Tag: lakota

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Tale of Two Paths

By John Andrews

You might know Gregory County because of its high school’s notorious mascot: the Gorillas. Or as the home of Elmer Karl, whose smiling face has appeared in advertisements for home appliances for over 50 years. But this county on the Missouri River — still affectionately described as part of Rosebud Country — is rich in history, culture and natural beauty.

Drivers from East River can cross into Gregory County via two main routes, and the area’s striking landscape is immediately evident no matter which is chosen. Highway 18 spans the Missouri River and Fort Randall Dam in the southern part of the county. The dam is named for historic Fort Randall, built in 1856 just below the present dam site. Fort Randall was an important link in a chain of forts protecting a trail along the Platte River and was the first in a line of forts stretching up the Missouri River. Soldiers stationed here were mostly charged with controlling the Lakota as homesteaders steadily trickled in from the East.

The remains of Fort Randall Chapel.

Fort Randall operated until 1892 but remnants still exist, include building foundations, a chalk rock chapel built in 1875 and the cemetery, where 138 soldiers, their wives and children were originally buried. Some bodies have been moved, but about 90 graves remain inside the white picket fence. A placard provides dates and causes of death — including disease, skirmishes with Indians and a lightning strike — for many who perished at Fort Randall.

Among the many soldiers stationed at Fort Randall included John Shaw Gregory, who worked as a trader for the Frost and Todd Trading Company. He was also a member of the territorial legislature in 1862, when Gregory County was created and named in his honor.

Just across the dam lies the Karl Mundt National Wildlife Refuge, home to one of the most important bald eagle roosts in the country. Between 100 and 300 bald eagles spend the winter there, fishing in the open waters of the Missouri River and roosting in the gnarled old cottonwoods. Birders are welcome, but the refuge itself is closed to visitors. A kiosk below the dam provides excellent eagle viewing.

Frank Day’s Bar caters to hunters in the fall.

All of Gregory County’s towns are situated along Highway 18. During the fall, that’s a well-traveled section of road because pheasant hunters descend upon the area. Local businesses like Louise’s CafÈ in Fairfax, or the TeePee CafÈ in Bonesteel offer hearty breakfasts and weekend specials to satisfy their hearty appetites. Guides, taxidermists and motel operators in those towns, plus Gregory, Herrick and Dallas are kept busy, as well.

Head north of Bonesteel to Whetstone Bay and search for prehistoric sea creatures on the banks of the Missouri River. Bonesteel’s Paul Neumiller has been hunting fossils since 1957. He’s discovered prehistoric lizards, elephants, mastodons and sea turtles that weighed two tons. He also found North America’s first hainosaurus — a giant sea lizard — in 2002.

Just beyond Bonesteel is the tiny community of St. Charles, where the Lakota culture remains alive and well. Gregory County was once part of the Great Sioux Reservation, which encompassed all of present-day West River South Dakota. The land was opened for settlement in 1904, but Lakota still live and work in the area. At Milk’s Camp, Marla Bull Bear leads a summer camp that was created a decade ago to combat a rash of youth suicides on the nearby Rosebud Reservation. Attendees learn about Lakota culture, music and traditions.

Attendees at Milk’s Camp learn hoop dancing under the guidance of Kevin Locke.

The next town along Highway 18 is Herrick. You can’t miss it because its bright red elevator has become a destination. Originally a working grain elevator, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places and has been renovated as a retreat center. The town also celebrates an annual Squeal Meal, which includes a pork barbecue, parade, dance and hog calling contest.

Burke is the county seat, but it’s known across South Dakota for the annual Stampede Rodeo. The event is really a community affair, with an expanded farmer’s market and a cattle drive down Main Street. The main event has all the hallmarks of a rodeo plus a singing contest and other special additions.

The largest town is Gregory, at just under 1,300 people. The citizenry loves Gorillas football games and a main street that features the flagship Karl’s store. For years the town held an Oscar Micheaux Festival to honor the African American filmmaker who originally homesteaded in Gregory County. On our most recent trip through Gregory, we stopped for a breakfast of eggs, homemade potatoes, toast and coffee at Sissy’s CafÈ and grabbed coffee at Dayspring Coffee Company.

The last town on 18 is Dallas, home to the iconic Frank Day’s Bar. When we visited 20 years ago, we found historic guns, hats, boots, saddles and photographs plastered to the walls inside the bar. Day, who has since passed away, was also a collector of stories, having recorded interviews with several old-timers. He told us the story of Tom McCrory, a rancher who had a hole in the palm of his hand”so big that you could see daylight through it,” Day said.”He claimed a bear had mauled him but another old-timer said the bear must have had a revolver.”

A cattle drive down Main Street of Burke precedes the summertime Stampede Rodeo.

If you enter Gregory County further north, you’ll cross the Missouri River on the Platte-Winner bridge. When workers built the bridge, the main stem dams had already been built on the river, so they had to build foundations in depths up to 180 feet. It was a lot of expense and work for a bridge that carries less than 1,000 vehicles a day, but few river crossings are as unspoiled and picturesque.

