Treaties

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Norfolk, Nebraska, with more than 13,000 people and a number of industries, is over seventy-five miles away--too far for convenient commuting but not too far to draw people permanently. Another factor is that conditions for successful agriculture are probably poorer at Santee than at any of the other locations. Though few Indians on any of the reservations do much farming, those at Santee may be indirectly affected in that they have a harder time making a living by leasing than the other groups do.

At the same time that the reservation population was declining, the alienation of allotted land, halted during the 1930's, was resumed. Although the tribal land purchased with IRA funds has remained intact, the amount of allotted land dropped from 3,252 acres in 1936 to 3,012 in 1952 and to 2,563 in 1960. In the next five years the acreage held almost steady. 43 The land remaining in Indian possession is widely scattered over the old reservation area, though there is some concentration at Santee village and along the streams. Because the topography is sharply dissected by ravines and lightly timbered with deciduous trees and brush, the acreage left to the Indians is not well suited to agriculture, except for occasional patches of bottomland. The scattered tracts of upland prairie are not occupied by the Indians, but are leased to white operators. Even here the land is rolling; and the roads, built on section lines, dip and rise with such frequency as to give the motorist a feeling of riding a roller coaster. Much of the old reservation, both Indian-owned and white-owned, is used only for grazing or is simply wasteland.

In the later 1940's and early 1950's, when there was much talk about "turning the Indians loose," it was inevitable that the Santee Sioux should be caught up in the controversy. Although they do not seem to have been among those most seriously considered for termination, the possibility was discussed. As on other reservations, there have been Indians at Santee who strongly favored such a move. They were usually either people who had themselves adapted successfully to white society and thought their tribesmen should do likewise, or people at the opposite extreme who resented the supervision of the Indian Bureau and wanted to be free to dispose of their land and spend the proceeds.

____________________ 43 Resolution to Commissioner, September 24, 1936, NARS, RG 75, Winnebago Agency; 82nd Cong., 2nd Sess., H. Rpt. 2503, p. 70; United States Department of Interior, Reports, September 1960, United States Indian Population and Land: 1960, p. 16; interviews, July 9, 1962, with Mr. Llewellyn Kingsley, and July 20, 1965, with Mr. Alfred Dubray, successive superintendents, Winnebago Agency, Winnebago, Nebraska.

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An early and unsuccessful move in the direction of termination was made in 1941, when several members of the tribal council went to Washington to seek "full citizenship" for the Santees. Again in 1948 the Niobrara Tribune carried a bitter attack on the Indian Bureau for not having brought the Indians out of poverty. Despite the "enormous salaries dished out to its many millions of employees," there were still Indians living in poverty. Perhaps, suggested the writer, the Indian Service was able to help the Indians only once every fifteen years. In any case, he concluded, "It is about time that an investigation be made but very secretly in order that not one stone shall be left unturned." 44 The Santees were generally opposed to termination, however, and their opposition, coupled with their poor economic status, kept the proposal from going beyond the talking stage when it was revived in the 1950's.

The condition of the Santees in the mid- 1960's remains depressed in comparison with that of the non-Indian population in the same region. Few are trying to farm the small tracts they have left, and it is doubtful that those farms could be made economically productive, even if the needed capital were available. In Knox County, as elsewhere on the Great Plains, there has been a general decline in the rural population in the past few decades. Between 1930 and 1940, when the Indian population of the reservation area was increasing, the total reservation population declined by 23 per cent. And between 1940 and 1960, when the Indian population declined 65 per cent, the total population dropped by more than 73 per cent. 45 It may be presumed that where white farmers are unable to make a satisfactory living, Indians, with fewer advantages and more handicaps, will also be unable to do so. Though there has been talk of starting a concrete plant on the reservation, no capital for the purpose has been made available. The area appears to have no other natural resources, except for the recreational potential of Lewis and Clark Lake, the reservoir created by the Gavins Point Dam. Most of the shoreline is owned by the Army Corps of Engineers or by the state, however, and the Santee tribe is not in a position to profit, except indirectly, from the tourist trade. 46

____________________ 44 83rd Cong., 2nd Sess., H. Rpt. 2680, pp. 95-96, 483; Niobrara Tribune, February 6, 1941, and January 22, 1948. House Report 2680, containing information submitted by field officers of the Bureau in 1953, stated that except for the tribal lands and government, the Santees had "practically ceased to exist as a tribe" and recommended termination in a period not to exceed fifteen years.
45 See decennial census references in Note 41.
46 Interview with Mr. Dubray, July 20, 1965. The Santee tribe requested $10,000 for the development of recreational facilities, but according to a Bureau official, "the entire sum was dissipated to minor stands and service facilities located near the lake

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Younger people continue to leave the area for urban centers, ranging from small nearby cities like Norfolk to distant metropolises like Los Angeles. Some of them have found a satisfactory place in American life; others may only have exchanged rural poverty for urban poverty. The resident population at Santee has continued to decline in recent years, dropping from 317 in 1960 to 299 in 1962, and it includes a high proportion of the elderly and unemployable. 47 In this respect, as in others, Santee resembles many other Indian reservations in the country. If the Santees are no worse off economically than most other Indians, this fact is small comfort to them--and slight balm to the conscience of the white man.

___ with unrealistic salary payments." See R. E. Miller, Acting Area Director, to Acting Commissioner of Indian Affairs, July 18, 1961, Flandreau School Agency; correspondence in possession of Bureau of Indian Affairs Central Office, Washington, D.C.
47 United States Indian Population and Land: 960, p. 16; interview with Mr. Kingsley, July 9, 1962.

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CHAPTER 16
The Twentieth Century: Sisseton and Devils Lake
THE PRINCIPAL THEMES on the Sisseton and Devils Lake reservations during the first thirty years of this century were the rapid attrition of the Indians' land base, the disappearance of most of the externals of their aboriginal culture, and the gradual reduction of government services and supervision. Although these processes went on everywhere on allotted reservations, the pattern varied from one to another, depending on the degree of acculturation achieved before 1900, the nature and quality of the land on each reservation, the density of white settlement around and among the Indians, and the personalities of the various men who represented the Indian Bureau at each agency.

Like the Santees, the Sissetons were vitally affected by two pieces of legislation passed in the first decade of the century: a provision in the Indian appropriations act of 1902 permitting the sale of inherited lands, and the Burke Act of 1906 authorizing the Secretary of the Interior to issue patents to any Indian thought competent to handle his own affairs. The sale of inherited lands began at once, and by the summer of 1903 more than two hundred tracts had been advertised and most of them sold. So prodigal were the Indians with the money received that in 1905 the Indian Office issued an order requiring that all funds

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received from the sale of lands be deposited in banks and all checks on those deposits be approved by the agent. Although this order caused sales to fall off sharply for a few years, the total deposits by 1910 amounted to $271,441, which, at the average price of $14 per acre realized on the early sales, represented nearly), 20,000 acres. 1 In the next decade annual sales rose once more. In 1911 alone, nearly 5,000 acres of inherited lands were sold, together with more than 3,500 acres of land belonging to Indians judged " non-competent" by the criteria mentioned earlier (see p. 298 ). For the next several years it was unusual when sales from these two sources totaled less than 3,000 acres.2 Still, the Indians had started out with 300,000 acres; at that rate it would take nearly a century for all the lands to be lost.

