Sioux Nation Research Articles

A Tribute to Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

Abstract: Elizabeth Cook-Lynn was a professor and writer of English literature and Native American Indian studies. Her writings contribute significantly to a growing body of Native American literature that addresses controversial issues pertaining to tribal sovereignty and treaty rights, but also to mindfully responsibilities of sovereign nations. She strengthened the Native voice when she helped to found the Wicazo Sa Review , a scholarly journal to inform subscribers nationally and internationally of the state of Native American affairs in the United States, especially those of the Oceti Sakowin Oyate, heretofore known people of the Great Sioux Nation. Always an engaging intellectual and thinker, she founded and co-chartered the Oak Lake Writers' Society, a one-of-a-kind tribal writers model, to assist aspiring writers to continue the revitalization of the Oceti Sakowin oral and written literary tradition. Dr. Cook-Lynn wrote curriculum and pedagogical strategies to help scaffold the emerging discipline of American Indian Studies. To raise awareness and respect for contributions of notable Oceti Sakowin leaders, activists, and writers, she helped to create the First Nations Sculpture Garden in Rapid City, South Dakota. In summary, Dr. Cook-Lynn lived and practiced her cultural values for which she received numerous prestigious awards and national recognition.

The Treaty Imaginary and Tribal Sovereignty in South Dakota

This article examines the history of the South Dakota "Mitigation Act" (as it is commonly know by Lakota people) in the 1990s and early 2000s. The Mitigation Act, enacted in 1998 and implemented over a period of nine years, was meant to create a negotiated agreement between tribal governments and the state for jurisdiction over the regulation of hunting and fishing on the Missouri River that would avoid a long history of bitter litigation over jurisdictional contests. The act was also meant to return lands held by the US Army Corps of Engineers, originally acquired for the purpose of constructing three main-stem dams on the Missouri, to the tribes that had originally held the land, and to the State of South Dakota. Both the goal of negotiating state and tribal jurisdiction, and returning lands to the state and the tribes, led to heightened intensity of the very tribal-state conflicts that the act was meant avoid. Based primarily on the senatorial records of Senator Thomas Daschle (D-SD) and the gubernatorial papers of William Janklow (R), the article examines the logic of the "treaty imaginary" among Lakota tribal governments and their constituencies, and the liberal democratic principle of negotiation by "all interested parties" at the center of development of the Mitigation Act. The article ties the conflict over the act to its fundamental misrecognition of the continuing validity of treaties for Lakota people, and the family resemblance the act had to the illegal taking of the Black Hills for many Lakota and other Great Sioux Nation tribes.

Cheyenne River Sioux Traditions and Resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline

The No Dakota Access Pipeline resistance movement provides a poignant example of the way in which cultural, spiritual, and oral traditions remain authoritative in the lives of American Indian peoples, specifically the Lakota people. Confronted with restrictions of their religious freedoms and of access to clean drinking water due to construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), members of Lakota communities engaged with traditions specific to their communities to inform and structure the No DAPL resistance movement. A series of interviews conducted on the Cheyenne River Sioux Nation with tribal members reveal that Lakota spiritual traditions have been integral to every aspect of the movement, including the motivations for, organization of, and understanding of the future of the movement.

State-Directed Intervention in the Santee Dakota Sioux Nation: A Comparative Case?

Historically, education policy has frequently framed American Indians, a contested term long-used to describe peoples indigenous to the United States, through a deficit-lens as “other.” While CER p...

