Akim D. Reinhardt.Ruling Pine Ridge: Oglala Lakota Politics from the IRA to Wounded Knee.:Ruling Pine Ridge: Oglala Lakota Politics from the IRA to Wounded Knee.Foreword by ClaraSueKidwell. (Plains Histories.)

Abstract

Akim D. Reinhardt has written a comparative study that discusses the significance of two political events that occurred on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The first section of this book examines Oglala Lakota political experiences between 1934 and 1936 under the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA). The second part looks at reservation politics between 1970 and 1973. Reinhardt concludes that the second occupation of Wounded Knee was a spontaneous grass-roots response to forty years of oppressive indirect colonial rule under the IRA rather than an outcome of political activism by leaders of the American Indian Movement (AIM). This volume contributes to the academic discourse among historian Lawrence M. Hauptman, anthropologists Thomas Bilosi and Paul Robertson, as well as other scholars, about how the IRA created cultural tensions and conflict on reservation communities, diminished tribal sovereignty, and made tribes dependent on the federal government. Reinhardt participates in this discussion by showing how the Oglalas were allowed to govern themselves under a 1936 IRA constitution but not in ways of their own choosing because all important decisions were made by either the superintendent or the secretary of the interior.