Rosebud Reservation Research Articles

Driving Hawk The Christmas Coat: Memories of My Sioux Childhood (review)

Reviewed by: Driving Hawk The Christmas Coat: Memories of My Sioux Childhood Elizabeth Bush Sneve, Virginia Driving Hawk . The Christmas Coat: Memories of My Sioux Childhood; illus. by Ellen Beier. Holiday House, 2011. [32p]. ISBN 978-0-8234-2134-3 $16.95 Reviewed from galleys Ad 4-8 yrs. As the daughter of the Episcopal priest on their South Dakota reservation, Virginia is resigned to her family's custom of putting the needs of congregation members before their own. She's badly in need of a new winter coat, but when the mission boxes of donations arrive, she's not really surprised when the "shimmering gray fur with a satiny silver lining" in her exact size goes to Evelyn, a decidedly unamiable classmate, instead. Evelyn's lovely rabbit-skin coat gets wet on the way to school and begins to smell; Evelyn's mother sends it back as unsuitable, and now Virginia is forced to give up even her own second-choice cloth coat from the donation box. But her sacrifice, however reluctant, is apparently rewarded when another box arrives that contains the hooded red coat Virginia wanted all along ("Sometimes the congregations in the East send boxes especially for the priest and his family. They ask what the family needs the most and then they try to send those items"). Beier's somewhat bland watercolors capably interpret the action, but young listeners may certainly wonder why this entire congregation is in need of charity and why nobody [End Page 170] seems to have paid attention to the needs of the Driving Hawk family in the past. No historical note is provided to address the implied poverty on the Rosebud reservation in the 1940s, or to explain whether the Christian Christmas rituals depicted here were prevalent across the reservation. Nevertheless, amid seasonal titles that emphasize the virtue of giving, it's refreshing to find a story that challenges listeners to imagine charity from the recipient's point of view. Copyright © 2011 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Reclaiming Futures initiative from a Sicangu Lakota tribal perspective: Lessons shared

This paper tells a story about one of the initiatives sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation known as Oyate Teca Owicakiya (Helping Young People). Oyate Teca Owicakiya was located on the Rosebud reservation, an extremely rural area in South Dakota. This was the only indigenous-based initiative funded by the Foundation. The initiative was undertaken by the Sinte Gleska University to provide services to reclaim youth from the justice system. This collaborative built on existing structures and community networks to strengthen and coordinate services for youth. The Reclaiming Futures model was adapted to the local setting by utilizing tribal resources. The background of the setting, its unique tribal governmental structure, demographics, and socioeconomic indicators are presented, and finally, eleven lessons are discussed. The success of the initiative was the strength and resiliency of the community itself, its members, and the network of individuals and organizations who came together for troubled tribal youth and their families.

Americanizing the West: Protestant and Catholic Missionary Education on the Rosebud Reservation, 1870–1920

Background This paper challenges the dominant story of Protestant and Catholic conflict by illustrating the critical role that mission schools played in creating denominational consensus in the West. Focus Protestant and Catholic missionaries cast aside their differences as they worked toward common goals to “civilize,” Christianize, and “Americanize” natives on reservations like Rosebud. United as whites against indigenous “others,” these predominantly female missionaries forged new, interdenominational conceptions of American identity through their work in western mission schools. Research Design The article offers historical analysis and interpretation. Conclusions Despite a long historiography emphasizing conflict between these groups, this study of a Protestant school and a Catholic school on Rosebud at the turn of the twentieth century provides new perspectives on the Americanization process at the center of schooling during this period. This examination of missionary education adds to our understanding of educative efforts among Native Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by illustrating how religion, and religious denominationalism, operated on the frontier. Against a long history of missionary work in the West and denominational conflict in the East, Protestants and Catholics alike affirmed their own “American” identity through their work on Rosebud.