Rewriting and Rerighting Indigenous Histories

Rewriting and Rerighting Indigenous Histories Andrew H. Fisher (bio) Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. London and New York: Verso, 2019. x + 310 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. $26.95. David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present. New York: Riverhead Books, 2019. 512 pp. Notes and index. $28.00. In Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (second edition 2012), Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith posed a provocative question: “Is History Important for Indigenous Peoples?” Her answer was ambivalent but affirmed the need for “a critique of how we, as the Other, have been represented or excluded from various accounts. Every issue has been approached by indigenous peoples with a view to rewriting and rerighting our position in history. Indigenous peoples want to tell our own stories, write our own versions, in our own ways, for our own purposes” (p. 29). Over the past twenty years, dozens of Native American authors and scholars have turned to that task, yet the process of decolonizing the academy and the larger society has only just begun. The books considered in this review strike two more blows against the intellectual structure of settler colonialism and its logic of elimination, which seeks to destroy Indigenous cultures in order to replace them. Although they differ considerably in style and tone, Our History Is the Future and The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee share Smith’s commitment to “rewriting and rerighting” the position of Indigenous peoples in both the past and the present. Nick Estes (Kul Wicasa/Lower Brule) and David Treuer (Ojibwe) write to counter a historical tradition that Estes calls “distorted” and “deeply disempowering” (p. 16). Their interest in doing so is not historiographical but unabashedly presentist, as they seek to change the terms under which Native communities live today. “There is no separation between past and present,” argues Estes, “meaning that an alternative future is also determined by our understanding of our past. Our history is the future” (pp. 10–11). The history of Indigenous peoples is also, they insist, integral to the history of modern America and the world. [End Page 63] Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance emerged directly from the confrontation noted in its subtitle. Estes, a professor of American Studies and a Lakota citizen of the Oceti Sakowin (People of the Seven Council Fires, or Sioux Nation), was among the “Water Protectors” who stood up against Energy Transfer Partners and its government backers in 2016–17. For more than six months, a coalition of tribal members, environmental activists, and Indigenous allies from around the world staged peaceful protests to prevent the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) from carrying crude oil beneath the Missouri River (Mni Sose) just upstream from the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota. Their movement drew both international media attention and militarized police, dispatched from multiple agencies and jurisdictions to clear the pipeline’s path by force. In the ugly crackdown that followed, law enforcement deployed anti-riot gear, armored vehicles, pepper spray, tear gas, water cannons, LRAD acoustic weapons, and counterinsurgency techniques against people armed only with drums and prayer feathers. Ultimately, the Water Protectors failed to stop the “Black Snake” (Zuzeca Sapa) from crossing the Missouri, but Estes found hope in the “meaningful solidarities” (p. 7) that had formed among activists from many walks of life. He also found inspiration for a book. Less than two years later, he published Our History Is the Future in order to “chart a historical road map for collective liberation” (p. 22). Estes’s book places the #NoDAPL movement in the larger context of Oceti Sakowin resistance to the entwined powers of settler colonialism and corporate capitalism. Since the early nineteenth century, when Lewis and Clark described the Sioux as the “vilest miscreants of the savage race” (p. 74), the tribes have generally been regarded as obstacles to American expansion and economic development on the Great Plains. Their heroic defiance of U.S. hegemony has made the Lakotas especially a favored subject among scholars...

A Study on the works of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn with reference to Indian Genocide

This work is a study on the works of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn who is proficient scholar and hails from South Dakotas and Sioux nations and their turmoil, anguish and lamentation to retrieve their lands and preserve their culture and race. Many a aboriginals were killed in the post colonization. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn grieves and her lamentation for the people of Dakotas yields sympathy towards the survived at Wounded Knee massacre and the great exploitation of the livelihood of the indigenous people and the cruelty of American Federal government. Treaty conserved indigenous lands had been lost due to the title of Sioux Nation and many Dakotas and Dakotas had been forced off from their homelands due to the anti-Indian legislation, poverty and federal Indian – white American policy. The whites had no more regard for or perceiving the native’s peoples’ culture and political status as considered by Jefferson’s epoch. And to collect bones and Indian words, delayed justice all these issues tempt her to write. The authors accuses that America was in ignorance and racism and imperialism which was prevalent in the westward movement. The natives want to recall their struggles, and their futures filled with uncertainty by the reality and losses by the white and Indian life in America which had undergone deliberate diminishment by the American government sparks the writer to back for the indigenous peoples. This multifaceted study links American study with Native American studies. This research brings to highlight the unchangeable scenario of the Native American who is in the bonds of as American further this research scrutinizes Elizabeth’s diplomacy and legalized decolonization theory which reflects in her literature career and her works but defies to her own doctrines.

