policy and local struggles over Native politics in South Dakota. American Indians across the nation had good reason to wonder whether Coolidge would help improve their situation. In 1924 he had signed the Indian Citizenship Act, which naturalized Native peoples across the country. Two years later his secretary of the Interior, Hubert Work, commissioned a nationwide study of Native communities and Indian policy. Published in 1928, this “Meriam Report” provided a blueprint for what would later become the Indian New Deal. It abolished the destructive policy of allotment, which had ravaged Indian Country and cultures nationwide since the late nineteenth century. By breaking up reservations into small individually owned parcels and selling the remainder to non-Indians, allotment slowly dispossessed Native peoples of more than eighty million acres of their land. The Indian New Deal also made initial moves against the long-term project of assimilation, which aimed to stamp out American Indians’ cultural, economic, and political systems by empowering tribes to reclaim some of their rights to self-governance under a prescriptive, democratic model.³ Yet these changes rested far on the horizon in 1927. So what significance to the history of federal Indian policy do Calvin Coolidge and his historic visit to Pine Ridge hold?

The historian Kenneth R. Philp has shown that “it is a mistake to view the 1920s as simply a conservative interlude between two eras of reform—the Progressive movement and the New Deal.”⁴ Yet aside from studies of reformers like John Collier, the Meriam Report, or the activities of Indian activist organizations like the Society of American Indians, which was active from 1911 until 1923, historians have—until very recently—generally overlooked Native roles in the formation of 1920s Indian policy, which is also true for much of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era.⁵ In order to combat this problem, Boyd Cothran and C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa have called for a reinvigoration of scholarly interest in indigenous history during these periods.⁶

This essay evaluates Lakota interactions with Calvin Coolidge during his time in the Black Hills in 1927, which culminated in his visit to Pine Ridge. It reveals how several prominent Lakota capitalized on their presidential visits and launched a diplomatic strategy aimed at pushing Coolidge, who—despite his reputation for political conservatism and personal disengagement—had occasionally shown an unusual interest in Indian affairs. In short, Lakota leaders like Henry Standing Bear and Chauncey Yellow Robe capitalized on this presidential moment and the media frenzy that accompanied it. They made several public overtures to Coolidge, asking him to improve federal–tribal relations. But these Lakota also had specific and local objectives in mind: they had been trying, since the 1890s, to have the treaty-protected Black Hills, which...