The Burke Act provided another means by which their lands might be diverted into the hands of the eagerly waiting white men. Between the passage of the act in May, 1906, and September 1, 1907, thirty-one applications for patents had been favorably acted upon, and the only reason there were not more was that the Sisseton agent and his clerks were so weighted down with paper work connected with farming and grazing leases and the sales of inherited and non-competent lands that they were unable to process the applications as fast as they were presented. This bottleneck was to some degree relieved in the following years. In 1911, for example, forty patents were issued, for a total of more than 3,500 acres. The next year the number was down, however, and it continued to decrease in subsequent years, mainly because the superintendents saw the iniquitous effects of issuing patents and did what they could to discourage it. As early as 1910, Superintendent S. E. Allen reported that 90 per cent of the fee patent land had been sold. 3

Despite such observations by men in a position to know the situation, the process of granting patents and selling inherited lands continued. In 1917, Commissioner Sells attempted to "liberalize" the issuance of patents by ordering them given to Indians regardless of the individual's wishes. He was frustrated in this policy, but not before more land had

____________________ 1 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1903, p. 321; U.S. Statutes at Large, XXXII, 275; XXXIV, 182.
2 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1904, p. 338; 1905, pp. 279, 347; 1907, p. 73; Superintendent Annual Reports, 1910, 1911, and 1912, NARS, RG 75, Sisseton Agency.

3 Ibid., 1907, p. 63; Superintendent Annual Reports, 1910, 1911, 1912, 1913, NARS, RG 75, Sisseton Agency.

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been disposed of. 4 High land prices during World War I led to a renewal of large sales of inherited lands. An exceptionally large sale in 1919 made it possible to equip many of the Sissetons with good houses and outbuildings, but this ready money, together with high wages during the war, caused them to neglect their farming, so that when land prices fell and the agricultural depression of the 1920's settled over the Middle West, they were in a poorer position than ever and more dependent on a government less willing to help them. 5

As at Santee, of course, much of the land remaining in Indian hands was not actually used by them. Leasing began here early and soon developed into the principal source of regular income for a large proportion of the landowners. The Indians' logic was quite understandable. In a country where crop failure was a frequent occurrence, they preferred the security of a fixed, if small, payment to the risk of losing everything in a year of drought or grasshopper infestation. Leases negotiated through the agent brought them from twenty-five or forty cents an acre for grazing land to a dollar an acre for broken farm land. Together with what they raised in subsistence gardens or earned by day labor, it was enough to keep them alive, though not enough to enable them to live in anything approaching comfort. 6

Although a later superintendent thought the Indians made more off their lands by leasing than they could by farming, the effort to make farmers out of them did not cease during this period. Some cheerful statistics were provided by the superintendent in 1910, but by 1929 it was said that only about twenty-six Indians were really farming like white men; most of the rest had nothing but gardens and a few chickens. 7 This decline--and one does not have to take the earlier figures literally to accept the fact of a decline--occurred in spite of strenuous efforts by the government and its local representatives to get the Sissetons on their feet. The number of supervisory personnel was increased, a reimbursable loan plan was instituted, a five-year plan was inaugurated in the early 1920's, and stock was issued to Indian farmers. None of these experiments seems to have accomplished much, partly because of drought and economic depression, partly because the Indians did not

____________________ 4 Harold E. Fey and D'Arcy McNickle, Indians and Other Americans ( New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959), p. 81.
5 Superintendent Annual Reports, 1922 and 1923, NARS, RG 75, Sisseton Agency.
6 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1903, p. 231; 1904, p. 338.
7 Superintendent Annual Reports, 1910, 1921, and 1929, NARS, RG 75, Sisseton Agency.

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pay back the loans, partly because the government farmers were not retained. Other, more or less peripheral, measures to encourage farming among the Indians included the initiation of a reservation fair in 1911 and the organization of farmers' clubs in the 1920's. 8

Besides the climatic and economic obstacles to successful farming, the superintendents at Sisseton complained that their efforts were impeded by certain characteristics of the Indians, presumably survivals of the aboriginal culture. They objected to the persistence of the old dances, for the same reasons that their counterparts at Santee did, and they attempted, with partial success, to suppress them. Some of the superintendents thought that the Sisseton's collective ethical system militated against their success as farmers in an individualistic economy. So long as the successful ones were obliged to share the proceeds of their efforts with the rest of the tribe, there was little hope of progress, thought one. Some of the Indians were prodigal with what they raised. In spite of the superintendent's urging to save seed each year, they would sell the whole crop and then appear at the agency office the next spring asking for seed wheat, to be paid for out of the money on deposit there from land sales. Such a request placed the superintendent in an awkward position. Although he thought they should be taught to exercise more foresight, he also knew that if he refused to allow them to buy seed, they would not farm at all. 9

Not all of the habits and practices that prevented the Sissetons from becoming good farmers were distinctively Indian, however. Superintendent E. D. Mossman meant no compliment when he said that the Indians cared for their farm machinery the same as white men in that region, for he added that they let it stand out in all weather. "They have an idea that as soon as a mower has two or three guards broken, and sickle rusts," he remarked, "that instead of spending $5.00 for a new sickle or guards, they should purchase a new mower." 10 Nor was the drinking done by the Indians noticeably worse than that among white men. Since it was more difficult for them to obtain liquor, they resorted to some expedients that whites did not discover until prohibition. As early as 1914 they were buying Peruna and other patent medicines with a high alcohol content, as well as lemon and other extracts. Prohibition brought stills, mostly operated by white men who

____________________ 10 Ibid., 1915.
8 Ibid., 1910, 1911, 1913, 1915, 1916, 1919, 1920, 1921, 1922, 1924, 1926, 1927, 1928, and 1929.
9 Ibid., 1915, 1917, 1918, and 1929.

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sold to Indians quite as freely as to others. By that time the Indians (and whites) were drinking canned heat, body rub, hair tonic, and anything else that contained alcohol or a passable substitute. A favorite practice was to drive to a garage, have the car radiator filled with denatured alcohol, then drive home and drain the radiator. One superintendent wrote that in this way the Indians had "two and one-half gallons of intoxicant that will keep the family drunk for a week for less than $3.00." 11

Except for their willingness to sell moonshine to the Indians, lease their lands (illegally if possible), and buy up the farms of those who had been issued patents, the white people on and around the Sisseton Reservation were not inclined to have much to do with their Indian neighbors. Although the Indians were permitted to vote and to sit on juries, many whites were prejudiced against them as a race because of the laziness and shiftlessness of a few. As one superintendent remarked, "Many persons fail to observe the industrious Indian working in his field, but always see and remember the Indian loafing on the street corner or drunk in the ditch." 12 Here as elsewhere the tax-exempt status of Indian land was a source of resentment on the part of the white community, evidenced by the reluctance of local officials to prosecute cases involving crimes by or against Indians and also by their opposition to admitting Indian children into district schools. The fact that the Indians paid property and poll taxes did not impress their white neighbors, who were opposed to much intermingling of the races on other grounds. 13 The closing of the boarding school in 1919 and the removal of the agency into the town of Sisseton in 1923 conspired to encourage more contacts between Indians and whites. Yet the separation continued, despite the efforts of at least one superintendent to make local whites aware that the Indian was not a vanishing race but was "to live with the white man for all time to come. . . ." 14

To assign the blame for this de facto segregation exclusively to the white population would be to oversimplify the situation. No doubt there was discrimination on the part of the whites, as when the barbers in Browns Valley refused to shave Indians, but it does not wholly account for the continued separation of the races in a locality where they were geographically intermingled and where the Indians necessarily

____________________ 11 Ibid., 1914, 1915, 1917, 1923, 1924, and 1926.
12 Ibid., 1910 and 1913.
13 Ibid., 1915, 1917, and 1918.
14 Ibid., 1919, 1920, 1923, 1925, and 1926.

