Rosebud Reservation Research Articles

To Come to a Better Understanding: Medicine Men & Clergy Meetings on the Rosebud Reservations, 1973–1978 by Sandra L. Garner

To Come to a Better Understanding: Medicine Men & Clergy Meetings on the Rosebud Reservations, 1973–1978 by Sandra L. Garner

Unghosting Bones: Resistant Play(s) versus the Legacy of Carlisle Indian Industrial School

Unghosting BonesResistant Play(s) versus the Legacy of Carlisle Indian Industrial School Jen Shook (bio) "Flesh can house no memory of bone. Only bone speaks memory of flesh." —Rebecca Schneider, "Archives: Performance Remains" "We talk about historical trauma… A hundred and thirty years later, this still has an impact on our youth. We're trying to make peace with those spirits and bring them home." —Russell Eagle Bear, Rosebud Sioux Historic Preservation Officer In N. Scott Momaday's The Moon in Two Windows, Luther Standing Bear, the first graduate of Carlisle Indian Industrial School, returns years later to catch a football game between Carlisle and the Army team. Moon closes as Luther and his son walk through the graves of Carlisle's cemetery, a resonant site for those who refuse to forget the genocidal legacy of the boarding school system launched at Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The young boy points to distant figures of a man and a child holding hands, swinging "round and round" (Momaday 177). Though the script does not identify them, the image echoes an earlier moment when Etahdleuh, an older member of Luther's transitional generation, swings round and round with Grass, the ghost of a girl who died on the train from the reservation to the school. The joyful yet haunting, lively yet dead, Grass and Etahdleuh surface as remains from Carlisle founder Richard Pratt's assimilationist mantra, "Kill the Indian, save the man." While the Pratt who Luther sees at the football game totters with age, throughout the earlier era portrayed in most of Moon Pratt organizes his school with vigor with Etahdleuh serving as his cultural translator. Moon, in other words, travels back [End Page 159] and forth through time, stitching connections for the audience between Carlisle's graves, Pratt's commands, and the students' transcultural negotiations. Grass's death troubles Pratt's orderly plan, and what to do with her remains gestures toward another ongoing Native and US negotiation: protection and repatriation of the dead. That football game that Luther watches features another historical Carlisle alumnus, Olympian Jim Thorpe. Like the students beneath the Carlisle gravestones, Thorpe's remains also lie in Pennsylvania, but his family has been fighting for their return to his native Oklahoma for over fifty years. This legal battle plays out in a fictionalized documentary in Suzan Shown Harjo and Mary Kathryn Nagle's play, My Father's Bones. Together, The Moon in Two Windows (2006), by N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), and My Father's Bones (2013), by Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne/Hodulgee Muscogee) and Mary Kathryn Nagle (Cherokee), resist the dismissal of anti-Native violence as a closed past event, calling to action both Native and non-Native audiences through embodied ghosts, cultural translation, empathy-modeling onstage audiences, and family/kinship interpellations. Both plays not only unghost the past in service of necessary and portable debate for present and future community health, they bring ghosts to life onstage in their activist memorializing of two specific issues: the generational loss perpetrated by the residential school system and the cultural genocide of looted human remains and sacred objects. By "unghost," I mean to make visible or acknowledge the presence of figures that have been obscured or ignored. To deal with ghost language in the landscape of Indigenous art carries a danger of reinscribing the erasure of Native peoples, the romantic obsession with their vanishment that fueled even so-called "Friends of the Indians" social movements. Yet un ghosting both attends to that erasure and amplifies the resilience, the survivability, of the peoples and cultures who remain and thrive despite centuries of genocide. While stage Indian ghosts haunted early US drama (and fiction and poetry and more) to perform an assuagement of settler guilt, the dead characters of Moon and Bones unsettle history and weave time to promote survivability.1 Unquiet memory in unburied bones circles like Grass and Etahdleuh in the Carlisle cemetery, unghosting hidden or ignored presences. Ghost characters might veer dangerously close to vanishment, the ongoing elegiac obsession [End Page 160] with "the last of the" that leads to convenient assumptions that Native peoples are extinct.2 Yet these stage ghosts must be played by actual actors, visibly...

