Sioux Nation Research Articles

Black Hills/White Justice: The Sioux Nation versus the United States, 1775 to the President

Black Hills/White Justice: The Sioux Nation versus the United States, 1775 to the President

Native Americans Then and Now - Edward Lazarus, Black Hills/White Justice: The Sioux Nation Versus the United States, 1775 to the Present (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1992. Pp. xxiv + 486. $27.50 hardcover). - M. Annette Jaimes, ed., The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance (Boston: South End Press, 1992. Pp. x + 460. $16.00 paperback). - Fremont

Native Americans Then and Now - Edward Lazarus, Black Hills/White Justice: The Sioux Nation Versus the United States, 1775 to the Present (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1992. Pp. xxiv + 486. $39.95 hardcover). - Volume 5 Issue 4

Black Hills/White Justice: The Sioux Nation versus the United States, 1775 to the Present.

Black Hills/White Justice: The Sioux Nation versus the United States, 1775 to the Present.

<sc>Edward Lazarus</sc>. <italic>Black Hills/White Justice: The Sioux Nation versus the United States, 1775 to the Present</italic>. New York: HarperCollins. 1991. Pp. xvii, 486. $27.50

Journal Article Edward Lazarus. Black Hills/White Justice: The Sioux Nation versus the United States, 1775 to the Present. New York: HarperCollins. 1991. Pp. xvii, 486. $27.50 Get access Lazarus Edward. Black Hills/White Justice: The Sioux Nation versus the United States, 1775 to the Present. New York: HarperCollins. 1991. Pp. xvii, 486. $27.50. Vine Deloria Vine Deloria University of Colorado, Boulder Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 98, Issue 1, February 1993, Pages 227–228, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/98.1.227 Published: 01 February 1993

Jerusalem of Grass by David Axelrod, and: The Year-God by Gerrye Payne

164 'Western American Literature Louis, an enrolled Lovelock Paiute from Nevada, teaches English at Oglala Lakota College in South Dakota. Since 1984, he has lived “among the Dog Eaters”—the Sioux, that is—whose spiraling descent into cultural chaos has inspired these frank, gritty poems. The title of the third poem in the collection, “This Is No Movie of Noble Savages,” warns away the faint-hearted reader. At odds with “the fakery of Dances With Wolves," Louis records the “cigarettes, smashed flies, and dead steam”of a living room on the reservation, the “four offwhite walls” of a federally subsidized interior. He writes of a culture too trauma­ tized by the past to make sense of the present, much less to care about the future. Mostly he fears that there is no getting out of the trap. These poems have a documentary feel to them, a longing to be received as authentic. Louis’s documentary style leaves plenty of room for editorializing, though. At some point, he manages to rail against rednecks, white liberals, and Indians alike. The urge to incite some positive change boils inside him: “In Big Bat’s Conoco I wanted to scream:/Wake up, you damn people wake up!/ America does not owe you a living./America does not owe you your souls./ You’ve got to grab your balls/and fill them with fire/and stop whining/and drinking like bums. . . .’’ In the end, the impulse to shout himself hoarse is deflated by a bit of self-mockery: “. . . but all I did was m urder/an ant.” It is Louis’s compassion for human limitations, his own included, that keeps these poems from becoming shrill and hateful. His sense of humor helps, too, sarcastic though it may be. During a transcendent moment outside Sioux Nation Shopping Center, Louis accepts his own willingness to love, acknowledg­ ing the importance of that willingness in keeping him alive. Noticing the winos who “bask and bake/in the luxuriant miasma/of slow death,” he thinks to tell his anonymous “you”: “The only thing/separating me from them /is my growing need for you/and the fear that I might die unloved.” Among the DogEaters is highly recommended, but only for those capable of handling a strong dose of reservation reality. '¿AUL HADELLA Southern Oregon State College /Jerusalem of Grass. By David Axelrod. (Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 1992. 54 pages, $4.95.) /h e Year-God. By Gerrye Payne. (Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 1992. 54 pages, $4.95.) These two handsome volumes demonstrate that the beauty of the West is in the eye of the beholder. Depending on the eye’s focus, beauty may be internal or external, private or universal. Your lyrical temperament will condition your aesthetic response. Reviews 165 In “Experience,” Emerson observed: “It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man.” In all its halting prose, this insight could serve as an epigraph to Axelrod’s volume, since Jerusalem of Grass illustrates the thought’s validity for contemporary lyric poetry. The locales of Axelrod’s poems are fluid. Sketched in the barest of terms, they seek less to portray specific spots on earth than interchangeable places where things happen to the lyrical 1 /eye. Images of cold nature abound, but some cold cityscape is thrown in for good measure. Contact with the earth is tentative in Axelrod’s poems. They continue a tradition of provisional communion with nature that hearkens back to Frost’s “To Earth­ ward”: “Love at the lips was touch/As sweet as I could bear;/And once that seemed too m uch;/I lived on air.” The places where poetry happens are to Axelrod what Jerusalem is to devout Jews scattered in the diaspora: not the place itself but its symbolic extension in the mind is significant. Jerusalem is the beacon of orientation as well as the yardstick of ethical behavior that willjerk you back when melancholia threatens to get the better of you. Axelrod adopts a voice that finds it hard to live in harmony with itself. In contrast to the changing places, the poetic...