There are no towns in northern Gregory County, but it’s historic country nevertheless. The area around Lucas was headquarters for Jack Sully, a legendary cattle rustler who was gunned down by a posse in 1904. In the days of the open range, large cattle companies from southern states drove livestock into the Dakotas and allowed them to forage, leaving little for the cattle belonging to homesteaders. Many South Dakotans saw Sully’s antics as merely protecting their rights to their own land, but he found himself in jail on several occasions. He broke out of the Mitchell jail and evaded law enforcement until U.S. Marshals learned he had returned to his home in the Gregory County hills. They shot him as he tried to escape on horseback.

Sully’s antics are still the subject of debate, but that’s all part of the beauty and mystery of Gregory County.

Editor’s Note: This is the 14th installment in an ongoing series featuring South Dakota’s 66 counties. Click here for previous articles.

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Sacred Ground

By Katie Hunhoff

We thought we’d broached every possible topic in 30 years of publishing South Dakota Magazine, but we found an altogether new subject for our September/October issue. Where are the burial sites of the great Indian leaders of the 19th century?

Paul Higbee, a Spearfish writer, led our effort to find the graves. He also wrote about the history and tradition of Indian burials. We discovered that the graves generally lie in Christian cemeteries because many Lakota and Dakota people converted to Christianity. But elements of traditional religion were still practiced, including a”release of the soul” rite which occurs a year after death.

Indian country cemeteries don’t always have the manicured appearance that you might see in other communities. Sometimes the grass is long, the stones are leaning and the road is rutted. The difference is partly because traditional Native American culture calls for remembering the dead through ceremony, not at a physical place.

However, many of the Lakota and Dakota leaders’ graves are within sight of the Missouri River. And there is a feeling of reverence and solemnity at every site, no matter the height of the grass.

Sitting Bull’s grave, just west of Mobridge, is perhaps the most picturesque. A bust created by Crazy Horse sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski marks the site, which is high above the Missouri River.

The graves of Struck-by-the Ree, Iron Nation and Gall are also near the Missouri. Struck-by-the-Ree is buried south of Marty on the Yankton Sioux Reservation. Gall, a contemporary of Sitting Bull who fought with him at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, is also buried west of Mobridge.

Spotted Tail was a Sicangu leader famous for his wit. He complained on one occasion about the constant relocations of his community, telling authorities,”I think you had better put the Indians on wheels and then you can run them about wherever you wish.” His gravesite is near Rosebud.

Red Cloud’s grave is near the Red Cloud School, west of Pine Ridge. A Catholic church and a cultural center also share space on the beautiful campus built by Jesuit missionaries in the 1880s. Red Cloud led a deadly campaign to burn military posts, but he eventually realized that U.S. forces were too strong to overcome. After that, he accepted the reservation life while continually fighting federal efforts to reduce tribal lands.”Red Cloud lived to age 88, dying in 1909 when the Indian wars had been romanticized in American memory,” writes Higbee.”Yet his name still sent shivers down the spines of some elderly Army veterans.”

We also traveled to Manderson, home of the Lakota holy man Nicholas Black Elk. He is buried in the Catholic cemetery, across the highway from St. Agnes Church. A deeply rutted road leads to the fenced, hilltop cemetery. Waist-high prairie grasses make it difficult to find the simple black marker. Sage, a purifying herb in Lakota culture, grows atop the grave.

Higbee notes that only a few people know the story behind Crazy Horse’s burial. After he was fatally bayonetted at Camp Robinson in Nebraska, family members took the body.”Certain people are aware of his remains,” says Donovin Sprague, a descendent and author.”It’s a very guarded secret and no one would ever reveal anything.”

Check out the magazine article for more history, photos and directions to the graves. Higbee also offers tips on cemetery etiquette.

We know we missed the burial sites of some important Native American leaders. We’ll keep looking and learning. That’s the whole idea behind publishing South Dakota Magazine.

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Forbidden Culture

By Herbert T. Hoover

A give-away event at a community on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

A renaissance occurred in the 1960s on the Yankton Sioux and Rosebud reservations when tribal elders brought traditional beliefs out from underground and into open use for the first time since the 1890s. But how did the practices survive 70 years of suppression that preceded the renaissance?

I found answers to that question early in my career when I came to know Charles Kills Enemy and Joe Rockboy. Charlie and Joe didn’t know it, but they and their friends were cultural preservationists before the renaissance. Charlie grew up on the Yankton reservation with the name Jonas Chasing Crane because he was raised by his grandparents, Charles and Sarah Chasing Crane. Later he moved to the Rosebud and took the name of his father, Mark Kills Enemy. He became a ranch foreman and rode with cowboys at non-Indian rodeos — sometimes on horses and sometimes on buffalo.