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came into frequent contact with white businessmen. The Indians had their own churches and their own social and other organizations, and they were to a considerable extent indifferent to association with the whites. Those who did associate freely were mostly mixed-bloods of predominantly white ancestry. The Dakota language continued to be used as the daily medium of conversation, and the extreme irregularity of attendance at any school meant that as late as 1915 many young people were unable to speak English. When the attempt to Christianize the Indians was in full swing, one of the arguments was that a common religion would forge a bond between red man and white. Yet as religion manifested itself at Sisseton, the Christian churches contributed to the separation of the races. In 1911 all but one of the twelve churches on the reservation were served by native clergymen, who used the Dakota tongue almost exclusively. Their associations with churches off the reservation were confined largely to other native congregations. 15

Although the Indians remained in most cases a race apart, it cannot be said that they retained much of their aboriginal culture into the twentieth century, except for the Dakota language. Aside from a little beadwork, the superintendent in 1910 could report no native arts and crafts. The old dances, as we have seen, became less frequent as the years passed. They had long since lost their religious significance and had become merely a form of entertainment. Christian church organizations had usurped their former position, and most of the social activity on the reservation was connected with the churches and guild halls in the various neighborhoods. Something of the old collectivism may have persisted within these neighborhood groups, but any sense of tribal unity was dying out during this period. After a spell of factional dissension, the tribal council was voted out of existence in 1911. In the early 1920's a committee was appointed to look after the tribe's pending

____________________ 15 Ibid., 1911, 1914, 1915, 1916, and 1922. The denominational composition changed gradually after the Presbyterian monopoly was broken. By 1911 four of the twelve churches were Episcopal, and one was Catholic. One superintendent's observation in 1915 that the Presbyterians were less effective as missionaries than the other groups would seem to be borne out by the fact that by the middle of the century about 46 per cent of the Sissetons were Episcopalians, as against nearly 28 per cent Catholics and less than 25 per cent Presbyterians. A handful belonged to millennialist or pentecostal groups. Until 1912, however, the Presbyterians maintained the Good Will mission school, which supplemented the work of the government boarding school. See Superintendent's Annual Reports, 1911 and 1912, in ibid.; 83rd Cong., 2nd Sess., H. Rpt. 2680, p. 147. The percentages are based on 1,813 Indians and do not include the entire reservation population.

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claims, but its powers were severely limited. In short, the Sisseton Sioux were neither a tribe nor a people, but merely an aggregation of families and individuals scattered over an expanse of country, separated from one another by members of a culture still alien to many of them, a culture which did not fully accept them and which many of them did not wish to participate in. 16

Events on the Devils Lake Reservation followed much the same course as at Sisseton during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Perhaps the most significant difference was that the "surplus" lands left after allotment were not disposed of until 1904, and the Indians enjoyed the benefits from the sale of the lands for the next ten years. James McLaughlin, serving as a special agent of the Indian Office, drew up an agreement in November, 1901, by the terms of which the Indians agreed to cede about 100,000 acres. The original agreement, providing that they should be paid a flat sum of $345,000, was amended by Congress so that the total amount paid would be determined by the price at which the lands were sold. In this form the agreement was ratified on April 27, 1904, and the greater part of the cession was opened to settlement the next September. 17 The price initially asked was $4.5 an acre, but the lands left unsold by 1907, mostly hilly and stony or else in small tracts, were made available at $2.50 an acre. Although the lands did not sell rapidly, their gradual sale provided a regular income for the Indians, since the proceeds were distributed in per capita payments. The last payments were made in 1914, after which the Devils Lake Indians were in much the same position financially as those at Sisseton. 18

Although beginning later, the sale of inherited land and the issuance of patents went on at Devils Lake as at Sisseton. Because of an unusually high mortality rate among allottees, land sales were proportionately more extensive than at Sisseton or Santee. In 1906, for example,

____________________ 16 Superintendent's Annual Reports, 1910, 1911, and 1923, NARS, RG 75, Sisseton Agency.
17 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 190 2, p. 263; 1904, p. 4; 1905, p. 279; U.S. Statutes at Large, XXXIII, 319-324. Available acreage figures are not consistent. The Annual Report for 1901 gives the "surplus" lands as 98,224 acres, whereas that for 1902 gives the figure as 110,576 acres. In 1904 it was listed as 104,000 acres.
18 Charles J. Kappler, comp. and ed., Indian Affairs, Laws and Treaties, I ( Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904), 597-598; U.S. Statutes at Large, XXXIII, 2368-2372; XXXV, 2143; Superintendent's Annual Report, 1914, NARS, RG 75, Fort Totten Agency.

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$51,212.53 was received from the sale of inherited lands, and the next year 3,253.61 acres went for $33,944.10. In 1912, $64,743.23 was realized from the sale of such lands, and three years later the superintendent reported, jubilantly, that the sale just completed had been the best in several years. 19 Clearly the process could not go on for many more years without leading to almost total loss of the Indians' land. Fortunately, by 1917 the agency was in the charge of a superintendent, Samual A. M. Young, who realized what was happening. "Extensive land sales help to give the appearance of prosperity," he wrote, "while an analysis of the situation shows that capital is daily being used up and not replaced." He believed that the inevitable end would be financial ruin and a return to the ration system. He asserted his intention of holding the line on future land sales, saying, "It is much easier to retain lands than it is to retain funds after they are placed to the credit of the Indian." 20

The issuance of patents seems at first not to have led to the sale of lands, but by 1912 the superintendent had to admit that some of the Indians who had been given patents were selling out. After the restrictions on the allotments at Devils Lake expired in 1918, the period of' inalienability was extended another ten years. Superintendent Young strongly recommended this action and even went so far as to utter heresy: "I am convinced that the Dawes Act and the Burke Act, held as being so great a boon to the Indians, have been very baneful in their effects." 21 Unfortunately, his views were not shared by, some of his successors. W. R. Beyer, who was superintendent in 1925, expressed the view that every young, able-bodied Indian who spoke English should be given a patent and cut off from government supervision. 22 The issuance of patents, together with the sale of inherited lands, went on throughout the 1920's and virtually tip to the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act in 1934.

The Indians at Devils Lake were encouraged to farm for themselves by means of the same devices employed at Sisseton, and with no more success. Several years of drought, the temptation to lease lands, dwindling government assistance, and, after 1914, a lack of capital all con-

____________________ 19 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1901, p. 297; 1904. p. 267, 1906, p. 293; 1907. p. 73; Superintendent's Annual Reports, 1912 and 1915, NARS, RG 75, Fort Totten Agency.
20 Superintendent's Annual Report, 1917, NARS, RG 75, Fort Totten Agency.
21 Ibid., 1910, 1912, 1918.
22 Ibid., 1925.