In Memoriam: Ewert Cousins 1927–2009

Ewert H. Cousins, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus at Fordham University, and internationally renowned theologian, died in his home on Saturday, May 30, at age 82 after enduring 2 years of difficult health challenges. Dr. Cousins served as the Director of Fordham' s Spirituality Program. As the chief editorial consultant for the innovative 107 volume Paulist Press series, The Classics of Western Spirituality, he forged new ground in inspiring interreligious dialogue. This seminal opus brought together the best scholarship in the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions and created the impetus for numerous worldwide interreligious conferences, bringing members of different faiths together in dialogue. Dr. Cousins was the General Editor of the 25-volume series, World Spirituality: An Encyclopedic History of the Religious Quest (Crossroads). He authored the provocative and prophetic text, Christ of the 21st Century and Bonaventure and the Coincidence of Opposites. His other publications include Process theology: Basic Writings, Bonaventure: The Soul's Journey into God, the Tree of Life, the Life of Saint Francis; Global Spirituality Toward the Meeting of Mystical Paths, and Hope and the Future of Man. Cousins had a profound ability to integrate the wisdom of religion, spirituality, theology, philosophy, depth psychology, and literature. His vast and synthetic mind could easily encompass the nature of the psyche, according to Carl Jung, a psychological perspective that he found most harmonious in relation to some of the most critical and reflective insights of religion and theology. The Journal of Religion and Health: Psychology, Spirituality, and Medicine was most honored to have him serve on our Editorial Advisory Board for nearly 10 years. Cousins was born and raised in New Orleans, joined the Society of Jesus at age 1 8, and entered seminary studies at Grand Coteau, LA. In his early Jesuit years, he worked on the Rosebud Reservation where he found himself deeply drawn to the vibrancy and depth of Native American spirituality. This experience ignited a yearning to explore the religious experience of a diversity of cultural traditions, including a 1-year study of Islam at the Tantur Ecumenical Institute in Bethlehem, Palestine, and many trips to India to study

Three Plays: The Indolent Boys, Children of the Sun, The Moon in Two Windows by N. Scott Momaday

B o o k R e v i e w s Unknown. BILLY STEVENS READING A BOOK. Ca. 1910. Black-andwhite photograph. Courtesy of the Museum of the American West, Autry National Center, Los Angeles. 88.125.6. B o o k R e v ie w s 4 1 3 Three Plays: The Indolent Boys, Children of the Sun, The Moon in Two Windows. By N. Scott Momaday. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007. 177 pages, $24.95. Reviewed by Chadwick Allen Ohio State University In Three Plays, acclaimed Kiowa and Cherokee author N. Scott Momaday moves his forty-year exploration of the power of the oral tradition into the genre of stage and screen drama. “The telling of a story and the enactment of a play are closely related,” Momaday states in his preface, “for both are examples of oral tradition. Their vitality is that of the spoken word.” The stage play and the screenplay carry the oral tradition into “our time and place” (vii). Not surprisingly, key figures, narratives, images, and turns of phrase developed in Momaday’s earlier works ofpoetry, memoir, fiction, and nonfiction recur in these new plays. Moreover, similar to many of his earlier publications, Momaday’s new book is highly structured and mixes genre and media. Preceding the text of each play is an iconic image or set of images, a dedication, and a briefhistory of the play’s origin and performance. Less expectedly, Momaday’s three plays share a focus on the extraordinary lives of American Indian children. The stage play The Indolent Boys and the screenplay The Moon in Two Windows confront audiences with legacies of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century boarding schools. Children of the Sun, intended for children, retells the story of the birth and early exploits of the twin culture heroes of the Kiowa. The boarding school plays will be of particular interest to scholars and teachers of American Indian and western literatures. Each is based on particu­ lar historical events. The Indolent Boys, which Momaday dedicates “to those whose stories have fallen beyond reach,” is set in 1891, when three boys ran away from the Kiowa Boarding School at Anadarko, Oklahoma, and froze to death in a winter storm. Through a series of juxtapositions, the drama contrasts the Kiowa community’s intense sense of loss at the boys’ deaths with school officials’ attempts to justify both the specific actions that precipitated the boys’ escape and the school’s larger “civilizing” mission. In the character ofJohn Pai, a star pupil of the school, Momaday creates a focal point of articulate and ironic critique from within the school itself. The Moon in Two Windows, which Momaday dedicates “to all the brave children,” is set in 1912, when Luther Standing Bear (Lakota), one of the first graduates of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, brought his young son east to watch the famous football game played that year between Army (West Point) and Carlisle. In the stands, Standing Bear has a reunion with the school’s founder, Richard Henry Pratt, whom he has not seen in many years. The screenplay juxtaposes this brief encounter with Standing Bear’s remembered childhood: his introduction to Pratt at the age of twelve in 1879, his journey east from the Rosebud Reservation to attend Carlisle, his and other 4 1 4 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e W in t e r 2 0 0 9 students’ experiences there as adolescents. Interesting comparisons can be made with Standing Bear’s own account of these events in his 1928 book My People, the Sioux. Similar to the character John Pai, Momaday’s Standing Bear is the voice of articulate Indian critique and defiant Indian survival. Moreover, The Moon in Two Windows is haunted by the spirit of an Indian child who died en route to Carlisle. Momaday’s screenplay ends with the adult Standing Bear walking with his young son among the graves in the Carlisle cemetery. Some readers have criticized Momaday’s earlier works for seeming to avoid overt engagement with American Indian politics. Few will...