Review: Power and Progress on the Prairie: Governing People on Rosebud Reservation by Thomas Biolsi

Review: Power and Progress on the Prairie: Governing People on Rosebud Reservation by Thomas Biolsi

Book Review: Power and Progress on the Prairie: Governing People on Rosebud Reservation

Book Review: Power and Progress on the Prairie: Governing People on Rosebud Reservation

Power and Progress on the Prairie: Governing People on Rosebud Reservation. By Thomas Biolsi

<i>Power and Progress on the Prairie: Governing People on Rosebud Reservation</i>. By Thomas Biolsi

Power and Progress on the Prairie

Review of: Power and Progress on the Prairie: Governing People on Rosebud Reservation, by Thomas Biolsi.

Racism, Popular Culture, and the Everyday Rosebud Reservation

Racism, Popular Culture, and the Everyday Rosebud Reservation Thomas Biolsi (bio) HOW DO WE MAKE SCHOLARLY (and political) sense of the everyday lives of people living in Native communities? By "everyday" I do not mean the episodic moments (and movements) of critical consciousness or resistance (e.g., protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline) or of heightened awareness of racial or colonial oppression (e.g., the Idle No More Movement).1 Instead, I mean the mundane, habituated, and taken-for-granted daily routines that compose most of Native experience. This is not at all to say that the everyday is not power laden or that the personal is not political for Native people. Far from it; there is no question that this everyday world is "structured" by settler colonialism and capitalism in determinate ways, including what we might aptly call "everyday racism."2 But that does not exhaust the everyday world of Native people. Both individuals and the everyday worlds they actively take part in making have what Chris Andersen insightfully calls density—a complexity (and a politics) not reducible to a single subject position. Even if we recognize that the Native subject is complicated by "intersectionality," this does not approach the full complexity of Native density. Andersen quotes Robin Kelley on the density of Black being, which Kelley insists is "not just political struggle but the struggles of everyday life …: fighting, dancing, begging, cajoling, teaching, thinking, loving." Andersen forces us to recognize the "more serious and infinitely less schematic livedness" of Native life.3 Indeed, Andersen's argument is that theorizing the politics of colonialism and racism—which, given the nature of structural accounts, runs the risk of schematization—will be deepened by careful attention to the everyday. After all, most Native people do not theorize settler colonialism or racism or explicitly engage in anticolonial or antiracist action in their everyday lives. Nevertheless, they live both within and against oppression. How do they do it? By examining the everyday world of Native people—and taking the role of embodiment seriously, as Brendan Hokowhitu urges us to do—we can bring to light Native ways of being that have escaped scholarly attention.4 In pursuit of the everyday on Rosebud Reservation, I begin with two South Dakota scenes. Scene one. From 1910 to 1997 a mural titled The Spirit of the West, created by New York artist Edwin Blashfield, graced the governor's office in the [End Page 77] South Dakota Capitol in Pierre (Figure 1). State historian Doane Robinson described the mural at the time of installation: "South Dakota is represented as a beautiful woman, in the spotlight, with the figure of hope floating over her and pointing forward. Trappers and settlers are beating back and overcoming the Indians who are clinging to her garments, attempting to impede her progress. Outlawry, represented by a dark and hooded figure is scuttling away into the darkness. In the background the prairie schooners of the early settlers are to be seen making their way across the prairie."5 After a long controversy beginning at least as early as the 1970s, in which the mural was severely criticized by Lakota people as racist because of its negative and exclusionary—even genocidal—depiction of Indians, it was walled over by Governor William Janklow (R) in 1997 after he had long resisted making any changes.6 The mural clearly fell into line with a persistent settler-colonial imagination of Indian people as the antithesis of civilization, with no contribution to make to, or modern place in, South Dakota. In the present, white imaginings of incompetent tribal governments that cannot be trusted to dispense justice to non-Indians on the reservation or traveling through it, of lazy people (including "welfare queens") living on "government handouts," and of Indian children who are a menace to white children in public schools are alive and well.7 In 2006 a group of Rosebud Sioux schoolchildren and their parents and guardians sued the off-reservation Winner School District in federal court for creating a "racially hostile educational environment." The plaintiffs claimed that "Caucasian students frequently call Native American students racially derogatory names, such as 'dirty Indian,' 'Black boy,' 'Indian bitch,' or...