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tributed to the failure of this effort. For a time the agents tried to induce the Indians to make flax their principal crop, in imitation of the surrounding white farmers, but this venture into a one-crop economy failed because of soil exhaustion and competition from better-equipped white men. The reimbursable loan plan was tried at Devils Lake, first in 1915, when $8,000 was used for the purchase of seed grains, and then revived in the later 1920's as a means of supplying the Indians with cows and sheep. By that time, however, drought had been a regular visitor too long for any half-measures to accomplish much toward the Indians' rehabilitation. 23

Besides their chronic poverty--which was only increased during World War I as a result of the high cost of living--the Devils Lake Indians suffered more from disease than the Sisseton group. F. O. Getchell, their agent in 1901, attributed their susceptibility to pulmonary diseases to the shift from a healthy outdoor life to one spent largely indoors, in unventilated and overheated cabins. Most continued to live in log houses throughout the early 1900's, supplemented by tipis in the summer. The health situation was somewhat alleviated by the construction of a hospital in 1915, but many Indians were reluctant to use it. In World War I a dozen or more tried to volunteer but were rejected because of tuberculosis, trachoma, or other diseases. The Indians' poor health was given as one reason the whites were unwilling to send their children to the same schools as the Indian children. 24

Educationally, the Devils Lake reservation was better supplied than Sisseton. Although as late as 1921 only six children were in public schools, the Fort Totten Boarding School, including the Grey Nuns' department, provided facilities for most of the children, though under appallingly crowded conditions. In 1916 they were said to be crowded twelve to eighteen in a room, with just enough room between the beds for a small child to walk. Supervisor Otis B. Goodall remarked that "the condition of the air when they arise in the morning is easier imagined than described." Infection traveled swiftly under such conditions, especially with only six bathtubs for 120 boys and one roller towel serving for a week. 25

____________________ 23 Ibid., 1910, 1913, 1914, 1915, 1916, and 1917; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1904, p. 268.
24 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1901, p. 298; 1904, p. 268; Superintendent's Annual Reports, 1915 and 1918, NARS, RG 75, Fort Totten Agency.
25 Superintendent's Annual Reports, 1916 and 1925, NARS, RG 75, Fort Totten Agency.

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The boarding school proper, located at the old military post, enrolled mostly children from other reservations, while the Grey Nuns' school accommodated the girls and younger boys from Devils Lake. A day school was opened in 1902 for the older boys, but the bonded superintendent who succeeded Agent Getchell two years later thought it unnecessary and apparently did away with it. The anomaly of a government school in which all but two of the employees were nuns struck one or two of the superintendents, and in about 1920 government support was withdrawn from the Grey Nuns'school, which thereafter was supported entirely by the Catholic Church. It burned late in 1926, and was rebuilt and reopened in 1929 as the Mission School of the Little Flower. By that time nearly forty children, mostly mixed-bloods whose parents lived on fee patent land, were enrolled in the public schools. 26

More of the old culture persisted at Devils Lake than at Sisseton. Besides the survival of the Dakota language, there were certain institutions such as a police force and a court of Indian offenses that tended to keep the Indians separate from the white community. In time the tribal court came to be used chiefly as a means of conciliation in family and neighborhood disputes, effective only if all parties accepted its nonmandatory decisions. Although as early as 1901 the Episcopal missionary was encouraging the Indians to take their cases to the local courts, the state and county authorities showed the same reluctance to act that we have noted at Sisseton. This refusal left a gap in the law-and-order system on the reservation, which was partly filled in 1920 when a federal judge in Fargo ruled that the state had jurisdiction in the case of the murder of one Indian by another. When the superintendent tried in 1920 to revive the institutions of the tribal judge and police force, outside groups threatened to bring suit against him on grounds that such a judge was illegal, and he abandoned the effort. 27

The survival of authentic aboriginal culture was much less in evidence than this persistence of group identity. Nevertheless, the old dances continued. Each of the four districts into which the reservation was divided had its own dance hall, where the ceremonies were carried on, mainly by older members of the tribe. Superintendent Young saw no harm in the dances and thought that any suppression would produce

____________________ 26 Ibid., 1918, 1927, and 1930; Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1903, p. 231; 1904, p.267; 1905, p. 280.
27 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1901, pp. 297-298; 1903, p. 230; Superintendent's Annual Reports, 1920 and 1929, NARS, RG 75, Fort Totten Agency.

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resentment and thereby frustrate his exercise of a beneficial influence in other respects. Whatever other survivals of the old culture there were did not come to the notice of the agents and superintendents. One official reported in 1911 that, although beadwork and basketry were taught at the school, there were no native industries left among the Indians. 28

The Sioux of the Sisseton and Devils Lake reservations had reached approximately the same point by the end of the 1920's. As on the other reservations, the Depression revealed their true condition, which had been partially concealed behind a superficial appearance of progress. There was much tentative groping for a solution to the problem by all who were concerned in the matter. On the Sisseton Reservation it took the form of suggestions for meeting the heirship situation, which by the early 1930's had become so serious that at least 25,000 acres of land lay idle because potential lessees were unwilling to hunt up the scattered heirs whose signatures were needed on leases. With the land base down to less than 120,000 acres and the population up to 2,700, something had to be done, and soon. One superintendent suggested in 1932 that all inherited land be bought up by the government and divided into forty-acre tracts to be used as subsistence farms by young Indians who had no allotments of their own. If this was impossible, the only alternative he could offer was to sell all the inherited lands and close the agency. 29

The heirship problem was to become worse before any real attempt was made to improve it; and, pending basic reforms, there were other needs that had to be met. As at Santee, the first step was to provide jobs, through the various public works agencies, for Indians who would otherwise have required direct relief. Men were employed in building roads, repairing houses, clearing out and thinning woodlands to reduce the fire danger, and performing other tasks of a useful though not essential nature. Fred A. Baker, who became superintendent in 1933, regretted that the $92,000 used for this purpose by June 30, 1934, had not been expended for subsistence homesteads. As it was, he felt that the Indians were not really any better off than they had been before, whereas if they had been placed on subsistence homesteads they would

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____________________ 28 Superintendent's Annual Reports, 1911 and 1917, NARS, RG 75, Fort Totten Agency.
29 Superintendent's Annual Reports, 1931 and 1932; Fred A. Baker to John Collier, February 12, 1934, NARS, RG 75, Sisseton Agency. Baker gives the figure of 68,000 acres lying idle.

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have received the same amount of employment and would have been "better fitted to make their way in life." 30

Baker was convinced that the Indians' future was bound up with the reservation and that efforts to aid them should be concentrated on helping them to become self-sustaining on the land they had left. He thought that if the idle land and that leased to whites could made available for use by the landless members of the tribe, there would be enough to go around without substantial additional purchases. To accomplish this, the government would have to provide a revolving reimbursable fund from which the lands could be purchased from the heirs. When his proposal was first broached to the Indians in February, 1934, at a council called to discuss the Collier administration's plans for Indian selfgovernment, it received a favorable vote of 81 to 45. But when they voted on acceptance of the Indian Reorganization Act, the result was a decisive rejection of the central feature of the Collier policy. 31 With the defeat of the IRA, Baker's plans for land purchases went out the window, and with them went the major hope for rehabilitating the Sisseton people.

Why did the Sissetons reject the IRA? Baker provided the answer, or a good part of it, in the text of a proposal for a rehabilitation program prepared some time before the vote. Remarking that little sense of tribal unity survived among the Sissetons, he pointed out that individualism had become predominant, and "collective effort in a cooperative way has found but little place in the life of the Indians of this reservation." According to Baker, they took pride in their progress toward civilization, and in the fact that they were like white people; hence they had "little inclination to resume tribal government or tribal customs" and wished to continue in the path they had been following since before allotment. When an early draft of the Wheeler-Howard Act (IRA) was presented to them, they had "expressed themselves as deeply resenting the formation of Indian communities" as provided there. 32 So well had Joseph R. Brown, Moses N. Adams, and other agents--not to mention Henry L. Dawes--accomplished their task that the Sisseton Sioux were psychologically unable to accept the proffered hand of the government when it was finally extended in the spirit of co-operation and friendship rather than as the mailed fist of authority.