He began his quest for spirituality in the hanbleceya, seeking contact with spirits. Over the years, he became an accomplished medicine man. He maintained his central lodge on the Rosebud Reservation in his old age, but his influence extended throughout the Sacred Pipe to relocated tribal members in California, Ohio and elsewhere.

Joseph Rockboy sings a peyote song during a prayer meeting in the 1970s. At that time he was the oldest member of the Native American Church.

Joe Rockboy was raised in a log cabin on the Yankton Reservation under the tutorial counsel of traditionalist”aunties” as well as his mother, a devout Episcopalian. She wanted Joe to be an Episcopal minister but during his teen years he discovered that ministers in the Episcopal Church must have a heritage of mixed-blood and Joe was a proud full-blood. He often declared himself 4/4ths Indian.

He left the Episcopal Church in 1917 and became an active participant in the Native American (Peyote) Church. Alcoholism plagued him in his early years. Women even hid vanilla extract from him in their kitchens. He rode in the 101 Wild West Show, but as a Mexican because the cast already included a sufficient number of Indians. He returned to the reservation in the 1930s, married and had a son.

On the reservation he worked on Indian New Deal projects, then drove a gravel truck to help construct the first runway on the airfield now known as Ellsworth near Rapid City. He also worked at a plant near Hanford, Wash., where the first atomic bomb was being produced.

Drinking encumbered his life until, in 1946, he nearly froze to death while under the influence. He never drank again.

Joe Rockboy worked in Chicago in the 1950s, but returned to the Yankton Reservation in the 1960s to hold a variety of jobs, including a cultural advisory position. He was an exemplary member of the Greenwood Chapter of the Native American Church and an organizer and participant in many aspects of the Indian renaissance.

Memories and stories from Charlie and Joe serve as bedrock information on the beliefs and practices that were preserved in relative isolation from 1890 to the 1960s. Lakotas and Yanktonais on their larger reservations in the United States experienced fewer obstructions to their cultural activities but on the Yankton and Rosebud reservations, traditionalists faced opposition from Christian missionaries and federal employees who believed in assimilation.

Medicine man Charles Kills Enemy prepares a wanbli (eagle) lowanpi altar for a ceremony to summon spiritual assistance for someone in need.

The Greenwood Native American Church endured in spite of efforts to suppress it from its inception. The stubborn members secured a charter from the Secretary of State in 1922 but still faced social pressure from non-Indians to abandon their native religion.

A belief system based around the Sacred Pipe encountered even more hardships. A network of dance halls became a protective environment for ancient tribal legacies. The halls should not be confused with the type in which Lawrence Welk began his band career. Drums were the norm, not accordions, and dancers didn’t do the polka.

Sketchy histories of the dance halls appear in written records around the turn of the 20th century — in isolation from both agency and mission influences. Traditionalists founded and managed the halls to nurture their legacy of dance, music, give-aways and other social practices, as well as recreational activities such as games and horse races.

Each Dance Hall Chief managed his hall from an adjacent, government-issued house. Joe Rockboy remembered the halls with great fondness when we became friends in the 1970s.”At one time we had seven dance halls,” he told me.”They was big square buildings about 36 feet by about 70 feet, I’d say. Our people put them up at their own expense. They all worked on building the halls.

“In the Thirties, some of our people had a real hard time, lost their horses and had no way to haul firewood,” he said,”so they tore most of the halls down and used the lumber for firewood, I think.”

Joe particularly remembered the Old Hay Hall northeast of Greenwood. A man named Wooden Nose was the Dance Hall Chief and drum keeper.”When there was going to be a dance, he’d go down to the agency, tell the agent that there was a dance arranged, and the agent would issue a slip that it was all right,” Joe told me.

He also attended events at the White Horse Rider Hall operated by War Chief and Brown Hall near Marty, run by Hollow Horn. White Hall was south of Marty and Fox Kit Society was near the Missouri River.

“There was another one northwest of Marty that they called Round Hall even though it was square,” he said.”That was for some of the Cat Band, and for the mixed-bloods. It was under a man with the name of Good Last Born.”

White Swan Dance Hall was located on the northwest corner of the Yankton Reservation until 1954, but tribal members moved it closer to Lake Andes before the bottom land was flooded by Fort Randall Dam.

The annual Catholic Convocation on the Yankton Indian Reservation during the 1920s attracted Indians from across historic Sioux Country.

Dances were Friday nights at White Swan. The gathering started when the drum keeper, the dance hall chief, hit the drum.”Then the one that sponsored the dance would call the crier [Ayanpaha] over and explain to him what it was about and explain to him who was the first to be recognized,” Joe said.

The first dedication went to the chief. Then the drummers honored others.”If they had a kettle of dog soup, they’d have a kettle dance and prayers were offered. The man with a stick would be the first one around that kettle. He’d burn some cedar. Four men would go out and dance while they sang that kettle song. They’d ask the man that put up the dog to explain what it was for. Probably it was to go to the singers, or maybe to someone that was to take a traditional medication.” The sacrifice of a dog and presentation of the soup represented an illness or special need.