This is Indian land: a call to museums in addressing mass incarceration of American Indians

ABSTRACTThis essay seeks to explore why inclusion of Indian people is fundamental in the difficult histories and dialogues regarding mass incarceration and to challenge the role of museums in ensuring that Indian people are centrally located in the discussion. I argue that the inherent roots of mass incarceration are historically situated in Indian dispossession and the obtainment of Indian land, and to omit this from any narrative is irresponsible. I employ the use of three stories – a piece of street-art by Native artist Jaque Fragua, the occupation of Alcatraz Island, and the current resistance in the Standing Rock Sioux Nation to the Dakota Access Pipeline – to discuss the inherent ties between sovereignty, land, settler colonialism and how they connect to mass incarceration in the United States.

The Great Sioux Nation V. The 'Black Snake': Native American Rights and the Keystone Xl Pipeline

The Keystone XL Pipeline has been shrouded in controversy almost since its conception. As a structure intending to cross the Canadian border into the United States, the pipeline must receive presidential approval before construction can commence. Since 2008, TransCanada has attempted to obtain this approval unsuccessfully. Criticism against the pipeline has focused largely on the negative environmental impacts that will likely accompany its construction and utilization, and it is precisely these environmental concerns that have ultimately stymied presidential approval and made international headlines. In November 2015, the U.S. government denied TransCanada’s application, effectively killing the Keystone XL project. While the Keystone XL project no longer poses a physical threat to the environment, an overview of the U.S. government’s consideration of the project reveals drastic flaws in process, specifically in regards to the human rights of a substantial portion of individuals who would be negatively affected by the Keystone XL Pipeline — the Sioux Nation.The pipeline is set to run through a substantial portion of the Black Hills of South Dakota — the sovereign and treaty lands of the Great Sioux Nation. This “black snake” threatens not only the environment of the Sioux lands, but also sites sacred to the tribes. The Sioux Nation has risen up in defense of their lands, and their right to free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) before the state can undertake projects on their indigenous lands. While the U.S. government maintains it has complied with domestic standards regarding Indian consultation and with its perverse interpretation of the right to FPIC protected under the U.N. Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, its actions have fallen drastically short of those expected by the United Nations and required by the inter-American system. This paper argues that under the American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man, the United States is obligated to obtain the fully informed consent of the Sioux Nation before approving the Keystone XL pipeline.

Witness: A Hunkpapha Historian’s Strong- Heart Song of the Lakotas by Josephine Waggoner (review)

Reviewed by: Witness: A Hunkpapha Historian’s Strong- Heart Song of the Lakotas by Josephine Waggoner Edward Valandra Witness: A Hunkpapha Historian’s Strong-Heart Song of the Lakotas by Josephine Waggoner. Edited and with an introduction by Emily Levine. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. vii + 745 pp. Illustrations, photographs, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $85 cloth. A book written from a Native person’s point of view provides a rare—and therefore much-needed—narrative about American society’s impact on indigenous peoples. Emily Levine’s 745-page work, Witness: A Hunkpapha Historian’s Strong- Heart Song of the Lakotas provides such a narrative. Josephine Waggoner, a Hunkpapha Titunwan, lived at a time when American colonization intruded into Oceti Sakowin Oyate daily life. Nearly half the book speaks to how Waggoner experienced this intrusion; the remaining half is sixty short biographies of Lakota and Dakota leaders who led their nation through difficult transitions. For example, several Lakota leaders remained in Canada after the 1876 Greasy Grass Fight as political refugees, but some returned (e.g., Sitting Bull) and some did not (e.g., Inkpaluta). During this period, Americans were annexing the twenty-six-million-acre Great Sioux Reservation as US territory, which led to the present-day reservations (1889 Sioux “Agreement”); US legislators [End Page 117] were implementing a land- allotment scheme on reservations at the turn of the nineteenth century that further reduced Native land (e.g., “surplus land”); strong Dakota/Lakota leaders were being neutralized; and the United States was sending Native children, such as Josephine Waggoner, off to boarding schools to be “educated.” Operated in military fashion throughout much of their existence, boarding schools were designed to “kill the Indian” within in order to “save the [hu]man.” Josephine Waggoner was among the first generation of Lakota children to experience boarding school. She was shipped off to the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, a technical school primarily for blacks. Levine’s documentation, which is quite thorough, reveals that, among other interesting insights, the Sioux Nation was well represented at Hampton Institute. Waggoner’s experience gives insight into a topic deserving more scholarship: the racial contact between Native and blacks other than as warriors and buffalo soldiers. Waggoner discloses how Native children perceived education as they observed how blacks at Hampton desired an education. But Waggoner also notes how whites at Hampton frowned upon, if not discouraged, interracial intimacy between Natives and blacks. Waggoner’s Hampton Institute experience is one of many that cuts through US colonization’s propensity to dehumanize nonwhites. Other critical aspects of the book make Witness a prized resource: the manuscript’s prepublishing journey; Levine’s extensive footnoting; the inclusion of Lakota/Dakota orthography; as well as maps, pictures, and appendixes. Finally, I concur with Levine’s assessment that nonacademics are doing some of the most important research in Native Studies. Witness is proof enough. Edward Valandra Founder, Community for the Advancement of Native Studies (CANS) St. Paul, Minnesota Copyright © 2015 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska—Lincoln