____________________ 30 Baker to Collier, February 17, 1934, NARS, RG 75, Sisseton Agency.
31 Baker to Collier, February 12, 1934; Superintendent's Annual Report, 19341935, in ibid.
32 "Rehabilitation Program for the Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux Tribe of Indians, Sisseton Indian Agency, South Dakota, Fred A. Baker, Supt.," June 4, 1935, in ibid.

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The course of events at Devils Lake resembled that at Sisseton. Work relief and the dole were the first forms of government assistance, but soon the superintendent, Orrin C. Gray, began to think in terms of subsistence homesteads, to be set up on submarginal land purchased for the purpose. Here, too, individualism had progressed far enough to make the outlook dim at best. Some of the Indians had qualms about the subsistence homestead idea, for they objected to paying for communal property that they might not use. The land situation was nearly as bad as at Sisseton, except that the population had not been growing so alarmingly. About two-thirds of the land originally allotted had been disposed of, and two-thirds of what was left was tied up in a complex heirship tangle. Less than 50,000 acres remained, and 10,000 of that was either entirely useless or rough grazing land. 33 Although a subsistence homestead program might provide a solution for a few families, clearly a massive land exchange and consolidation project was in order if the situation were really to be remedied.

When the Devils Lake Indians voted on the IRA, on November 17, 1934, they rejected it, though not as decisively as the Sissetons. According to a member of the tribe who favored the act, anti-New Deal agitators had contributed to its defeat by spreading false rumors, "like no Indian will hold any property individually and the whole Act was a scheme to strip the Indians of whatever lands they have left and that they will be subject to forced labor and will be no better than convicts under government and such stuff." 34

Even though rejection of the IRA on both reservations frustrated the hope of a thoroughgoing land reform, much was done to help the Sisseton and Devils Lake people during the 1930's. At Sisseton the Indian Division of the Civilian Conservation Corps built roads and truck trails, constructed a dam near the old Good Will mission, developed springs, carried out a rodent control program, and developed two picnic and camping areas. The dam was used to impound water for a small

____________________ 33 Superintendent's Annual Reports, 1931 and 1932; Orrin C. Gray to Collier, February 7, 1934; Elna N. Smith to A. C. Cooley, October 27, 1934, NARS, RG 75, Fort Tottten Agency.
34 Louis DeWolf to Collier, n.d. (received January 22, 1936); Fred H. Daiker to DeWolf, February 18, 1936; Joseph Twobear to Collier, January 23, 1936, ibid. The vote showed 144 in favor, 233 opposed, and 144 eligible voters who did not participate. In its original form, the Wheeler-Howard Act specified that a majority of the eligible voters of a tribe had to vote against it for it to be rejected. Under this interpretation, the Devils Lake Indians were understood to have placed themselves under its provisions. But in 1935, Congress amended the act so as to require a majority of the votes cast for acceptance. This amendment barred Devils Lake from participation in the IRA.

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irrigation project. A four-and-one-half-acre garden plot was irrigated, and ten houses were built, together with some outbuildings. At the site of the old boarding school a root cellar was constructed. When emphasis was placed on canning and preserving food for winter use, many Indian women used the cellar as a canning room. Later a community self-help building was erected for that purpose. All of these projects were designed both to give temporary employment to some of the men and to provide several families with part of their subsistence. 35

Housing was a major problem on the Sisseton Reservation. As late as 1936 there were 517 families on the reservation, living in fewer than 300 houses. It was common for as many as five families to be occupying one house, with perhaps ten people to a room. To alleviate the situation, Baker proposed the construction of 100 houses and repairs to 150 others. As with all the other projects deemed necessary at Sisseton, this one fell far short of the superintendent's wishes. Although about 85 houses were built or repaired between 1936 and 1940, some people were still living in tents at the end of the decade. 36

Health and education were two other major concerns on the Sisseton Reservation. In 1934 Baker listed construction of a thirty-five-bed hospital as the most immediate need of the people there; and in May, 1937, such a hospital was opened. So long as extreme congestion in living quarters remained the rule, however, the general health of the Sisseton people could not be radically improved. The effort to improve educational facilities for the Indians centered about the establishment of day schools. Baker and his successor, W. C. Smith, faced up to the fact that not enough children were attending the district schools, which had been located with reference to the convenience of the white farmers and not of the Indians. Although a great many went to Flandreau, Pipestone, or Wahpeton, or to mission schools, Baker and Smith did not see the off-reservation boarding school as the answer to local educational needs. After an experiment with day schools conducted in guild halls, in 1939 a day school was erected at Big Coulee, followed by another at Enemy Swim. Besides their primary function, they also served as community centers, since the dispersion of the Indians over a wide area made it impossible for all to use the community self-help building. 37

____________________ 35 Baker to Collier, February 17, 1934; W. C. Smith to Collier, August 19, 1939; Charles L. Ellis to Collier, October 26, 1940, NARS, RG 75, Sisseton Agency.
36 "Rehabilitation Program," June 4, 1934; W. C. Smith to Collier, July 9, 1938; Superintendent's Annual Reports, 1936- 1937 and 1938- 1939, ibid.
37 "Rehabilitation Program," June 4, 1934; Superintendent's Annual Reports, 1936- 1937 and 1938- 1939, ibid. A day school was later built at Long Hollow, and the

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Similar progress took place at Devils Lake. The central project there was the subsistence homestead plan, which got under way in April, 1936, with the construction of thirteen log houses on concrete foundations. The experiment began at an inauspicious time, for North Dakota was then in the throes of the worst drought in its history. The attempt to provide subsistence for thirteen families from the land proved unsuccessful, and the participants in the experiment became discouraged. Since there was not enough work available in the locality, they had to turn to "made" jobs with the agency. By the beginning of 1940 several of the original participants had left, most of them delinquent in their rent payments, and all but one of the remaining occupants of the houses were delinquent. 38

A few other developments at Devils Lake merit mention. The Fort Totten boarding school was closed in 1935 and reopened the same year as a preventorium school for children with tubercular tendencies. Two day schools were opened in outlying parts of the reservation in 1937 but later abandoned. About 140 children were attending public schools by the later 1930's, and about 150 were at the Little Flower mission. 39 A central canning kitchen and community sewing room was started in 1936, the former benefiting at least fifty families, the latter, about a hundred. Some effort was made to revive native arts and crafts. The principal handicraft project was the manufacture of moccasins, Indian dolls, and other articles out of buckskin decorated with beadwork designs. Eighteen workers, mainly women with families, were employed on this project. Road work under the CCC provided jobs for a number of men, and others were employed in repairing and painting the agency buildings. 40

In spite of all these measures taken by the Indian Bureau to improve the condition of the Sisseton and Devils Lake Indians, no fundamental

____________________ community self-help building was converted to use as a day school. Except for the one at Long Hollow, which was sold to the district, all the schools were still in operation by the Bureau in 1965.