Then dancing began in earnest. There might be a war dance, a love dance, a round dance, a penny dance or a give-away dance. Every song had meaning.”In the old days,” Joe said,”those dance groups was for the bands [ospayes] but after our people moved to the reservation the bands got all mixed up. Of course, the bands got mixed up in the old days [too]. You have to follow the woman’s side in the Indian way. If you was a Roaster and you married a woman of the Cat Band, you’d lose out on your own band and belong to hers. But even with that crossover, the bands stayed separate under their own leader, and each one had its own dances.” The Rosebud dances were generally open to everyone, while the Yankton events were often restricted to particular ospayes and tiospayes.

When Charlie was a youth on the Rosebud Reservation there was a federal policy to eliminate dancing by anyone but elders. Middle-aged tribal members could not dance, but they could watch. Youth were forbidden to even approach a dance hall.

One night, Charlie and some other youngsters watched the dancing through a window. Suddenly the lights of an automobile approached, so they fled and jumped in a car. Charlie cranked the engine and, with little experience behind a steering wheel, drove the vehicle into the darkness of an open field. The car hit a rock and rolled. He broke his wrist, but no one was badly injured.

Marriages and divorces were part of the dance hall culture. Marriages took place in solemn Sacred Pipe ceremonies or in Native American church prayer meetings. For unhappy couples divorce proceedings were simple. A woman could cast her husband’s belongings out of her tee pee or allotment house and declare in a loud voice that she no longer wanted to live with the man. He was then available to any woman who would have him.

The White Swan Dance Hall before it collapsed in the early 1980s.

A man could attend a pow wow or other gathering, go to the central drum and strike it four times, thus declaring the marriage over. There were no trumped-up charges, no lawyer fees and no court proceedings.

While missionaries and government agents discouraged and regulated dance halls, they promoted assimilation through festivities befitting their own heritage. Joe Rockboy attended Fourth of July games that lasted as long as 10 days. An annual Sioux Fair was held near Greenwood (south of present-day Wagner) in September to give Indian farmers a chance to show products from their allotments.

Shinny was a traditional game played at the fair.”Someone made a ball by rolling up a deer’s tail and covering it over with deer skin,” Joe remembered.”They’d mark off two goals about a quarter of a mile apart. They’d team up on different sides. Each person took a hickory or ash stick about 25 or 30 inches long and they went after that deerskin ball just like in a soccer game. What they was supposed to do was see which team could drive the ball over the opposite team’s goal first. Sometimes they’d play for a half a day. Then they’d rest up and go at it again after dinner. The side that put the ball over the opposing team’s goal two out of three games would win the match.”

Another game called wands and hoops involved throwing spears through a rolling hoop. A hoop man would say something to distract his opponent, such as”I’m a horse thief.” The spear thrower would counter, perhaps, with”I like to scalp horse thieves.”

Yanktons made tops out of buffalo horns by filling them with iron wood (hickory). They put deerskin thongs around them and spun them. The goal was to spin your top longer than the other players. Other games included spear throwing and a dice game using plum seeds with marks on them.

Horse races were also popular.”After the Yanktons got patent-in-fee to their land and started to sell allotments, some of them went out and bought fast horses,” Joe said. He and several of his friends were top competitors in a relay race in which riders brought three horses and changed saddles as they progressed. The total purse was $150 per day, and races were often held for three straight days during county fairs.”Our expenses wasn’t much. We’d travel with dried meat that the white man calls jerky. We done all our own cooking. If you could pick up a purse here and there you’d save a couple of hundred dollars by racing in the summer and that was a lot of help in buying food and clothes for the family in the winter.”

Dance halls, Fourth of July celebrations and county agricultural fairs drew the Yankton and Rosebud people together in a time when their native culture was discouraged, and sometimes forbidden, by their non-Indian neighbors. Even the charitable give-away was banned in some areas because agents and missionaries perceived it as anti-capitalistic, and they were attempting to encourage personal ownership.

Charlie and Joe laughed when they described how forbidden practices — especially traditional marriages and divorces — continued during seven decades of enforced assimilation. Could it be that the non-Indians’ assault on traditional culture only made it more attractive?

In any case, tribal members sought creative and fun ways to preserve their ancestral beliefs and practices, keeping many of them alive and ready for re-emergence in the renaissance of the 1960s.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2012 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Rosebud’s Voice

By Michael Zimny

Before a producer from MTV’s Rebel Music contacted Frank Waln, he was just one rapper among a generation of young Lakota artists trying to get their music out there — online, at shows in high school gyms and auditoriums, any way they could. Now that millions have seen the show, the Sicangu Lakota artist from the Rosebud Reservation — who now lives in Chicago where he’s working on his debut album — has become a symbol for a burgeoning scene.