Racism, Popular Culture, and the Everyday Rosebud Reservation

Racism, Popular Culture, and the Everyday Rosebud Reservation

Converting the Rosebud: Catholic Mission and the Lakotas, 1886–1916 by Harvey Markowitz

Reviewed by: Converting the Rosebud: Catholic Mission and the Lakotas, 1886–1916 by Harvey Markowitz Michael F. Steltenkamp S.J Converting the Rosebud: Catholic Mission and the Lakotas, 1886–1916. By Harvey Markowitz. [The Civilization of the American Indian, Volume 277.] (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 2018. Pp. xvi, 303. $34.95. ISBN 978-0-8061-5985-0.) Popularly known as “Sioux,” the Lakota today live on nine reservations in South Dakota and several others in Canada and the United States. The Sicangu division (formerly referred to as the “Brulé”) occupy the Rosebud Reservation. This study addresses a range of subjects that affected these people and the Indian world as a whole in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Chapters cover “Federal-Indian relations,” Grant’s “peace policy,” Bishop Marty’s stewardship of the Dakota Territory, his interaction with the controversial Father Francis Craft, and his enlisting German-born nuns and priests to staff St. Francis Mission. Apart from the challenging terrain upon which the people were scattered, efforts to establish Church presence at Rosebud were hampered by “acts of God,” anti-Catholic sentiments harbored by government officials, lack of funds, and the resistance of some to the missionary message. Clergy, agents, and diverse Lakota citizens (notably Spotted Tail) come to life via diary accounts and government documents. Concluding chapters report the [End Page 173] interaction of diverse actors during a turbulent time of culture-contact. Readers might negatively interpret church initiatives as “cultural imperialism” or, more positively, a form of “interfaith dialogue” apropos conditions of the time. Accounts substantiate these conflicting perceptions—their legacy being an Indian population that today both sustains Christian practice and avoids it. That legacy reveals an array of religious practitioners among contemporary Rosebud Lakota. One now finds conventional Catholics, non “churchgoers,” those who have grafted Christian thought onto native antecedents, and those who consider themselves “pipe carriers” (i.e., persons identifying with a pre-reservation religious identity). In short, Markowitz presents an early-reservation milieu that was the seedbed of contending religious perspectives still present a century later. The author surprisingly charges the legendary Jesuit explorer, Pierre De Smet, as being ethnocentric. This conflicts with the much-noted respect that was accorded him within Lakota country of the mid-nineteenth century (chronicled in biographies of the man). Similarly, the author’s emphasis on people’s resistance to baptism begs reconciliation with images of De Smet busily baptizing numerous souls when visiting Lakota who eagerly sought his blessing. By the same token, this illustrates the challenge which scholars face when trying to understand a complicated socio-religious landscape of the past. For example, as the Indian revitalization movement got traction in the late twentieth century, activists and writers popularized a plaint that Markowitz echoes. He writes that the Sicangu would find it “absurd” to abandon their beliefs and practices “for the ways and teachings of a wanikiye (lifegiver) named Jesus” (p. 182). The problem with this observation is that throughout Lakota country of the early-reservation period, the Ghost Dance was widely popular—its central doctrine being that Jesus would come again—this time, to Indian people. To what extent his return would meld or replace old and new practices never materialized. However, embrace of the Ghost Dance shows a people’s desire for sacred revelation—whatever its source and tenets. Theirs was not a one-dimensional parochialism that contemporary observers so often associate with a native religious perspective. Marquette University is the repository of diaries cited in Converting the Rosebud. It alone should beckon readers to visit Milwaukee and read the captivating accounts not included within the text. Markowitz’s contribution is that he introduces readers to these diaries, and by doing so reveals the complex world of culture contact as it bore upon religion. Inquiring minds will want to find greater clarity on this topic, and so should be grateful to Converting the Rosebud for sparking interest in this quest. [End Page 174] Michael F. Steltenkamp S.J Wheeling Jesuit University Copyright © 2019 The Catholic University of America Press

Retail-based healthy food point-of-decision prompts (PDPs) increase healthy food choices in a rural, low-income, minority community.