38 E. N. Smith to Cooley, October 27, 1934; List of Homestead Assignees, January 8, 1940; James H. Hyde to Collier, January 8, 1941; Superintendent's Annual Reports, 1934, 1936, and 1938, NARS, RG 75, Fort Totten Agency.
39 Superintendent's Annual Reports, 1935, 1936, and 1937, ibid.
40 Gray to Collier, June 8, 1936; Superintendent's Annual Report, 1938, ibid. In 1938, a fairly typical year, the income from work relief amounted to $43,341.79; an additional sum of 54,566.99 was received from federal, state, and county relief, and $12,477.62 was received from leases, hay permits, grazing and trespass--a total of $110,346.30 for the year, in addition to surplus commodities distributed through the county welfare board and an undetermined but small amount of earned income from off-reservation employment.

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change could be effected without coming to grips with the land situation. Baker recognized from the start of his administration that the basic problem stemmed from the allotment of land in severalty. In his first annual report he denounced the allotment system, which he said had destroyed the economic unity of the land, made its use by livestock associations impossible, and deprived later generations of the landholdings to which they were entitled. The issuance of patents had brought about the loss of lands; the sale of inherited lands had further depleted the reservation resources; and the inheritance of allotted lands had produced endless confusion, destroyed the Indians' initiative, and fastened on them the leasing system. About 92 per cent of the land at Sisseton was in heirship status, most of it so fractionated as to be virtually useless to its owners or to anyone else. It was even difficult to make contracts for repairs to houses on allotments because of the time needed to track down all the heirs whose signatures were required. 41

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The degree to which fractionation had progressed by the 1930's is almost incredible. An individual equity in a 160-acre farm might amount to as little as a 20-foot square. When Superintendent Smith was called upon to divide the wheat produced on an 80-acre tract, he found that the eleven Indians who owned the smallest equities would each receive 1,344 grains. The extreme case was that of the allotment of Akipa ( Joseph Renville), who had died in 1891 and whose land was now owned by more than 150 heirs. Probating the estate cost $2,400 and required more than 250 typewritten pages. If the land were sold at its appraised value, Arie Redearth's share would have been 1.6 cents. Rentals would have had to accumulate to $250 before she would be entitled to one cent in income; and since checks were not normally issued for less than a dollar, it was estimated that 1,600 years would have to elapse before sufficient funds would accumulate so that a check might be issued, assuming that the current rate of' rentals continued. Smith reported in 1937 that unless something was done shortly, the agency would have to buy larger adding machines to use in making the divisions of equities on rentals coming in; his clerk was then using 56,582,064,000 as a common denominator. 42

____________________ 41 Superintendent's Annual Report, 1934- 1935; W. C. Smith to Baker, February 17, 1937; W. C. Smith to Collier, July 9, 1938, NARS, RG 75, Sisseton Agency.
42 Superintendent's Annual Reports, 1936- 1937 and 1938- 1939; W. C. Smith to Collier, April 30, 1937; Memorandum of Information relating to proposed legislation which would authorize the consolidation of the lands on the Sisseton Indian Reservation, North and South Dakota (accompanying letter from Secretary of Interior Harold L. Ickes to Representative Henry M. Jackson, Chairman, House Committee on Indian Affairs, n.d.), ibid.

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Such figures as these are not evidence of wasted ingenuity on the part of the superintendent and his clerks. They dramatize the desperate situation that had evolved during a half-century of allotment, a situation made even worse by the fact that some fourteen or fifteen hundred Sissetons did not own even a fractional equity in an allotment and were absolutely landless. In 1937, Charles West, Acting Secretary of the Interior, wrote to Will Rogers, chairman of the House Committee on Indian Affairs, that, since the situation at Sisseton would be duplicated on other allotted reservations in ten or twenty years, action should be taken at once to make Sisseton a sort of pilot project, where a land consolidation and exchange program could be tried out. Bill after bill was introduced in Congress to effect this end, but each one either died in committee or was defeated in one house or the other. 43

After nearly a decade of the Collier administration, the Sisseton Reservation remained an economically depressed area. In 1942 the number of families on the reservation had risen to 591, two-thirds of whom had an annual income of less than $300. The next year more than 400 families had to be given some form of relief. The situation became especially acute in the winter of 1947-1948. Mission workers who visited the reservation in January found "near-famine conditions" prevailing. In one family consisting of a middle-aged couple (the husband ill), a daughter, and her two children, the only income was $30 a month from the wife's pension. Another household was found to have no food but coffee and a little flour. Mercy flights of food were made in March to aid destitute families isolated by storms. Two years later the relief situation was described as even worse. 44

The situation at Devils Lake was similar. Nearly 1,500 acres had been bought there and retained in government ownership, but the basic land problem was not solved. Apathy among the Indians made it difficult to get sufficient representation to elect a business council. The officers serving in 1938 were predominantly elderly--all but two were over sixty--and their discussions were carried on in Dakota, which Superintendent Gray did not understand. The very limited success of the subsistence homestead project left the Devils Lake people in not much

____________________ 43 Charles West to Will Rogers, November 24, 1937; William Zimmerman, Jr., to W. C. Smith, April 18, 1939; J. M. Stewart to Ross D. Davis, August 21, 1939; W. C. Smith to Collier, May 13, 1940, ibid. The first of the bills was H. R. 6047, introduced in Congress on March 31, 1937; H. R. 5451 followed two years later, and in April, 1945, H. R. 2947 was introduced. There were further attempts in the later 1940's and in the next decade.
44 Ickes to Jackson, n.d., ibid.; Sisseton Courier, January 22 and March 18, 1948; January 19 and 26, 1950.

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better economic shape than the Sissetons on the eve of World War II. 45

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The plight of these two reservations in the post-war period is suggested by the responses of the Indians and their superintendents to requests for information as to their readiness for termination. In a report prepared for Congress in 1953 many reservations were recommended for almost immediate termination, and usually the Indians were represented as favoring such action. Not so those at Sisseton and Devils Lake. The superintendent at Sisseton reported talking to scores of Indians and finding only one who wanted government supervision ended, and he was a man who had sold his land, had no income, and was generally regarded as incompetent. At Devils Lake the chief objection to termination was the extreme poverty of the group, growing in part out of the heirship problem. About 60 per cent of the trust land was in heirship status, and even the Bureau officials did not consider the Devils Lake people competent to manage their own affairs until that situation had been cleared up. 46

Conditions at Sisseton and Devils Lake have not improved appreciably in recent years, although some figures show a rise in average family income. Since there has been no exodus comparable to that at Santee, while the birth rate has remained high, the reservation population is still far in excess of available resources. The resident population at Sisseton in 1960 was 2,315; at Devils Lake, 1,463, and it has probably increased since then. Although the land situation lies at the root of the present problem, a land exchange and consolidation program would no longer solve the Indians' predicament. Recent economic changes in agriculture have rendered subsistence farming and small-scale commercial farming impracticable, and the Indians have neither the capital nor the training nor the inclination to compete with large white operators. 47

_________ 45 Superintendent's Annual Report, 1938, NARS, RG 75, Fort Totten Agency.
46 83rd Cong., 2nd Sess., H. Rpt. 2680, pp. 78, 85, 406 - 407, 431 - 432. Despite the attitude of the Indians, as reported by their superintendent, the Bureau's view was that a large majority of the Sissetons were competent to manage their own affairs, however reluctant they might be to do so. According to the report, they had come to regard the Bureau as a "combination foster-father, Santa Claus, and scapegoat." The views expressed in that House Report must be accepted only with great caution, however, for a definite attempt was made to represent the Indians as prepared for termination. So single-minded was this effort that it sometimes led to strange paradoxes, as in the following statement about a Utah Indian group: "Indian Peak Paiute Indians are not competent to manage their own affairs. The Indian Peak Paiute Band of Paiute Indians are ready for complete Bureau withdrawal . . ." (p. 87 ).
47 United States Department of Interior, Reports, September 1960, United States