The Great Sioux Nation: Sitting in Judgment on America Roxanne DunbarOrtiz, Editor. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013.

Great Sioux Nation: Sitting in Judgment on America Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, Editor. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013.The revised edition of Great Sioux Nation raises questions about not only the position of this sovereign nation within American borders but also about American political, legal, and cultural policies in contemporary and historical contexts. Clearly a product of the 1970s, a time of activism, anger, and political and cultural upheaval, this text bears witness to that change and contributes a verse that still resonates today for indigenous peoples. vast majority of the documents included are primary sources, such as witness testimony from the 1974 trial transcript in the case of the United States v. Consolidated Wounded Knee Cases on the motion to dismiss for want of jurisdiction, which was a hearing about the meaning of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 and whether it gave the United States permission to strip the Sioux Nation of its sovereignty and land. In addition to this testimony, the editor includes the full Fort Laramie excerpts from the court's decision to deny the Sioux Nation their sovereignty, newspaper clippings of trial coverage, brief contextual and historical overviews by well-known Native American scholars, post-trial statements from the defendants' attorney, a glossary of important cultural terms such as treaty, sovereign, tribe, and traditional, a comprehensive bibliography designed to guide further study, and sectional interludes of poetic words by Henry Crow Dog, a traditional Sioux elder and witness. For scholars interested in the activism of the 1970s, Great Sioux Nation contextualizes the broader activist impulse, raises questions about these issues that in many ways remain unresolved, and emphasizes the struggle over land, sovereignty, and terminology.Texts analyzing America focus on broad shifts in culture, economics, and politics, such as America in the Seventies (2004), Seventies: Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (2001), and Stayin' Alive: and the Last Days of the Working Class (2010). Some books spotlight remnants of 1960s activism such as Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism (2010), which happily includes three chapters on indigenous movements and decolonization efforts. Philip J. Deloria writes in the foreword to this new edition, The writing seems to cry out with anxieties about form and legitimacy and authority that also say something about the 1970s (v).The Great Sioux Nation starts to become less heated in word choice, calmer and equally assertive, but more positive as it progresses from the writings of Simon Ortiz, Vine Deloria, Jr. …

Partnership, knowledge translation, and substance abuse prevention with a First Nations community.

Having identified substance abuse as an issue of concern in their community, the Alexis Nakota Sioux Nation invited University of Alberta researchers to partner on the cultural adaptation, delivery, and evaluation of a school-based drug and alcohol abuse prevention program. Researchers conducted a literature review of available drug and alcohol prevention programs for children and youth, identifying the Life Skills Training (LST) program as a viable model for cultural adaptation. Four program objectives were developed: (1) Review and cultural adaptation of the elementary and junior high LST programs, (2) delivery of the adapted programs, (3) measurement of changes in students' knowledge of the negative effects of drug and alcohol use, attitudes toward drugs and alcohol, drug and alcohol refusal and life skills, and changes in self-esteem/self-concept, and (4) documentation of the community's experience of the project. Using the principles of community-based participatory research (CBPR), we employed both qualitative and quantitative methods to evaluate the impact of the project. Qualitative evaluation of the program adaptation and implementation were both positive. Qualitative measures of program impact on students revealed a positive effect, whereas results of the quantitative measures were mixed. Culturally adapted, evidence-based programs can have a positive effect on Aboriginal youth and their communities. Strategies to expand knowledge translation (KT) when working with Aboriginal communities include working to create an "ethical space" that draws on the strengths of both Western and Indigenous worldviews.