Black Hills/White Justice: The Sioux Nation versus the United States, 1775 to the Present.

Black Hills/White Justice: The Sioux Nation versus the United States, 1775 to the Present.

Black Hills White Justice: The Sioux Nation versus the United States, 1775 to the Present

Hills/White Justice: 'Lazarus is a compelling writer...[He] learned the story of the Black Hills at the family dinner table, straight from the mouth of the Sioux Nation counsel' - Great Plains Quarterly. '[Lazarus'] judgment is sound; his prose fluent; and his research exhaustive' - Wilcomb E. Washburn, late director, American Studies Program, Smithsonian Institution. 'Black Hills/White Justice is both explicitly and implicitly appalling, a vivid portrait of our myopic, arrogant, militaristic government - unchanged since the nineteenth century. I hope it finds many readers' - Evan S. Connell, author of Son of the Morning Star.Black Hills/White Justice tells of the longest active legal battle in United States history: the century-long effort by the Sioux nations to receive compensation for the seizure of the Black Hills. Edward Lazarus, son of one of the lawyers involved in the case, traces the tangled web of laws, wars, and treaties that led to the wresting of the Black Hills from the Sioux and their subsequent efforts to receive compensation for the loss. His account covers the Sioux nations' success in winning the largest financial award ever offered to an Indian tribe and their decision to turn it down and demand nothing less than the return of the land. Edward Lazarus is the author of Closed Chambers: The First Eyewitness Account of the Epic Struggles inside the Supreme Court. He lives in Los Angeles.

Black Hills/White Justice: The Sioux Nation versus the United States, 1775 to the Present

Black Hills/White Justice: The Sioux Nation versus the United States, 1775 to the Present

Black Hills/white justice: the Sioux nation versus the United States, 1775 to the present

Black Hills/white justice: the Sioux nation versus the United States, 1775 to the present

Black Hill/White Justice: The Sioux Nation versus the United States 1775 to the Present

Black Hill/White Justice: The Sioux Nation versus the United States 1775 to the Present

The Black Hills Bill: Expressions of Doubt As to Its Justification and Constitutionality

I. Senate Bill 105, the Bradley Bill, constitutes an unprecedented intrusion by Congress into the affairs of a State. A. The bill will create a new reservation which would cover all or part of seven counties. These are Harding, Butte, Lawrence, Pennington, Meade, Custer and Fall River. B. The bill would transfer over 1.5 million acres of publicly owned land to a newly created entity called the Nation. The publicly owned land is in the Black Hills National Forest, Custer National Forest, Wind Cave, and Buffalo Gap National Grasslands. C. The bill would establish exclusive jurisdiction to regulate hunting and in the newly created Sioux Nation although the State of South Dakota has controlled such hunting and fishing since 1889. S.B. 105 ? 17. (Hereinafter only a ? is given in reference to S.B. 105.) D. The bill would severely alter the water rights regime as discussed in more detail below5. E. The bill would cloud property rights by giving the Sioux Nation the right of first refusal with regard to sale of lands deemed by the Sioux Nation to have special religious or ecological significance. ? 8(6), 11 (b), (c). E The bill would create a huge area of checkerboard jurisdiction as discussed in more detail below. G. The U.S. has not created any reservations of this size, to the writer's knowledge, in the Twentieth Century. II. The historical case justifying the bill is very weak. A. The first elements of the Sioux did not cross the Missouri River and certainly did not see the Black Hills until sometime between 1750 and 1800. 1. Wesley R. Hurt was contracted by the U.S. Department of Justice to study the movement of the Sioux. Hunt traced their progress from Minnesota to South Dakota as follows:

The Black Hills Case: On the Cusp of History

Indian Law provokes the deepest and most enduring questions about the nature of law in our society. The entire field rests, sometimes precariously, on the viability and vitality of the historical promises contained in treaties. The future course of Indian law is inseparable from the fate of these sovereign covenants. Time has wrought its changes, but the basic challenge to fashion a just and pluralistic society remains. It is the cornerstone responsibility of the law to be an intellectual and moral lodestar in this effort. I. Background and Significance: The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 and the Taking of the Black Hills The starting point in tracing the legal and cultural history of the Black Hills controversy is the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. Despite the existence of seven prior treaties with various Sioux tribes, the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868' is the centerpiece. It served to end the military deadlock between the Lakota and the United States government in the Dakota Territory and established two overarching objectives: (1) to guarantee peace between the Sioux and the United States, and (2) establish the boundaries of the Great Sioux Nation Reservation free from white intrusion. Article I of the Treaty ended hostilities and established peace while Article II out the boundaries of the Great Sioux Reservation which consisted of all of western South Dakota including parts of present day Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, and Nebraska. This land was set apart for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation of the Indians herein named.2 The other key provision of the Treaty is Art. XII which provides that no treaty for the cession of any portion or part of the reservation herein described which may be held in common shall be of any validity or force as against said Indians, unless executed and signed by at least three-fourths of all the adult male Indians, occupying or interested in the same.3 These provisions coupled with the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution recognizing treaties as the supreme law of the land would seem to have established an unassailable and legally binding agreement between two sovereign entities. Yet history (and the law) has taken a much different course. Two points of reference that established rich benchmarks from which much of subsequent tribal history is measured need to be emphasized. First, at the time of the Treaty of 1868, the Lakota4 were truly sovereign. As Vine Deloria, Jr, the leading Sioux intellectual, has written: On the whole the Sioux, even when you consider the broad spectrum of opinion that was represented by tribal leaders, were telling the United States, 'If you don't get out, we are going to push you out.' The Sioux people not only considered themselves a nation but they were prepared, some were even eager, to fight to the death against the United States. They definitely considered themselves a distinct and separate sovereignty which had to receive the respect of other nations, particularly the United States. They had a military fighting force that, while small, was still the most potent single force the United States would meet on the field of battle until they encountered Geronimo's band of Apaches nearly twenty years later.5 The reach of the federal government, particularly the tentacles of its legal and political structure, had not penetrated Lakota society. The United States government and the Lakota saw each other vividly proud, separate, apart. The second point concerns the nature of the treaty itself. The Lakota did not see the treaty as mere expedience and the power politics of the day, subject to future accommodation to other emerging national interests. Every treaty was settled with the

A New Look at Indian Land Suits: The Sioux Nation'S Black Hills Claim As A Case For Tribal Symbolism

The Sioux Nation's Black Hills land claim has become a tribal symbol, and after 60 years of litigation the symbolic aspect of the claim is as important as the court action.

Federal Plenary Power in Indian Affairs after Weeks and Sioux Nation

Federal Plenary Power in Indian Affairs after Weeks and Sioux Nation

Indian Land Rights and the Sagebrush Rebellion

Federal ownership of land is an old controversy in American political history. The federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 reaffirmed federal ownership of public lands except in special circumstances. Many western states, nevertheless, continue to press for the transfer of title to public land to them. Nevada and Utah passed legislation that presumed to extend state jurisdiction over federal lands in their borders. No state has yet asserted such a claim to designated national parks, refuges, or Indian reservations. The movement for state control of federal lands is known as the The movement is an important commentary on the meaning of the public domain in terms of the continued economic growth of the West.1 Few observers in the current debate have acknowledged the significance of Indian reservations to the public domain. As Larry Echohawk of the Shoshone Bannock tribe in Idaho recently reminded protagonists in the sagebrush rebellion, treaty rights are still outstanding over much of the public lands.2 Two facts are immutable. The majority of Indian tribes inhabits land in the West, and most of the public domain is there. The Indian reservations are either on residual parcels of tribal territory that were excluded from the cession treaties that transferred vast acreage to the public domain or on lands that were designated for tribes from areas already ceded to the federal government. The Indian Claims Commission was abolished in 1978, and the remaining claims were transferred to the Court of Claims, where many are still pending.3 In the hopes of regaining land rather than money, many tribes continue to oppose a litigation process for resolution. The general sentiment is that tribes seek land, not money. The unrest of the Shoshone caused by the intrusion of the MX missile project, the unacceptable monetary awards of approximately forty-seven cents an acre in the second California land-claims case, and the rejection of the final judgment by the Sioux Nation in its suit over claims in the Black Hills are indications that the tribes recognize a common foe in the sagebrush rebellion. Current demands of the western states not only run counter to long-standing policies of resource management but also, if met, would undermine the recent revisions of federal land-management practices. Among other goals, they seek to strengthen the role of the Bureau of Land Management by providing it with a specific mission in the West. Fears exist that many states, if they were granted additional federal land, would dispose of it as they had done in the past. Barely 5 percent of the original land grants to California and only 1 percent of those to Nevada remain in state ownership, while New Mexico retains 90 percent of its original grants. Whether western states would keep or dispose of newly acquired federal land is not the only important consideration. The collective record of these states in resource management has arguable merit.4 The transferred lands would be subjected to new and perhaps less environmentally oriented conditions of resource management. Currently both federal and state lands are selectively 357