Rebel Music: Native America, which recently aired and is available online, has created a national buzz around Waln, as well as the other artists featured — including Lakota artist Mike”Witko” Cliff (from Pine Ridge), Nataanii Means and Canadian artist Inez Jasper. The program visits the artists in their respective communities, introducing them and their music, then follows them as they confront issues from the disappearances of Native women and girls in Canada to protests against the Keystone pipeline in South Dakota.

We caught up with Waln as he prepared to headline the Black Hills Unity Concert to ask him about his creative process, artistic influences, and what the Hills mean to him.

MZ: Can you talk a little about how the Rebel Music’s Native American documentary came together?

FW: Yeah, it was a long process. I was the first artist they reached out to last summer. I got an email, and I get a lot of emails from people saying they are creating a documentary about Natives and we want to feature you, and I’m pretty reluctant about it because the way people portray us — it’s just hard if they are non-Native. Because they don’t come from the place where we come from. I wrote her a long explanation of why I’m reluctant about bringing people into my home and bringing people to the rez. She said she understood and forgot to tell me she was a Native woman. She said, ‘I wrote my Ph.D. on indigenous hip-hop and I’m the lead researcher for this project.’

Many conference calls and meetings [later], through that whole process I started to feel very comfortable with the project, because the lead researcher was a Native woman and the co-producer was a Native, and the whole production team listened to all of the Natives. It was unprecedented for a mainstream production team to listen to the Native people that are being portrayed the way that they want to be portrayed.

It was one of the first mainstream media projects that I’ve seen where it was true. It was real stories about real Native people and things we were facing. It wasn’t like Natives burning wagons and stealing white women or look at these alcoholics, and savages and drunks. It was like, no this is our home, we’re human beings, we survived genocide and this is what we’re going through. It was very real and very raw and I’m very proud of that project.

I never in a million years thought I would be on TV. I’m just a kid from the Rosebud. I almost quit so many times — I thought there was no hope for me to do music. I thought there was no hope for me. I never thought my music would make it out of the rez, let alone South Dakota. It was a big validation for me, and a big milestone in my career.

MZ: What does the Black Hills Unity Concert mean to you?

FW: To me, the Black Hills Unity Concert is about just that — unifying as people across cultures, across economic borders, across all these borders that are put up to keep us separate. Coming together and realizing that ultimately this place, this home, this land, this water — this is ours and we need to come together to protect it, to keep it safe and stay a place that we can be proud of and that we can call beautiful and that we can call home. As a young Lakota person, to me it’s also a statement and testament to the strength and resistance and the beauty that my ancestors had. Because I’m not supposed to be here. The government tried to wipe us out. The government took the Black Hills from us. The government didn’t want me to be alive. So the fact that I’m a live Lakota person standing here in the Black Hills as an artist using my voice to speak out for the Black Hills is a beautiful thing to me and it gives me hope that one day everything is going to be OK.

MZ: What rappers have influenced you?

FW: My introduction to hip hop was Eminem. It was the emotion of the music that really struck a chord with me. After that I heard Nas and the song”One Mic.” That’s when I knew I wanted to be a rapper. Nas was speaking to his community in an empowering way.”All I need is one mic to change the world.” That was a profound statement for me to hear, being a kid on the rez who loved making music.

MZ: Nas is a good example of an artist who does”conscious” material like”One Mic” as well as more radio-friendly”get money” music. Do you feel as comfortable with both?

FW: I listen to Kendrick Lamar and I listen to Young Thug. For me, when I sit down I just write down whatever I’m feeling that day. Sometimes it’s conscious stuff. I’m working on an album right now and it’s about trauma and love and I guess that could be conscious and it could not. I’m gonna write about both. I’m not big on the”make money” type because I’m not living that. You know I’m still doing what I can to pay the rent so I’m not writing music about what I don’t live.

MZ: Who are some hip-hop producers that influenced you as far as sound?

FW: Dr. Dre was a big influence on me. A lot of the music coming out of the West Coast we would listen to back on the rez.

Organized Noise is definitely a big influence production-wise, and Hi-Tek. They drew from familiar influences but then they used that to create something fresh and something new. That’s what I’m striving to do. It’s always those producers that did something different. Also Rick Rubin, as a producer who just does whatever he has to do to bring the best out of the track.

And you know South Dakota is in a cool place. It’s in the middle of the country and we get music from all over. I grew up on country because I lived in South Dakota.

MZ: Back to the Black Hills Unity Concert, and the history of the Hills you touched on — how feasible do you think it is that the Treaty will be honored?

FW: I hope that it is. It’s kind of messed up that we even have to ask this question, because the documents that founded this country — it would just make sense that the government would honor them. How can we call this the greatest country in the world and not even honor the original contracts that founded this place? Do I think it will happen in my lifetime? No. Will I stop fighting for that to happen? No. I think looking at this long term, this is something that the Native people do — we think about generations.