Warrior nations: the United States and Indian peoples

Roger L. Nichols’s Warrior Nations is, in essence, military history written from both an Indian and an American point of view. While the book’s organization is chronological, only eight of the most brutal encounters in American history are included— the struggle for the Ohio Valley, Jackson’s suppression of the “Red Sticks,” the Arikara War of 1823, the Minnesota-Dakota Conflict of 1862, the Cheyenne Arapaho War of 18641865, the Chiricahua Apache War of 1861-1872, and the Nez Perce War of 1877. All of these conflicts have some similar elements, but Nichols has not chosen them primarily for their comparative aspects. Instead, he challenges a prevailing model of military history that focuses on government policy, congressional activity, the Office of Indian Affairs, the moods and actions of army officers, and even the aggressiveness, or what has recently been called the “settler sovereignty,” of white pioneers. Nichols focuses on the complexity of tribal, village, and even band politics and the rationale for conflict, in order to provide a better analysis of many of the most important conflicts in history. In some ways, this book is a throwback to such general histories as Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1971), The Long Death (1964), or The Last Days of the Sioux Nation (1963). But Nichols has provided a much sharper and more objective understanding of these tragic events. The basic conclusion of the study comes early. The earliest white colonists began the massive invasion of Indian lands; as millions of Europeans arrived, conflict over the land was inevitable. “Warfare could not have been avoided,” the author concludes, “even if all interracial dealings had been honest and fair, or even if the federal system for dealing with tribal peoples had worked flawlessly” (pp. xii-xiii). But what made conflict even more compelling, according to the author, is that the United States seems to revel in war—Nichols notes that nineteenth-century wars with Indians have only shifted in subsequent centuries into conflicts with peoples outside the country. It was, then, a warring nation of Europeans that encountered tribal societies that were themselves often bred of warfare. Most readers will lack knowledge of the Arikara War of 1823. Nichols provides a convincing narrative that demonstrates that the conflict erupted over increased trade competition for furs, and from the precarious position of these Indians in relation to the Teton Sioux and the more northern Mandan and Hidatsa. In a similar fashion, Nichols analyzes the events that led up to the Minnesota-Dakota War of 1862—not well known to historians either—noting the causes

Infinite West: Travels in South Dakota by Fraser Harrison (review)