Deadliest Enemies: Law and the Making of Race Relations on and off Rosebud Reservation, and: Not Without Our Consent: Lakota Resistance to Termination, 1950–59 (review)

Deadliest Enemies: Law and the Making of Race Relations on and off Rosebud Reservation, and: Not Without Our Consent: Lakota Resistance to Termination, 1950–59 (review)

Rosebud Sioux: A Lakota People in Transition by Claes H. Jacobson (review)

Rosebud Sioux: A Lakota People in Transition by Claes H. Jacobson (review)

The "Indian Handshake" between Generations

The “Indian Handshake” between Generations Edward Valandra (bio) Anyone intimately familiar with Native Country can perhaps identify with the same "hole in the world" feeling I experienced on learning that Vine Deloria Jr. had joined our ancestors on November 13, 2005. A couple weeks prior to his passing, I also learned he had survived a heart attack. Hearing about his first heart attack, I pondered the difficult thought of Native Country without Vine. Now we are left to struggle with that reality. And because we could count on Vine to pen the next critique that would skin one of the whites' sacred cows, I find it a bit scary that he will no longer be among us. However, Vine did leave us his intellectual skinning knives, and we must apply the same degree of skill as Vine did whenever he skinned one of those sacred cows. These intellectual skinning knives are, in a manner of speaking, Vine Deloria Jr.'s magnum opus that he bequeathed to Native Country; and let us not be fooled, there remain plenty of sacred cows—manifest destiny (genocide), plenary power (colonialism), white privilege (racism), Native studies–lite (colonial laureates), and so on—that need skinning. I suppose describing Vine's work in such terms is a tribute to his influence. Moreover, the tributes to Vine that have poured in from all directions prove that he attained a unique status within Native Country: he was our favorite son. So, when asked to write a tribute to Vine, "What," I thought, "has not been written about Vine and his work since November 13, 2005, that I could add? How might I do justice to [End Page 157] Vine or his life's work?" In searching for an appropriate tribute, I turned to Lakota traditions, since we measure the quality of a person by them, and they in turn answered these difficult questions. Our kola pi tradition, a highly respected relationship among Lakota men, especially among our grandfathers' generation, comes to mind as I think about Vine. This tradition did not manifest itself between Vine and me but instead between Vine and my father, Cato Valandra. Because of their kola relationship, I can offer a narrative about Vine that embodies the gratitude we felt, the praise he earned, and the affection we have for him. I imagine that people who had the good fortune to spend time with Vine, if only briefly, will understand what I mean when I say that Vine's way of doing things is reminiscent of an "Indian handshake" of a bygone era. My father, Cato Valandra, would recall that—despite being retired from office in 1969 by the Sicangu people as president of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe (1962–69)—throughout his presidency, a handshake between Lakota pi made a promise or a favor inviolate. In reality, the promise or favor might evolve into a metahandshake, because a family, a tiospaye, a society, or a community would perhaps recognize not only the importance of a promise made or favor to be returned, but also that an Indian handshake between two or more individuals signified honorable and respectful relations. It has been several years since Vine invited me to do graduate work at the University of Colorado, and during those years, I have come to acknowledge that, in some inestimable way, Vine's invitation was perhaps returning a favor to my father. During the politically charged period of the early 1970s, I first came to know Vine through his writing. Going to a public high school on the reservation, I did not, thanks to a wasicu education, possess the range of intellectual and political frameworks to comprehend what was transpiring throughout Native Country in the late 1960s and early 1970s—the occupation of Alcatraz, the Trail of Broken Treaties, the takeover of the BIA offices in Washington, D.C., and Wounded Knee II. During this period of our political resistance against white colonialism, Native Country experienced a profound reawakening. We also know that when these acts of decolonization occurred, the wasicu dismissed them as nothing more than the efforts of a few disgruntled Indians who had an ax to grind with white colonial society. Years...

Native Waters: Integrating Scientific and Cultural Ways of Knowing about Water

Away needs to be found to make young people want to learn the importance of water, before it is too late and our information is lost forever. —Rosebud Sioux elder.

Deadliest Enemies: Law and the Making of Race Relations on and Off Rosebud Reservation

Deadliest Enemies: Law and the Making of Race Relations on and Off Rosebud Reservation

"Deadliest Enemies": Law and the Making of Race Relations on and off Rosebud Reservation

"Deadliest Enemies": Law and the Making of Race Relations on and off Rosebud Reservation

Deadliest Enemies: Law and the Making of Race Relations on and off Rosebud Reservation

Deadliest Enemies: Law and the Making of Race Relations on and off Rosebud Reservation. Thomas Biolsi. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. ix. 240 pp., maps, tables, references, index.