Instead of just thinking about me and how much money I can make at the expense of the land, I’m thinking about what I can do to impact seven generations down the line. I’m using my voice, my music, my art, to hopefully see a day where my nieces and nephews and children (someday, I’m not a father yet) will live in a South Dakota, live in the Black Hills, where we’re treated like first class citizens. I have hope that will happen. Not in my lifetime, but I will not stop doing what I can to make sure I see that happen.

Michael Zimny is the social media engagement specialist for South Dakota Public Broadcasting in Vermillion. He blogs for SDPB and contributes arts columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

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Land of the Burnt Thigh

By John Andrews

In late August we drove from Yankton to Pine Ridge on Highway 18 to collect stories for an upcoming issue. As we passed through the pine forested hills and ravines of the Little White River valley, I was reminded that this area is one of South Dakota’s hidden gems. The region is known locally as the Little Black Hills, and was our Todd County selection in our July/August 2011 feature on places to visit in every county. It’s beautiful from the highway, but even better views are found by kayaking the Little White River, particularly the 25-mile stretch between 18 and the Spring Creek Day School, or by driving BIA Route 5.

Todd County is rich in Lakota culture because the Rosebud Indian Reservation, home to the Sicangu (Burnt Thigh Nation) people, lies completely within its borders. The Rosebud was created in 1889, when the Great Sioux Reservation — which encompassed all of present day South Dakota west of the Missouri River — was parceled into the reservations we know today.

Architecture true to Lakota culture accentuates Sinte Gleska University’s campus.

The county’s largest town is Mission, where Sinte Gleska University provides an education rooted in both the Western and Lakota worlds. Lionel Bordeaux, who grew up not far from the campus, leads the college. He attended high school at the St. Francis Indian Mission, then enrolled at Black Hills Teachers College in Spearfish. He had a job with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and was enrolled in a Ph.D. program at the University of Minnesota when he got a phone call from Stanley Red Bird, Sr., considered the founder of Sinte Gleska College.

He said they were searching for a president to lead the newly formed school and that Bordeaux’s name had come through from the Spirit World. Red Bird told Bordeaux to resign his position with the BIA and that he was not to continue at Minnesota. Bordeaux talked with his wife and they returned to Mission, where he was inaugurated President of the college in 1973, just before his 33rd birthday. He’s one of the country’s longest-serving college presidents.

Sinte Gleska is named for Spotted Tail, one of the most revered Sicangu leaders. He proved himself an able warrior in his younger days, though eventually he grew to believe that resisting the advance of white settlers was futile, and sought ways to benefit his people who had been relegated to reservation life. He was killed by a rival, Crow Dog, in 1881. His gravesite, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is in the Episcopal Cemetery at Rosebud.

A vision brought Lionel Bordeaux back to Mission, where he’s led Sinte Gleska University for more than 40 years..

Lakota Studies is an important part of SGU’s curriculum, and for years Albert White Hat, one of the country’s leading preservers of the Lakota language, led it. He was raised at Spring Creek, a small community of five or six families on the Rosebud. Children learned Lakota ways, and spent winter evenings listening to storytellers explain Lakota history, culture and spirituality using the Lakota language. But in the early 1950s the tribe adopted the state’s education standards, which said nothing about Lakota studies. When his children started school in the Todd County district in the late 1960s, White Hat lobbied for a Lakota language and history program.”They really gave me a bad time,” he told us in 2009.”None of them would accept it. They laughed at me. Finally in 1970, they said, ‘You can have a half an hour during noon hour to play your tape and dance.'”

Albert White Hat (left) and Duane Hollow Horn Bear helped preserve Lakota language and culture at SGU.

Soon White Hat was teaching Lakota studies part time at St. Francis and Sinte Gleska University, even though he knew little about teaching. He had no books and learned how to formulate lesson plans from colleagues. The university hired him full time in 1983.

White Hat worked on standardizing Lakota, but he encountered problems in the 1990s as he worked on his textbook, Reading and Writing the Lakota Language. White Hat and Jael Kampfe, a Montana native studying at Yale University, began the project in 1992. Kampfe recorded White Hat’s classes. Then they transcribed and edited them into a 226-page book. He sent the manuscript to three linguists and a host of schools and publishers who offered mixed reviews.

“The language has developed what they call a subculture,” he said.”Historians and anthropologists use the modern translations, and my work contradicts that. They didn’t want that printed.” One major university press told White Hat that,”folk etymology and oral history are fine, but they’re not recorded so this shouldn’t be printed.” The University of Utah Press finally published his book in 1999 and it remains widely used, a fitting tribute to White Hat, who died in 2013.

Girls at Mission’s North Elementary (from left) Shanelle Eagle Star, Bailey Horse Looking, Hapun McCluskey and Olivia Leading Cloud made dancing shawls.