Reviewed by: Infinite West: Travels in South Dakota by Fraser Harrison Paul Baggett Infinite West: Travels in South Dakota. By Fraser Harrison. Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2012. x + 234 pp. Map, index. $17.95 paper. British writer Fraser Harrison’s travel narrative departs from travelogue convention. Rather than describe foreign locations for readers back home, his aim is to “describe the face that South Dakota showed to the tourist, but with this twist: that [he] would also be describing the face to its owner.” Harrison thus directs his impressions toward South Dakotans themselves, particularly toward those who think they have nothing new to learn about the state. Calling it his “homage to South Dakota,” Harrison divides his book into seven chapters: one dedicated to his namesake town of Harrison, South Dakota, another to Lewis and Clark’s expedition through the area, and others devoted to more famous (and infamous) locations—the Badlands, Mount Rushmore, Deadwood, and Wounded Knee. The final chapter “sketches” additional places he visited en route to his primary destinations. In writing primarily of well-known locations for South Dakota readers, Harrison is especially effective at defamiliarizing the familiar. He notes that Mount Rushmore, America’s so-called shrine to democracy,” was sculpted by a man with connections to the Ku Klux Klan, that the legendary status of “Wild Bill” Hickok is more the product of dime westerns than history, and that twenty of the soldiers who participated in the brutal massacre at Wounded Knee received the Medal of Honor, the military’s most prestigious award. While Harrison, a former freelance broadcaster for the bbc whose articles have appeared in major newspapers in the United Kingdom, does not pretend to be a historian of the Great Plains, he sufficiently contextualizes the places he visits, offering details often missing from tourist books. But the most engaging moments of the book occur when the narrative shifts from the historiographical to the personal. Harrison brings an aesthetic sensibility to his text, evidenced when he describes in rich detail the Badlands as a moonscape “composed of pink and cream rock piled in layers but scattered across the plain like remnants of an exploded ice cream,” or when he senses “a forlorn and abandoned air” in the well-preserved yet empty town of Yankton. Such artful prose often leads to personal reflection, such as when he compares the insularity of Harrison, South Dakota (population 45), to the English villages where he and his wife have lived, or when the eroding Badlands conjures feelings of his own aging. Harrison is not immune to politicizing his impressions along the way. His characterization of the mass grave at Wounded Knee as “a construction of striking ugliness” furthers his broader assessment of this massacre site that effectively ended the American Indian wars as among the most neglected and grossly misunderstood locations within the state, a place where “a spirit of grief and rage still seems to hang in the air.” Similarly, he characterizes the grandiose style of Mount Rushmore as “reminiscent of the monumental classicism beloved of dictators in the 1930s,” confirming his earlier premonition that in some cases, art cannot [End Page 192] be considered “in aesthetic isolation from its historical or biographical context.” In this case, Mount Rushmore appears to Harrison less a “shrine to democracy” than the expression of a sculptor who held a range of undemocratic beliefs. Of course, such commentary will very likely turn off a few proud South Dakotans, despite his many gestures toward sensitivity. Just as he unsettles a pious ninety-one-year-old Harrison resident by divulging his atheism, so too might he aggravate a few readers when he draws a relationship between the religious certitude that typify members of Harrison (almost exclusively members of the Dutch Reformed Church) and their relative unconcern that the farm communities they know and love are quickly disappearing. His discussion of Lewis and Clark’s expedition may also trigger critical responses, particularly from the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota of the Great Sioux Nation whose ancestors’ lives and their own were radically changed as a result of the expedition. While Harrison acknowledges in one brief aside that Lewis and Clark “may have...

"Making a Place of Respect": Lessons Learned in Carrying Out Consent Protocol With First Nations Elders

This article explores the issue of informed consent by First Nations Elders modifying and implementing a substance abuse prevention program for youth, Nimi Icinohabi, among the Alexis Nakota Sioux Nation. The Elders who approved and guided the research maintained that informed consent procedures carried out by the Western academic institutions were redundant given adherence to their own culturally based protocol. The objective of this article is to present lessons learned regarding the cultural basis of consent involving First Nations Elders to improve our own and other researchers' ethical practice in this context. Two focus groups were held with our team of community and university-based researchers (n = 6) to discuss our experience of the Elder consent procedures used during the project. Elder involvement was integral to the success of the program. Using methods of consent originating from Western thought and given historical and ongoing issues of trust with Western institutions, signing consent forms was unacceptable to them and perceived as undermining their own ethical practices. An oral consent process utilizing cultural protocol and a tool to keep track of participation in this process was subsequently approved by our Research Ethics Board (REB) and used successfully. When researchers use standard informed consent practices, they risk losing the trust of community partners by undermining cultural values and practices. As academic researchers, it is our ethical responsibility, in the spirit of restorative justice, to honor the principles of beneficence and justice in research by ensuring consent within the context of cultural protocol.