This study examines the potential for point-of-decision prompts (PDPs) to promote healthier food choices among shoppers in a rural, low-income, minority community. We hypothesized that a narrowly defined PDP (focused on fresh produce) would be easier for shoppers to remember than a broadly defined PDP (focused on any healthy items), resulting in a higher proportion of healthy items purchased. PDPs were placed at the entrance to a supermarket in Mission, South Dakota, United States of America, on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation for alternating time periods, July 9–10, 2017. Sales records from 653 transactions were retrieved from the supermarket, comprising periods in which PDPs were in place and control periods. We examined the proportion of selected items and proportion of total expenditures that were a) any healthy foods and b) fresh fruits and vegetables. Data were analyzed in 2018. The narrowly defined prompt consistently resulted in a higher proportion of items and expenditures on healthy foods than either the broad prompt or the control condition. Shoppers in the narrow prompt condition purchased and spent significantly more on any healthy foods and fresh produce than shoppers in the control condition. While shoppers in the narrow prompt condition purchased more healthy foods and fresh produce than shoppers in the broad prompt condition, the differences were not statistically significant. Shoppers exposed to the narrow PDP consistently purchased more healthy foods than shoppers in a control group, while shoppers in the broad PDP did not, highlighting the importance of considering cognitive processes when designing health promotion messages.

To Come to a Better Understanding: Medicine Men and Clergy Meetings on the Rosebud Reservation, 1973–1978 by Sandra L. Garner

To Come to a Better Understanding: Medicine Men and Clergy Meetings on the Rosebud Reservation, 1973–1978 by Sandra L. Garner

Invited Essay We, the Heartland: Land(scapes), Community, and the Keystone XL Pipeline

Invited Essay We, the HeartlandLand(scapes), Community, and the Keystone XL Pipeline Kate Schneider (bio) Whether noble, picturesque, sublime or mundane, the landscape image bears the imprint of its cultural pedigree. — d. bright (1992) The air, earth, and water, which sustain us, have no voice. As stewards of the land, we are very aware of our surroundings and the footprints we leave behind. We must speak for the land. We ask you to protect our nation, the earth, air, and water. Reject the KXL pipeline. — bonny kilmurry to president obama (2014) Introduction Photographing in the prairies is both inspiring and mind-numbing. At first, the vastness of the space lulls and overwhelms, and then eventually becomes a canvas seemingly devoid of complexity. While photographing my photo-essay, We, the Heartland, on the communities protesting the Keystone XL pipeline, I felt overcome by both, multiple times a day. However, the more time I spent looking at the environment and culture, I began to comprehend the depth of its complexity. I saw the changing in the gradient of the grasses as the seasons morphed from early spring to late summer. I saw a fullness develop in the coats of the cattle as winter began its approach. I saw the changes in light from morning to late afternoon, and from winter to spring. I started to understand how the land morphed through the seasons, and how I interacted with it needed to reflect these changes. When I began photographing the Great Plains, I was interested in the Keystone XL pipeline protest movement and how two typically disconnected communities—Holt County, Nebraska, and the Rosebud Lakota (Sioux) Nation—are working together to stop the pipeline. I wanted to know why these particular communities are so vocal in their opposition, and if there is something about their environment and their relationship to their environment that reflects their opposition. As an artist, my work has always been about an individual's ties to the land. Whether the land is urban or rural, landlocked or coastal, my initial draw to make any photo-essay is to look at the places people occupy, and how we interact with our home environment. In Holt County and Rosebud, I saw this connection to the land. For many of the people I photographed and interviewed, their relationship to their land and water was their primary motivation for fighting the pipeline. They spoke of duty [End Page 1] to preserve a land that is voiceless, and to protect it not only for themselves but for those who came after them. We, the Heartland came out of a desire to consider the lands along the proposed pipeline route, and the resulting series is a window into the lifeworld of communities at the center of the protest movement. The final work consists of fifty images made in the Sandhills of Nebraska and on the Rosebud reservation, along with ten handwritten letters to President Obama by landowners and activists stating their opposition to the proposed pipeline. The work is a political document, documentary photo-essay, and collaboration between me and some of the leading members of each opposition community. Alliances What brought me to make this work in Nebraska and South Dakota came out of my love of eavesdropping. In the summer of 2012, my father and I went on a road trip in the Great Plains where we visited some of the small towns that dot rural Nebraska. In the NebraskInn, a restaurant in Gross, Nebraska (population two), we overheard a group of men discussing their dismay at the proposed Keystone XL pipeline and their worries for how the proposed project will affect the Ogallala aquifer and the Sandhills. This conversation confused me. Of all the farmers I had previously met, few were liberal, and all had a healthy disdain for "tree huggers." So, here I was, in the second smallest town in the reddest state in the Union, and I was listening to a group of farmers and ranchers discussing their anger and worries for the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. At the time, I thought that Gross, Nebraska, was just where all closeted environmentalist convened. Quickly, I realized these men were not...