Special Recent Development: United States v. Sioux Nation: Political Questions, Moral Imperative, and the National Honor

Special Recent Development: United States v. Sioux Nation: Political Questions, Moral Imperative, and the National Honor

Review: The Great Sioux Nation: Sitting in Judgment on America, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortíz

Book Review| February 01 1979 Review: The Great Sioux Nation: Sitting in Judgment on America, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortíz The Great Sioux Nation: Sitting in Judgment on AmericaRoxanne Dunbar-Ortíz Veronica E. Tiller Veronica E. Tiller Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Pacific Historical Review (1979) 48 (1): 128–129. https://doi.org/10.2307/3638948 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Veronica E. Tiller; Review: The Great Sioux Nation: Sitting in Judgment on America, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortíz. Pacific Historical Review 1 February 1979; 48 (1): 128–129. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3638948 Download citation file: Ris (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 ContentPacific Historical Review Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1979 The Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Calgary

Several years back, I read Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee; and after reading the paragraph referring to Sitting Bull’s flight with the Sioux nation to seek refuge in Canada, it occurred to me that there was a play inherent in that small reference. The thought persisted. In the summer of 1972, I happened to mention this idea for a play. The person to whom I was talking told me that the play had already been written by Sharon Poliock, a writer who lived on the west coast.

The Seven Pipes of the Dakota Sioux

Ceremonial uses of the seven major pipes of the Dakota Sioux are described. According to the older generation the original pipe was made of bone and clay. After the calf bundle was presented to the Sioux nation, a stone pipe was used for religious purposes, and in fact from that time seven pipes were used. The first pipe was used to pray to the Great Spirit, which was done by pointing the pipe to the four winds and to heaven and earth. The pipe was filled with tobacco and pointed to the rising sun. Prayers were made to the Great Spirit that nothing would happen, and that everyone would be happy through the day. Then the pipe was lighted, and all the people that took part in the ceremony smoked the pipe. A pipe pointing to the east is a wish for a good day and that all will be happy through the day. When pointed to the west, it is a wish for a good rest and that no enemies will bother during the night. Pointed to the south is a wish for good health, and that the buffalo and other animals will not vanish. When pointed to the north, a prayer is made that the weather will not be severe, and yet that plenty of moisture will allow the grass to grow, so the animals will not vanish. When pointing to heaven, a prayer is made to the Great Spirit that all creatures and all the good scenery will not vanish. When pointing the pipe to the earth, they pray for the dead, and that someday they will join them somewhere. When the sun is setting, the pipe is again filled with tobacco and a prayer is made to the Great Spirit. The prayer of the Sun rise ceremony is repeated. The second pipe is called the Sun dance pipe. It is used only by the seven Sun dance chiefs, and Paper presented at a symposium on Plains Indian Religion held during the 26th Annual Plains Anthropo logical Conference, Lincoln, Nebraska, November 1968. in the Sun dance ceremony. The Sun dance chiefs supervise adoptions, marriages, and divorces. If a man or woman are going to get married they will first have to have permission from their parents. They then go before the Sun dance chiefs to get married. If the couple should happen to separate they will have to go before the Sun dance chiefs again before they are granted a divorce. The woman cannot marry again, and the man cannot go to any gathering. If it happens that they get married again, they are disgraced by the tribe. If another tribal member wants to marry into the Sioux tribe, he or she must go before the chiefs, or the council, and must be adopted into the tribe. This was accomplished by going through a ceremony before the chiefs to show that the individuals would be true and honest to the Sioux tribe. Before the adoptions, marriages, or divorces are granted the individual concerned smokes the pipe with the seven Sun dance chiefs. This is how the second pipe is used in the Sun dance ceremony. The third pipe is called the preamble pipe. When holding a council meeting, one person holds the pipe and points it toward the heavens. This is part of the preamble: Oh, my Great Spirit from above cast eyes down upon me a poor and weak, which I am but nothing more. Pity me Great Spirit the land which you have bestowed upon me. As my happy hunting grounds there as you said I was to multiply my people with content and happiness. That this council meeting today will all go well. The fourth pipe, the peace pipe, all chiefs smoke during the council meeting. When this pipe is filled, 30 persons can smoke it. When the pipe is smoked up it will be refilled again. They do this until the meeting is adjourned. The fifth pipe is called the sweat hut pipe, or the Medicine man pipe. This pipe is used in the case of sickness, and it also has a ceremonial