Remembering the "Forgotten Child": The American Indian Child Welfare Crisis of the 1960s and 1970s

Remembering the "Forgotten Child":The American Indian Child Welfare Crisis of the 1960s and 1970s Margaret D. Jacobs (bio) On Christmas Day 1975, Marcia Marie Summers was born to Charlene Summers, a member and resident of the Standing Rock Sioux Nation in North Dakota. A few months later, a white couple from Indiana approached the young mother and offered to care for her infant while Summers attended school. (Just two months before, the couple had filed an adoption petition in the Standing Rock Tribal Court for another Indian child, but the court had denied their request.) Assuming she was making a temporary arrangement, Summers agreed and signed a document giving the Indiana couple power of attorney over Marcia Marie in parent-child-related actions. Immediately, the couple departed with the baby from the reservation and returned to Indiana. Summers realized that the couple intended to permanently adopt her daughter, so she asked the Standing Rock Tribal Court to intervene. When the couple ignored the tribal court's order to return the child to her mother, Summers and tribal authorities requested the help of the Association on American Indian Affairs (AAIA). Their attorney filed a writ of habeas corpus on Summers's behalf in the Washington County, Indiana, Circuit Court, and the judge ordered Marcia Marie returned to her mother, noting the tribe's exclusive jurisdiction in the case.1 Like Summers, in the 1960s and 1970s, thousands of other American Indian parents, grandparents, and caretakers suffered the removal of their children and their placement in non-Indian foster or adoptive homes. Unlike Summers, however, many Indian families struggled for years to regain their children, and some were never able to effect their return. By the late 1960s, many Indian tribes had become deeply troubled by this practice. In 1968, having endured an inordinate number of [End Page 136] such cases, the Devils Lake (now Spirit Lake) Sioux Tribe of North Dakota requested that the AAIA conduct an investigation into the practice. The AAIA found that of 1,100 Devils Lake Sioux Indians under twenty-one years of age living on the Fort Totten reservation, 275, or 25 percent, had been separated from their families.2 Suspecting that this practice devastated other Indian communities as well, the AAIA engaged in a painstaking process to amass similar data from state social services agencies and private placement agencies across the nation. They discovered that in most states with large American Indian populations, 25 to 35 percent of Indian children had been separated from their families and placed in foster or adoptive homes or in institutions at a per capita rate far higher than that of non-Indian children.3 How did it come to pass that the fostering and adoption of Indian children outside their families and communities had reached these crisis proportions by the late 1960s? State welfare authorities and Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) officials alleged a dramatic rise in unmarried Indian mothers with unwanted children and claimed that many Indian individuals and families lacked the resources and skills to properly care for their own children. Claiming to be concerned with the best interests of the Indian child, the BIA promoted the increased fostering and adoption of Indian children in non-Indian families. Indian families and their advocates charged instead that many social workers were using ethnocentric and middle-class criteria to unnecessarily remove Indian children from their families and communities. Through creating their own child welfare organizations and legal codes, as well as working for the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), Indian activists and their allies sought to bring Indian child welfare under the control of Indian nations. Given the shockingly high estimates of Indian children who were fostered or adopted outside their communities, surprisingly little historical research has been done on this topic. Most of the scholarship on Indian adoption has been in the fields of sociology, psychology, social work, and law. It has included outcomes studies and oral histories of adopted Indian children, debates about social work practice, and examinations of the new legal framework created by the passage of ICWA in 1978.4 Historians of American adoption have briefly mentioned Indian adoption, but they have generally subsumed...

Unjustifiable Expectations: Laying to Rest the Ghosts of Allotment-Era Settlers

When the Supreme Court decides whether a tribe has jurisdiction over non-members on its reservation or addresses the related issue of reservation diminishment, it often refers implicitly or explicitly to non-Indians’ justifiable expectations. These presumed non-Indian expectations arise from the fact that, when Congress opened up reservations to non-Indians during the allotment era, it assumed that the opened reservations would soon disappear due to the federal government’s assimilationist policies and that the tribes who governed them would similarly dissolve. Thus, the Court imputes justifiable expectations as to the lack of any possibility of tribal jurisdiction to non-Indian allotment-era purchasers and then bases decisions to deny tribes jurisdiction in part on these presumed expectations. To refute the idea that such non-Indian expectations were justifiable, I examine historical newspaper articles and other historical sources regarding the opening up of reservations to non-Indian purchasers, specifically focusing on cessions by the Sioux Nation and especially the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. Such sources suggest that non-Indian purchasers were on notice, in at least some cases, of a potential violation of tribal rights in the allotment and the opening of portions of reservations to non-Indian settlement. Based on my argument that “justifiability” encompasses both reasonableness and justice, this information is used to show that the non-Indian purchasers’ presumed expectations about the disappearance of reservations were not justifiable because the purchasers had notice in many cases that lands were unjustly being taken from the Sioux Nation and other tribes. Because non-Indian expectations of tribal disappearance were, in many cases, not justifiable, such expectations should not be given weight in determinations of tribal jurisdiction or reservation boundaries today.