To Come to a Better Understanding: Medicine Men and Clergy Meetings on the Rosebud Reservation, 1973–1978, written by Sandra Garner

To Come to a Better Understanding: Medicine Men and Clergy Meetings on the Rosebud Reservation, 1973–1978, written by Sandra Garner

Reservation Politics: Historical Trauma, Economic Development, and Intratribal Conflict. By Raymond I. Orr

While many researchers have dealt with political relations between the federal government and American Indian nations, fewer have tackled the more sensitive subject of intra-tribal politics. In this challenging book, Raymond I. Orr examines three nations—the Citizen Potawatomi, the Isleta Pueblo, and the Rosebud Sioux—to understand how trauma has influenced their economic development. Orr argues that trauma not only persists “at the collective polity level decades and centuries after the initial traumatizing events” but that it prompts “the… rise of the melancholic worldview, which is the drive to reject self-interest in favor of furthering individual and collective mourning” (p. 9). One of Orr’s most significant claims is that intra-tribal conflict, rather than inter-ethnic conflict with non-Natives, is the larger issue affecting Native Americans today. Citing works such as Andrea Smith's Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (2005), the author claims the field of indigenous studies not only distorts the level of violence committed by non-Natives but it moves “hagiographically” by focusing on non-Native violence and suppressing the role of intra-tribal violence as a serious issue (pp. 43, 48). According to Orr, tribes have developed on a spectrum depending on three factors: how undisturbed they are, how often they have been exposed to wealth creation opportunities, and how often they have been exposed to traumatic events. While the Isleta Pueblos have been largely undisturbed in Orr’s view, fostering self-interest, the Lakotas have experienced high trauma, fostering melancholia, while the Citizen Pottawatomi have competing factions of melancholia and self-interest. These worldviews affect tribal affairs on a daily basis and play a more regular role in tribal life than outside violence according to Orr.

Girard and the “Sacrifice of the Mass”: Mimetic Theory and Eucharistic Theology

Research Article| May 01 2017 Girard and the “Sacrifice of the Mass”: Mimetic Theory and Eucharistic Theology Anthony R. Lusvardi, S.J. Anthony R. Lusvardi, S.J. Pontifical Atheneum of St. Anselm, Rome ANTHONY R. LUSVARDI is a Jesuit transitional deacon pursuing graduate studies in sacramental theology at the Pontifical Atheneum of St. Anselm in Rome. He completed previous degrees at Boston College, Loyola University Chicago, and Notre Dame. His pastoral work has included time in Haiti, northeast India, and on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. In addition to academic articles, he has published numerous short stories and literary essays. Before entering the Jesuits he served in the Peace Corps in Kazakhstan. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Contagion: Journal of Violence Mimesis and Culture (2017) 24: 159–190. https://doi.org/10.14321/contagion.24.1.0159 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Anthony R. Lusvardi; Girard and the “Sacrifice of the Mass”: Mimetic Theory and Eucharistic Theology. Contagion: Journal of Violence Mimesis and Culture 1 May 2017; 24 159–190. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/contagion.24.1.0159 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressContagion: Journal of Violence Mimesis and Culture Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2017 Michigan State University Press2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: ARTICLES You do not currently have access to this content.