The Last Days of the Sioux Nation by Robert M. Utley, and: The Truth About Geronimo by Britton Davis, and: Sun Chief: The Autography of a Hopi Indian ed. by Leo W. Simmons

Reviews 249 The Last Days of the Sioux Nation. By Robert M. Utley. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1966. XIV -f- 314 pages, $1.95.) The Truth About Geronimo. By Britton Davis. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963. XIX 253 pages, $1.95.) Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian. Edited by Leo W. Simmons. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1966. xx 460 pages, $2.95.) In his commencement address to the University of Utah graduates this year Arnold M. Toynbee spoke of three sins, the sin of pride, of idolatry, and of impatience, to all of which we Americans are addicted. In discussing the third of these sins, he referred to the traditional American method of treating rocks, flora, and fauna with the same ruthless impatience. [The Americans], he said, “cut down the forests; they exterminate the bison; and they ex­ terminated—or, short of killing, corraled some of the human fauna too.” Toynbee was speaking particularly of the Sioux. Utley’s book gives us a balanced overview of this phase of our history. It is a sympathetic and moving account of the struggle of the Sioux peoples to retain their identity and their old way of life in the face of the encroaching white man’s impatience to get or to use their lands, to remake the Indians as farmers, and to bring about an immediate adjustment of Indian people to the white man’s aggressive, competitive way of life. Here the oft repeated story of the white man’s mis­ treatment of the Indian is seen in proper perspective, telling the white man’s side of the argument as well as the Indian’s. The account is presented with amply documented detail and yet simply and clearly. The gratifying result is that a reader is likely to go through this history as though it were inevitable and relentless tragedy. One very satisfying accomplishment of the book is the tracing of the inception and growth of the Ghost Dance religion, which had a basis in Christian philosophy and a tremendous potential for good but which, un­ fortunately, played an important part in bringing about the tragic slaughter of Indians and whites at Wounded Knee. Ironically, if the House of Rep­ resentatives had moved with the same speed in voting funds for Indian rations as it did in opening up Indian lands to white settlers, the Sioux would prob­ ably not have been driven by hunger and the desperate quest for a messiah to the heat of rebellion which culminated in the painful episode at Wounded Knee. The Truth About Geronimo is a simple and straight forward account of the author’s participation in the last phase of the struggle between the United States and the Chiricahua Apaches from 1882 to 1886. In reviewing the events of these troubled years in frontier Arizona, the writer, a West 250 Western American Literature Point graduate and a second lieutenant under General Crook, reveals not only the patient yet determined course which Crook followed in dealing with Indians but much of his own knowledge of Indian ways of thinking and acting. His knowledge was gained through four years of almost constant living with the Apaches, both on the reservation and in the field. Lacking the sense of style which gives a convincing literary flavor to the history of The Last Days of the Sioux Nation, this book, nevertheless, holds the reader and gathers suspense as the strenuous campaign to round up Geronimo and his forces in the mountains of Mexico draws to a close. The title is somewhat misleading. Not that the information concerning the notorious Apache leader is to be questioned, but the bulk of the book is only obliquely concerned with Geronimo. Of course, the troubles which in­ volved Cochise and his son Taza, and later Chihuahua, Chato, Natchez, Mangus, Loco, and Benito naturally enveloped Geronimo. He would, however, have been able to generate trouble by himself. But one gathers that the “truth” which Davis wants to establish about Geronimo is chiefly that the credit for running this wily foe down belongs chiefly to General George Crook and his men despite the fact...