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A social and economic survey of the Sisseton Reservation completed at the end of 1955 showed that the Indian lands could support only onefourth of the families then living on the reservation. Leasing had increased 30 per cent over the previous year, 50 per cent since 1952. In 1957 it was reported that 34 per cent of the Indians received no cash income from their land, another 30 per cent less than $100 a year. Only three farmers were regarded as successful. Many Indians had moved into the town of Sisseton, where relations between them and the non-Indian population were described as poor; the city auditor estimated that 85 to 90 per cent of arrests made there were of Indians. 48

Off-reservation employment offers little hope for these people, unless they move away from the vicinity, for there is not much industry in nearby towns. Most of the Indians with regular jobs work for the Indian Bureau or the Public Health Service; others derive some income from seasonal farm work. The great majority of families on both reservations receive welfare assistance at least part of the year. Since Roberts County, South Dakota, where most of the Sissetons live, refuses direct relief to Indians, the burden falls on the Bureau to provide what help it can. Other sources of welfare are Aid to Dependent Children, old-age assistance, Aid to the Totally Disabled, and veterans' pensions. 49 Relocation, in progress since the late 1940's, had removed 163 families from the Sisseton Reservation, at least temporarily, by April, 1957. Fourteen months later it was reported that 250 people had been relocated in the previous two years, but 50 of them had returned. On-thejob training and adult vocational education programs were instituted during the 1950's, and efforts were made to attract industry. 50

The Sisseton and Devils Lake reservations present a depressing spectacle to the visitor. Small log or frame shacks dot the countryside, most of them well back in the coulees at Sisseton, scattered over the wooded hills at Devils Lake. A housing project at Fort Totten in 1964 provided twenty new dwellings, and more are planned. Except for these, the only bright spots are the public buildings--the three day schools at Sisseton, the new central elementary school and the community hall at Fort Totten, a few of the churches on both reservations. Mere surface appearances may, of course, be deceptive, but at Sisseton and Devils Lake

____________________ Indian Population and Land: 1960, pp. 21, 25; interview with Mr. Wray P. Hughes, Superintendent, Sisseton Agency, July 26, 1965.

48 Sisseton Courier, December 22, 1955, January 19, 1956, and June 6, 1957.
49 Interview with Mr. Hughes, July 26, 1965.
50 Sisseton Courier, April 25, 1957, June 19, July 31, and December 25, 1958.

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they reflect all too accurately the bleakness of the lives of those who live there. Not only are their individual lives blighted by the apathy that is normally found among the poverty-stricken, but the collective life of the community suffers from the general atmosphere of futility. Despite their rejection of the IRA, both reservations later organized under constitutions granting limited advisory powers to tribal councils. Neither council seems very effective. Though capable individuals serve on both, the offices are not actively sought, chiefly because council members tend to become whipping boys for the tribe. The council at Devils Lake is described by agency personnel as "native-oriented" and still composed mainly of older men. Poor communication on the reservation also contributes to the ineffectiveness of tribal organization. 51

Sisseton and Devils Lake illustrate even more forcibly than Santee the ongoing nature of the Indian problem--the failure of nearly a century of work by the Indian Bureau on the present reservations to accomplish the purposes that seemed so easy of realization in the 1870's and 1880's. The solution, if there is to be one, will require even more ingenuity than will be called for at Santee.

____________________ 51 Interview with Mr. Richard Drapeaux, Employment Service Officer, and Mr. James S. Yankton, Realty Officer, Fort Totten Subagency, July 28, 1965; T. N. Engdahl to Commissioner, April 3 and September 25, 1946, Sisseton Agency; Homer B. Jenkins, Acting Assistant Commissioner, to Alfred McKay, July 22, 1957, Turtle Mountain Agency. This correspondence is on file at the Bureau of Indian Affairs Central Office, Washington, D.C.

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CHAPTER 17
The Twentieth Century: Flandreau and the Minnesota Sioux
THE DEPLETION of the Indians' land base, with its attendant evils, which characterized the Sisseton and Devils Lake reservations from 1900 to 1930, occurred also at Flandreau and among the Minnesota Sioux colonies; but the consequences were less devastating, and in the 1930's the process was reversed by means of substantial land purchases. Together with greater opportunities for off-reservation employment, the improved land situation enabled these smaller groups at least to hold their own and present a more cheerful exterior to the world. Their land resources are still inadequate to their needs, and they have experienced a steady draining off of young men and women, but the population loss has been largely compensated for by a high birth rate among those who have remained.

Before the end of the nineteenth century the Flandreau people had lost the greater part of their homesteads and were living on small remnants insufficient to give them more than a bare living. Most of the farms were mortgaged, and in many cases the taxes were allowed to go unpaid until the lands were sold at tax sales. As early as 1895, the Santee agent complained that the Flandreau people were selling the barns and houses built by the government and permitting them to be moved

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away by the white purchasers. 1 This is the condition in which the settlement was found by Superintendent Charles F. Peirce when he took charge in 1901. Since his primary responsibility was the Flandreau Indian Industrial School, and since the local Indians seemed to require little attention, Peirce allowed them to do pretty much as they wished about disposing of their land and spending the proceeds. He thought that many could be given their pro rata share of the tribal funds and separated from government supervision. 2

This is essentially what was done in 1905. Two years earlier the Flandreau Indians had petitioned for their share of the permanent Sioux fund, and now it was distributed, each person receiving $159.42. Except for some thirty or forty elderly people who had to be cared for, this payment in Peirce's opinion terminated all government aid to the Flandreau Sioux. As a matter of fact, however, it turned out not to be the final payment, for there still remained $8,063.01 to their credit in the Treasury, which was not paid until 1909. Many expected momentarily to become the beneficiaries of sizable payments from the Santee claims, and for a few years around 1905 they went deeply into debt and neglected their farming. As we have seen, the claims case was not finally settled until the 1920's, and then the amount received by each member of the tribe was small. 3

The Flandreau Indians did little but survive during the first thirty years of the twentieth century. Numbering 288 in 1900, they lost numbers in the next decade, chiefly through departures for the Minnesota colonies, and were down to 275 in 1910. Then their population began to climb again, to 286 in 1920 and 328 in 1930. After most of their land was gone, they made a living as farm laborers until the farm depression of the twenties, when they took up skilled and semiskilled vocations such as carpentry, masonry, and auto mechanics. Still showing the resiliency that had carried them through the difficult early years of their experiment, they managed somehow to keep going without much official aid. Those who owned houses on their small tracts tried to pay their taxes; the rest rented when they could and moved on when unable to pay the rent. The old and helpless (numbering forty-six in 1910) continued to receive a semimonthly issue of beef, flour, coffee, and sugar; and the children were educated at government expense. Except for those ser-

____________________ 1 Joseph Clements to Daniel M. Browning, March 10, 1895, NARS, RG 75, LR, Santee Agency.
2 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1902, pp. 266-267, 283.
3 Ibid., 1905, pp. 336-337; Charles F. Peirce to Francis E. Leupp, April 29, 1901, NARS, RG 75, LR, Flandreau School Agency.