Designing A Health System That Works For The Tribe.

After a crisis at its Indian Health Service hospital, the Rosebud Sioux Tribe imagines a health system that finally meets its needs.

Simon Ortiz’s Poetry of Crisis Ordinariness: Spiritual Uncertainty during a Rosebud Reservation Winter

Simon Ortiz’s Poetry of Crisis OrdinarinessSpiritual Uncertainty during a Rosebud Reservation Winter Reginald Dyck (bio) Key Words Lakota, Native spirituality, South Dakota, trauma … the gloomy dark, a winter that has entered the spirit. I do not know. / I have never known. / I may never know. … the galaxy shifts / … / and we will never quite know. —Simon Ortiz, After and Before the Lightning1 How does Native spirituality feel to a speaker struggling through a bleak Rosebud Reservation winter? “[L]ike sexuality, religion and spirituality also constitute intimate domains of feelings where ‘traumatic events’ are collectively processed and made meaningful, especially in colonial contexts,” Joanna Brooks explains.2 Her concern with spiritual experience in a time of trauma is part of a shift within Native religious studies away from theology or abstract beliefs and “towards close analysis of lived practice.”3 This perspective offers a useful standpoint for considering Simon Ortiz’s (Acoma Pueblo) poetry collection After and Before the Lightning. The title is a Lakota phrase referring to the beginning and end of prairie winters.4 This poetic account expresses the experience of Native spirituality in a difficult context: the harsh Northern Plains winter, the speaker’s distance from his Southwest home and traditions, the everyday trauma of continuing colonization, and also modern secular culture that questions the possibility of spirituality itself. The resulting structure of feeling that the poems present is spiritual uncertainty as the speaker struggles to reconcile belief and experience. Reflecting on the life that falls between autumn and spring, Ortiz depicts spiritual liminality as the poems engage the two meanings of the term apprehension: the act of conceptually grasping something but also the feeling of anxiety because of uncertainty. My argument is that spiritual apprehension in the first sense never fully reassures the speaker’s apprehension in the second. In spite of the book’s structure of hope and promise of spring renewal, the speaker’s experiences of spiritual misgivings during [End Page 1] a Rosebud Reservation winter are not resolved. After and Before the Lightning is marked by a probing experiential investigation of this spiritual problematic as well as a challenge to generic expectations for a hopeful conclusion. What makes the book’s spiritual journey distinctive is Ortiz’s unflinching and unresolved exploration of the disjuncture between belief and experience and the resulting difficulties in sustaining belief. The spiritual uncertainty described takes places within a specific historical context. In her essay “Thinking about Feeling Historical,” Lauren Berlant uses the term “crisis ordinariness” to describe “traumas of the social that are lived through collectively” and that create “the heightened perceptiveness” of the historical conditions one is living through as a group.5 Seldom is anything dramatic reported in After and Before the Lightning, only the day-to-day struggle to make sense of what people, and the speaker himself, are experiencing. The culturally and historically astute quality of Ortiz’s writing creates the heightened perception of everyday spiritual experience that results from “the loss of the freedom to be unconscious about the internal limits to their sovereignty.”6 That is, the speaker is forced into a questioning selfconsciousness because the usual framework for apprehending experience can no longer be unconsciously invoked. The resulting necessity of finding new ways of apprehension gives impetus to this poetry of crisis ordinariness. Traditional spiritual assumptions are no longer givens in this uncertain world, even as the speaker strives to reclaim them. Berlant explains, “Amidst the rise and fall of quotidian intensities a situation arises that provokes the need to think and adjust, to slow things down and to gather things up, to find things out and to wonder and ponder. What’s going on?”7 This is the key question for this book, its structure of feeling. This essay’s first main section sets forth the various contexts that shape the spiritual uncertainty the speaker experiences. Each of the sections that follow explores a section of the book. Rather than a pattern of struggle and resolution, the analysis finds themes and variations: efforts to connect quotidian experience to the cosmos, the harsh conditions of everyday life, the problem of making sense of these experiences and conditions, and, again, the...