Todd County was created in 1909 and named for John B.S. Todd, a native of Kentucky and cousin to First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln. Todd had a long military career that included service in the Mexican War before he resigned in 1856. He moved to Fort Randall and became a trader engaging with Indian tribes west of the Missouri River. Todd started a law practice in Yankton in 1861, but with the outbreak of the Civil War he was commissioned as a brigadier general. He led North Missouri district until the end of 1861. He again resigned from the military in 1862 and moved back to Dakota. He represented Dakota Territory in Congress in the 1860s and also served in the territorial House of Representatives. Todd died in 1872.

Jesuit missionaries played an important role in the evolution of the area. They established the St. Francis Mission in the 1880s, and today it’s an important destination for those wanting to study Lakota culture. The Buechel Memorial Lakota Museum in St. Francis contains over 2,000 items in its ethnographic collection and more than 42,000 photos. The museum is named after Father Eugene Buechel, S.J., a noted missionary, linguist and ethnologist who came to St. Francis in 1902.

Respected Sicangu leader Spotted Tail’s gravesite can be found in the Episcopal Cemetery near Rosebud.

Another place to visit in St. Francis is St. Charles Borromeo Parish, painted bright lavender by children attending a camp there in 2005. The church has 24 stained glass windows that depict the life of Christ.

Todd County also has a few famous sons. Ben Reifel was born at Parmelee in 1906, attended South Dakota State College and Harvard University and became the first Lakota to serve in Congress when he was elected in South Dakota’s First District in 1960. He served in Washington, D.C., for 10 years.

Jim Abourezk, who served in the U.S. House and Senate during the 1970s, was born just across the county line in Wood, but his uncles Tom and Chick ran a general store in Mission for 30 years. It’s still referred to locally as”Abourooski’s.”

And longtime television game show host Bob Barker spent his childhood on the Rosebud, where his mother Tillie taught school. In his memoir, Barker has fond memories of swimming in Antelope Crick (not Creek). He didn’t write anything about the Little Black Hills, but maybe some places are better kept secret.

Editor’s Note: This is the 11th installment in an ongoing series featuring South Dakota’s 66 counties. Click here for previous articles.

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One Woman’s Vision

By Katie Hunhoff

Nine years ago Marla Bullbear did a vision quest, something traditionally done by young men to seek life guidance. She hiked a summit above the pine timber reserves on the Rosebud Reservation, her home, and waited quietly for answers.

The reason behind the vision quest was a feeling that she, and other community leaders needed to do something about a rash of suicides that occurred on the Rosebud. They met at the St. Francis school in 2002 to brainstorm solutions. Roy Stone, a medicine man from Mission, opened the program with a prayer and spoke of the Lakota circle of life. Other leaders offered their perspectives. Later, someone surveyed the youth to see if any of the ideas had an impact. Most teens mentioned one particular speaker: the medicine man.

“I thought about that for a while and then I realized that he was different because he spoke about their culture and they must have wanted that connection,” Bullbear says. She and several friends came up with the idea of a summer of camps designed to connect the teens with their Lakota roots.

After the first summer Bullbear was happy with the success of the camps but had a feeling she must do more. She and six female friends then did the vision quest, 24 hours on the summit meditating about what path her life should take. “That helped me clarify what I need to do,” she said. That was nine years and 6,000 campers ago.

The Rosebud Sioux Tribe provided 10 acres on the site of Milk’s Camp, a nearly forgotten village founded by the renowned Chief Milk. Most original residences are now gone, but pow wow grounds remain along Ponca Creek as well as an Episcopal Church. Chief Milk is buried on a hill above the old church.

The youth retreats are known as Family Camp. At least four camps are held every summer, each four days long with a different theme. Harvest camp in early June is based around the Indian culture’s edible and medicinal herbs. Three hundred have been identified on the camp’s grounds including wild turnips, purple coneflower (the root eases toothaches) sweet grass used for smudging and wide-leaf wild sage that was brought from Bear Butte.

The other themes are hunting, leadership and horsemanship. Bullbear and her assistants don’t have the time or resources to track the success rate of the youth who have attended camps. In fact, they hardly have the resources to run the camps. “We run on a shoestring,” she told a South Dakota Magazine writer. “The tribe has helped. The state has helped. If we had $100,000 a year we would be flourishing. We are probably operating on half of that.”

To raise more money, Bullbear and her helpers at the Native American Advocacy Program are inviting tourists to Milk’s Camp for retreats, reunions or group gatherings. Visitors will have the opportunity to learn about Lakota culture while sleeping in canvas tipis and lodge houses. Bullbear hopes that welcoming visitors will raise enough revenue to continue the Family Camps in summer.

During winter it’s fun to think of riding horses on green grass, searching for wild turnips, singing around the campfire and taking nature walks. We all feel that way, but none more so than the kids from Rosebud and Pine Ridge who attended Family Camp. If you are making summer vacation plans, visit their website to see what they have to offer for non-campers. You might learn something new.

