Our History Is the Future by Nick Estes

Author:Nick Estes
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Verso Books

The BIA, seeking to account for the loss of “intangible” things like mice beans, wild plums, chokecherries, buffalo berries, wild game, plant medicines, and a bountiful timber supply, was estimating the “value of wild products” to be equivalent to “the grocery of food to replace the loss of wild products.”47 But many of the “wild products” lost also played central roles in seasonal ceremonial practices. One such practice involving women’s coming of age required the use of buffalo berries, which would never again grow on Lower Brule land after inundation, thus ending the ceremonial practice. LaRoche was outraged at having to explain this and place a monetary value on the loss of ceremonial rites: “Well, the white man, he never cared about these things; he didn’t even know what it was.”48

In a 1958 congressional hearing on the Oahe relocation and rehabilitation program for Standing Rock, Josephine Kelly, no longer the chairwoman, expressed disgust at the way the United States government and the Army Corps ran roughshod over treaties. Frustrated congressmen told her in patronizing tones that the settlement would provide agricultural and community development loans. “We don’t want loans,” Kelly shot back. The congressman compared the loan to a gift from Santa Claus, as if Kelly was an entitled child. “We have been Santa Clauses, too, the Sioux Indians. We gave up our Black Hills and gave up our land,” she replied, “and now we are down to bedrock, just like a bunch of beggars, and that is really sad.”49

No matter. Human and animal life, BIA officials harshly explained, would “have to reestablish on the open upland plains where a less hospitable and more rigorous climate prevails.”50 And compensating land loss at “fair market value” was next to impossible because this sudden rise in demand for hospitable lands drove up real estate prices and market competition for prime ranchland.51 As a result, many families had to subsist on a monetary compensation that arrived only after their homes had been flooded, “with the result that they run the real risk of ending up penniless and homeless.”52 And many did. Michael Lawson describes an all-too-familiar scene that unfolded at Standing Rock, which was also experienced by the Lower Brule and Crow Creek Reservations:

In January 1960, when the Corps of Engineers finally delivered the settlement funds to Standing Rock, it also served the tribe with an immediate eviction order. In the midst of a fierce Dakota winter, with temperatures falling as low as thirty degrees below zero, tribal families who lived within the Oahe reservoir taking area were forced to gather all their possessions and to leave their land. Because the federal government had not yet made funds available for either the construction of new homes or the relocation of old dwellings, these people were crowded into cold and cheerless trailer houses, which they had to maintain at their own expense until permanent housing could be prepared.53

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