Curse of the Black Hills: breach of treaty and due process under the 5th Amendment

The US Congress has a legal relationship with the Native Americans that is set out in the Commerce clause. It has been invoked by the federal government to reach agreements with the tribes leading to their sovereign status. This process was achieved with the Sioux by means of the Treaty of Fort Laramie 1868 that led to the Great Sioux Reservation, which encompassed a land mass in the mid-West of the US. The Black Hills range proved to be gold rich and were soon coveted by the mineral prospectors. After their military defeat the Sioux had to forfeit the territory under the clause of the 5th Amendment in 1879. The issue of taking the land against the stipulation of due process has been the subject of dispute ever since and the Supreme Court in Sioux Nation v. the US, (1980) has awarded monetary compensation. The Sioux having denied any proprietary right on the basis that the claim is res judicata can question it on the basis of the principles of public international law. These can draw on the international rulings that have come through the International Court of Justice (ICJ) judgments? It can then build on the precedence that can claim the judicial review of purchases of land under duress and in breach of treaty leading to the revocation of the plenary power doctrine.

The Role of Tribal Experiences in Shaping Native American Health

The relatively poor health and healthcare of Native Americans is well documented. However, the existing research does not adequately consider unique tribal experiences in shaping Native American health. Consequently, the purpose of this paper is to assess the role of tribes in explaining measures of healthcare and the perceptions of health-related problems. Employing interview data from 219 members of the Omaha Tribe and Santee Sioux Nation in rural Nebraska, it is found that significant tribal distinctions exist in terms of health status, health access, and the perceptions of community issues related to health and healthcare. These differences are linked with the unique experiences of the tribes as a way to illustrate the need for researchers and policy makers to consider the role tribes play in shaping health.

Medical Director of the Year Leads by Example and Design

Medical Director of the Year Leads by Example and Design

Politics of Externalization in Reflexive Times: Reinventing Japanese Education Reform Discourses through “Finnish PISA Success”

With the release of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2003 results in late 2004, Finland became the focus of international admiration. Soon after the study’s release, scholars, journalists, and government officials from around the world flocked to the small Nordic nation in search of the “secret” of its educational accomplishment (Asahi News 2002). While Finland enjoyed international acclaim, Japan—the former exemplar of educational excellence—was in the midst of serious soul-searching about its own educational system. The Japanese “academic achievement crisis debate” (gakuryoku teika ronsō) erupted in the late 1990s, generating a national moral panic over declining academic performance (see Takayama 2007). The PISA 2003 results were released at the peak of this controversy, and Japan’s “drop” in ranking in some areas from PISA 2000 to PISA 2003 led many observers to believe that the suspected scholastic crisis had been confirmed (see Takayama 2008c). In the aftermath of the PISA shock, Japanese journalists, scholars, and government officials followed the international trend, traveling to Finland in search of the Finnish secret (Fujita 2005). Meanwhile, various Japanese professional educational associations invited Finnish education scholars and former and incumbent ministers of education to learn from the world’s best education system (Asahi News 2005b; Tanaka 2005b; Kitagawa 2006 In addition, many individuals, organizations, and publishers were quick to capitalize on the “Finnish boom” (Watanabe 2005, 12). Tatsuo Kitagawa, formerly of the Japanese embassy in Helsinki and presently the chairperson of the Finnish Method Promotion Association (Finrando Mesoddo Fukyū Kyōkai) translated a series of literacy textbooks used in Finnish schools, selling more than 100,000 copies (Yomiuri News 2007b). Kitagawa and other experts