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Lakota Nation Invitational

We sent a writer to the Lakota Nation Invitational Tournament (LNI) last weekend in Rapid City. We’ll have a major feature article on the LNI in the fall of 2015, but we thought we’d share some photographs of the big winter extravaganza that has been held for the past 38 years at the Rushmore Plaza Civic Center in Rapid City. Photos by Bernie Hunhoff.
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Who Was Peter Shannon?

By John Andrews

Lost among the Democratic and Republican hurrahs and disappointments of the Nov. 4 election was an interesting development on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Residents there voted overwhelmingly to change the name of Shannon County, the entirety of which includes the reservation, to Oglala Lakota County.

The final tally was 2,161-526; the 80.4 percent of votes in favor of the change far exceeded the two-thirds necessary. There’s still some political rigmarole that must transpire before the change becomes official. Once all provisional ballots have been certified, the county commissioners must notify the governor. The governor then relays the name change to the Legislature in January. After the Legislature passes a joint resolution, the governor can officially issue a proclamation recognizing the change. Shannon County becomes Oglala Lakota County on the first day of the month following the proclamation.

There are 66 counties in South Dakota, many of which are named after territorial founders or prominent 19th century national politicians. Shannon County’s name comes from Peter C. Shannon, chief justice of the Dakota Territorial Supreme Court from 1873 to 1881. But it’s Shannon’s role in obtaining land from the Lakota that led to his name’s ouster 130 years later.

Shannon was a Pennsylvania native who practiced law in Pittsburgh. After his defeat for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1852 as a Democrat, he was appointed president judge of the local district court. He later became a Republican and a supporter of Abraham Lincoln. He helped escort Lincoln through Pennsylvania en route to the new president’s first inauguration in 1861. He served two terms in the Pennsylvania House and raised a regiment called The Irish Dragoons during the Civil War.

After the war Shannon practiced law until President Ulysses S. Grant appointed him chief justice of the Dakota Territorial Supreme Court. He presided over several trials in Yankton, but the most famous was surely the trial of Jack McCall for the August 1876 murder of Wild Bill Hickok in Deadwood.

During his time on the bench he became close allies with Gov. Nehemiah Ordway, a somewhat dictatorial figure who presided over the relocation of the capital from Yankton to Bismarck, earning the scorn of southern Dakotans. Shannon also fell out of favor with territorial lawyers who successfully blocked his application for reappointment in 1881.

George Kingsbury described the situation in scathing eloquence in his 1915 History of Dakota Territory:”His second term had not been marked by that friendliness, respect and confidence that should exist between the presiding judge and the members of the bar practicing in his court, but on the contrary, there had grown up a feeling of distrust toward the judge, and an entire and a total lack of confidence in his official integrity.”

Dakota Territorial lawyers wrote a list of grievances against Shannon and approved them on March 25, 1881. The charges were:

insulting attorneys and parties in open court;

offensive partisanship in criminal cases;

has endeavored by threats and other coercive means to secure endorsement of attorneys for reappointment;

has been publicly intoxicated, and the habit has grown on him;

with writing fictitious letters.

Instead Alonzo Edgerton, a U.S. Senator from Minnesota, was appointed to fill the chief justice position and began in January 1882. Shannon found his way onto a committee with former Gov. Newton Edmunds and James Teller, of Ohio, to negotiate land sales with tribes on the Great Sioux Reservation west of the Missouri River.

They endeavored to acquire 11 million acres. In return the government promised 25,000 cows and 1,000 bulls to be divided across the remaining reservation land.

“The commission had to obtain 3/4 of adult male signatures per tribe,” says Jesse Short Bull, an organizer behind the name change.”It was not a popular concept. The interpreter, Samuel D. Hinman, was accused of intimidating people to sign or face military removal. Hinman also acquired signatures from children as young as five years old at area day schools on the Pine Ridge Agency.”

It took the efforts of two more commissions before the signatures were finally obtained and the land transferred. Short Bull says it seems like Shannon was the odd man out on the commission, but he nevertheless played a role in shaping Lakota life.”When you think of the line of incompetent military officers to ill prepared Indian agents that the tribes had to deal with, Shannon was not in their category. He was a smart man, and vowed no wrong doing on his part when the Edmunds Commission was being questioned. With that being said, he was still part of the driving force that changed the course of history for the tribes and everything that came with that — the breakdown of Lakota culture and the introduction to a new way of life.”

Shannon lived somewhat quietly until poor health led to his move to San Diego in the late 1890s. On April 13, 1899, he boarded a carriage en route to Point Loma. Shortly after departure the driver lost control of the horses, which swerved toward the sidewalk and struck a telegraph pole. Shannon was thrown from the carriage and died later that night from internal injuries.

He was buried at Calvary Cemetery in San Diego, but over time the cemetery fell into disrepair. Headstones were removed, and over time the area became Calvary Memorial Pioneer Park. Today the only traces of Shannon are his name on a brass plaque in San Diego and his county in South Dakota, although that will soon be removed by the people he helped to remove 130 years ago.