A Rosebud Reservation Winter Count, circa 1751-1752 to 1886-1887

This is a discussion of a newly found winter count of a Lakota tiyospaye(extended kinship group) that eventually ended up on the Rosebud Reservation created for the Sicangu (Brule). The count is on muslin, measuring 89 centimeters by 176 centimeters. It consists of 136 pictographs, most drawn in black ink with colored ink washes, that cover a span approximately from 1751-2 to 1886-7. The count was obtained by either John A. Anderson or Myrtle Miller Anderson and passed on to their family. It resurfaced in 1998, in an old trunk, and was donated to the Smithsonian Institution in the fall of 2000. The count is closely related to the one on a tipi cover that was photographed by John Anderson in 1895 and is possibly the basis for the cover.

Breaking the Cycle of Alcohol Problems Among Native Americans

This study explores methods of improving the treatment of alcoholism among Native American people by integrating culturally relevant practices into treatment methodology. Primary to the findings of this study are the opinions and experiences of four Lakota people living on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, individuals who have worked with alcoholism in their community for a number of years. Also important is an understanding of the history of alcoholism among Native American people, including forms of cultural breakdown that lead to increased levels of alcohol problems. Findings suggest that alcoholism treatment programs that integrate Native American culture and traditions into the recovery process will be more likely to be accepted by Native American alcoholics than mainstream rehabilitation programs that ignore cultural factors.

"Deadliest enemies": law and the making of race relations on and off Rosebud reservation

"Deadliest enemies": law and the making of race relations on and off Rosebud reservation

"The Deadliest Enemies": Law and the Making of Race Relations on and off Rosebud Reservation

Thomas Biolsi, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.Reviewer: Tony FisherUniversity of AlbertaDeadliest Enemies is an excellent book. It's not perfect, but then, no really good anthropology book is. Deadliest Enemies begins well. The Introduction introduces us to things we should know but probably don't. Chapter 1 is a good, brief review of Reservation's history and how its present legal status or conundrum came to be. The book carries on through four chapters focused primarily on specific cases and their associated legal issues. The final chapter and conclusion point to impact of Indian law discourse.Biolsi does a good job of keeping lawsuits and circumstances which lead to lawsuit, circumstances surrounding trial and outcome of suit, in picture. This is very important because Sicangu Lakota (or Rosebud Sioux Tribe) must fight complex legal-political battles on alien ground. An 'alien ground' which is chimerical too.The ground is owned by Sicangu Lakota (whose nationhood is denied). But, their homeland is actually held by people who are contesting legal-political issues with them. And contest is in alien courtrooms and legalese, alien to Lakota.As Biolsi says early on, a central theme of this book is contradiction and indeterminancy that lies at heart of discourse of federal Indian law--as well as consequences of this for Indian-White relations (p. 11). The origins of contradiction lie in legal (and mythical) charter of United States itself. The Declaration of Independence contains a statement of rights of man from which it excludes merciless Indian savages among whom might be Sicangu Lakota. Another of origins is further exclusion of the natives, who were heathens as aliens from American humanity by Chief Justice John Marshall (p. 12).Then, U.S. Congress excluded not taxed from citizenship, when it gave citizenship to former slaves, and then, Supreme Court of United States kept individual Indians from citizenship, even it they had dropped their tribal affiliation (Ibid.). This was case notwithstanding having ruled, Indian Nations were not real nations, but denominated domestic dependent nations (p. 13). To Canadians this may sound familiar. It is similar to views expressed by Premier Gordon Campbell, of British Columbia, regarding First Nations of Province and their Treaties.These exclusions are crucial. …

Welfare Reform on Rosebud Reservation: Challenges for Tribal Policy

Welfare Reform on Rosebud Reservation: Challenges for Tribal Policy

Deadliest Enemies: Law and the Making of Race Relations on and off Rosebud Reservation. By Thomas Biolsi. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. Pp. xiii+240.

<i>Deadliest Enemies: Law and the Making of Race Relations on and off Rosebud Reservation</i>. By Thomas Biolsi. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. Pp. xiii+240.

Deadliest Enemies: Law and the Making of Race Relations on and off the Rosebud Reservation

Deadliest Enemies: Law and the Making of Race Relations on and off the Rosebud ReservationThomas Biolsi (Berkeley: University of California Press,2001).

Deadliest Enemies: Law and the Making of Race Relations on and off Rosebud Reservation

Journal Article Deadliest Enemies: Law and the Making of Race Relations on and off Rosebud Reservation Get access Biolsi Thomas, Deadliest Enemies: Law and the Making of Race Relations on and off Rosebud Reservation. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2001. xiii, 240 pp. $35.00. John R. Wunder John R. Wunder University of Nebraska-Lincoln Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar American Journal of Legal History, Volume 45, Issue 3, July 2001, Pages 324–326, https://doi.org/10.2307/3185329 Published: 01 July 2001