Life among the Indians: First Fieldwork among the Sioux and Omahas by Alice C. Fletcher (review)

Reviewed by: Life among the Indians: First Fieldwork among the Sioux and Omahas by Alice C. Fletcher Robin Ridington Life among the Indians: First Fieldwork among the Sioux and Omahas. By Alice C. Fletcher. Edited and with an introduction by Joanna C. Scherer and Raymond J. DeMallie. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. ix + 418 pp. Illustrations, drawings, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $65.00 cloth. Alice Fletcher was a pioneer of what we now call participant observation ethnography as well as applied anthropology. She began her career as a lecturer on subjects having to do with American Indian antiquity and women’s issues. Because of this background she was already proficient in public speaking and writing for an educated audience when she began her first fieldwork at the age of 43. Fletcher undertook her travels to the Rosebud Sioux and Omaha reservations as a freelance writer, intent on being the first to document the lives of Indian women from “the Indian’s point of view” (101). She had previously met Thomas Henry Tibbles, his Omaha wife, Suzette, and her half-brother Francis LaFlesche on their tour of the East with Ponca chief Standing Bear. They agreed to be her guides to Indian country. At the Rosebud Sioux reservation she was witness to abuses by an Indian agent who proudly informed her, “I’ll have you understand that I regulate everything on this reservation but the weather” (121). She was horrified at the chaotic government distribution of cattle at Rosebud and was witness to the Sioux’s poverty and despair, which solidified her negative opinion of the reservation system. Following her time with the Sioux she returned to the Omahas, where she was welcomed into the family of Joseph LaFlesche. As a keen observer and eloquent writer, she recorded important details of Omaha social organization and ceremonial life. Fletcher’s views on assimilation and the transfer of reservation land to the hands of individual tribal members reflected the opinion of her host family. Joseph La-Flesche was a member of the “young men’s party” and [End Page 181] lived in the “village of the make-believe whitemen.” The narrative ends with Fletcher taking a position as land allotment officer for the government. Fletcher completed Life among the Indians in 1886 and hoped to have it published before the end of the decade. For reasons unknown, Charles Scribner, to whom she submitted the manuscript, never brought it into print. Fletcher went on to her pursuits as allotment agent and, in 1890, holder of the Thaw Fellowship, which supported her work without the need to publish commercially. Fletcher, with her collaborator and later coauthor Francis LaFlesche, went on to publish The Omaha Tribe in 1911. It elaborated on much of the ethnographic information in the earlier work, which was intended for a popular audience. The 1911 publication, however, in no way supplants the material finally published here by the University of Nebraska Press and skillfully introduced and annotated by Joanna C. Scherer and Raymond J. DeMallie. Fletcher uses reconstructed dialogue throughout the book and writes in a style that does not sound foreign or dated to the contemporary reader. Her writing reflects an Omaha way of storytelling. Her acceptance into the LaFlesche family gave her access to rich information about Omaha tribal life. She was sometimes told, laughingly, “Don’t you know you are almost as good as an Indian” (274). The book is an important contribution to Plains Indian ethnography and still an engrossing read. The best of premodern ethnographic writing, which this is, continues to have both literary and historical value. Robin Ridington Professor Emeritus of Anthropology University of British Columbia Copyright © 2015 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Contemporary Use of Wild Fruits by the Lakota in South Dakota and Implications for Cultural Identity

We present modern-day uses of traditionally used wild fruits among the Lakota on Rosebud Reservation as determined from interviews conducted in 2012. We quantify modern-day uses of wild fruits for food, beverages, tonics, medicines (physical and/or spiritual), and crafts. Use of buffaloberries, buffalo currants, chokecherries, riverbank grapes, plums, rosehips, and other plant parts remain as customs among the Lakota although the knowledge and practice of using wild fruits may be waning. Many interviewees implied that traditional uses of wild fruits could help sustain cultural identity.

Wes Colombe v. Rosebud Sioux TribeCase No. 13-1382, No. 13-1512, 2014 U.S. App. LEXIS 6226 (U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, April 4, 2014)

Wes Colombe v. Rosebud Sioux Tribe<i>Case No. 13-1382, No. 13-1512, 2014 U.S. App. LEXIS 6226 (U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, April 4, 2014)</i>