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vices, the Flandreau Sioux were as much on their own as the white people surrounding them. 4

The depression of the 1930's revealed how slender the economic margin of safety the Flandreau people had enjoyed was. The effects were severe enough to induce them to appoint a council, which in May, 1933, reluctantly petitioned the new Indian Commissioner for assistance. "Due to unemployment, and with most of the Indians having homes and land here sixty years and beyond in age," they wrote, "it has been rather hard for the Indians to pay any taxes on their land for the last few years. Nearly all the homes consist of from three to five acres of land, with buildings." 5 In response to a circular sent out by the Bureau to various Indian groups early in 1934, the Flandreau council met and worked out recommendations for land purchases. Superintendent Byron J. Brophy also suggested legislation to permit the paying off of mortgages and delinquent taxes owed by those twelve families who still had land. He also thought the purchase of small homesteads of twenty acres or so for the landless would be desirable. He urged the development of self-supporting projects and recommended that everything should be on the reimbursable plan. 6

During the course of the year two plans emerged: a subsistence homestead project for Indians who wished to earn most of their income by working in the town of Flandreau, and land purchases under the IRA

____________________ 4 Henry C. Baird to William A. Jones, May 2, 1901; Charles H. Dickson to Robert G. Valentine, April 7, 1910; Jess M. Wakeman to John Collier, February 14, 1934; Henry J. Flood, "Flandreau Homestead Subsistence Project" (enclosed in Byron J. Brophy to Harold L. Ickes, November 22, 1934, NARS, RG 75, Flandreau School Agency. The government did continue for a number of years to use a couple of buildings erected earlier. The tract of land on which the former day school was located came to be partially surrounded by the town of Flandreau, and in about 1890 a street was run through it. Fifteen years later the warehouse and granary were moved to the boarding school premises, and the day school building was converted into a warehouse. Part of this tract was transferred to the city in 1916, but the remaining building was moved to the part still in government possession. Peirce said that it provided a good place for rations to be issued and also for the Indians to leave their teams when they came to town, "feeling they are not encroaching upon other peoples property. Something of the old independence still persisted in spite of poverty and humiliation. See Peirce to Cato Sells, May 19, 1915, ibid.; U.S. Statutes at Large, XXXIX, 524.
5 George Eastman et al., to Collier, May 31, 1933, NARS, RG 75, Flandreau School Agency.
6 Wakeman to Collier, February 14, 1934; Brophy to Collier, February 19, 1934, ibid..

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for those who wanted to resume farming. The subsistence homestead project received the most attention at first. Several women were employed in a small garment factory, started in December, 1933, which made clothing, mainly for children, used in the Indian Service. For a number of years some of the local Indians had been employed in the boarding school. It was now believed that those people could be successfully established on subsistence tracts of from ten to forty acres. They could not be absorbed by agriculture even if they wished to farm; but if provided with houses, outbuildings, and a few cows and chickens, they could supplement the income they received from wage labor. When Mrs. Elna N. Smith, Assistant Supervisor of Indian Subsistence Homesteads, visited Flandreau in October, 1934, she noted that the Indians there were used to working and had not been pauperized; hence they were better material for such a project than some groups. 7

Legal obstacles, centering about the fact that the subsistence homestead statute had been intended for already existing reservations, delayed action at Flandreau and created some unrest. Although the plan was not linked to acceptance of the IRA, anti-New Deal elements tried to persuade the Indians that it was all a trick to get them to accept the act, as they in fact did. During the delay, options taken on land for the project expired, and prices began rising. 8 When $25,000 was finally made available for land acquisition at Flandreau in May, 1935, the project had changed its complexion somewhat. Instead of small subsistence homesteads, the plan was now to assign forty-acre tracts to families, in the expectation that they would make farming their principal occupation. Work got under way after the formal proclamation of the Flandreau Indian Reservation on August 17, 1936. During the next three years some 2,100 acres were purchased and divided into forty-acre tracts. Eventually it was realized that forty acres was too small a unit for successful farming, and the amount of land assigned to each family was increased to eighty acres. 9

____________________ 7 "Capital Needs for Indian Land Use, Flandreau Sioux Jurisdiction, S. D.," n.d. (received September 20, 1934); Elna N. Smith to A. C. Cooley, Director of Extension, October 23, 1934; William Zimmerman, Jr. to Ickes, December 11, 1934, ibid.
8 Nathan R. Maragold, Assistant Solicitor, Interior Department, to Assistant Secretary of Interior Oscar Chapman, January 17, 1935; Brophy to Gollier, March 12 and April 19, 1935; Collier to Brophy, April 25, 1935; E. N. Smith to Cooley, April 27, 1935, ibid.
9 Zimmerman to Brophy, August 16, 1935; J. N. Stewart to Brophy, n.d.; Brophy to Stewart, November 11, 1936, ibid.; 82nd Cong., 2nd Sess., H. Rpt. 2503, p. 65. In some cases a person received two noncontiguous forties, but usually it was possible to assign the tracts so as to provide a workable unit.

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The land-acquisition program, by far the most important Bureau activity at Flandreau in the 1930's, represented a sharp departure from the previous history of the community in that it created an Indian reservation composed of tribally owned land held in trust by the United States government. Apparently the experience of the previous sixty years had led the Indians to question the advisability of individually owned farms. By this time only two of the original homesteads remained intact, and one of them was in a complex heirship tangle and leased to white farmers; three or four small tracts scattered around and unused by the owners remained in Indian hands. Despite their history of factionalism, the Flandreau people seem to have co-operated to the extent of successfully managing the newly purchased lands and assigning them without stirring up charges of favoritism. 10

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The old individualism persisted, however. Though opposed to bills introduced in Congress to repeal the IRA, the Flandreau people were divided on termination. When interviewed on the question in 1953, some wanted to buy the farms they were occupying; others wanted the land given to them; still others wanted it sold and the proceeds divided among them. Although most were spending their money as fast as they made it, they were apparently doing all right financially. Most of their cash income was then being earned by the women working in the garment factory. 11

The closing of the factory in 1956 was a blow to the Indians' economy. About the same time, the large farming enterprise of the Flandreau Indian school was discontinued, and the local Indians were deprived of the services of the agriculture teachers, who had functioned as extension agents. Most of the people formerly employed at the factory found jobs at the school, which experienced a large increase in enrollment at that time, and some moved away from the area. The resident population in 1965 was about 210. Few were actively farming by the mid-1960's. The assignments were leased to white farmers, and most of the Indians were living in town. With employment available at the school and some other jobs to be had locally (the tribal chairman in 1965 was a mail carrier for the Flandreau post office), it was the opinion of knowledgeable

____________________ 10 Brophy to Division of Extension and Industry, BIA, February 6, 1936; Kenneth W. Green, Assistant Land Field Agent, to Stewart, January 26, 1936, NARS, RG 75, Flandreau School Agency. Green proposed that the Flandreau community be made a pilot project because of unusually favorable conditions and a relatively small area and population. See Green to Fred A. Baker, Land Field Agent, April 30, 1936, ibid.
11 Joe Jennings and Benjamin Reifel to Collier, September 25, 1939, NARS, RG 75, Flandreau School Agency; 83rd Cong., 2nd Sess., H. Rpt. 2680, pp. 320-321.

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people that the average income of the Indians was about the same as that of the general population, and in some cases higher. 12

Despite their determination in 1869 to become like white men, the Flandreau Sioux have come to take pride in their Indian heritage. In 1962 and again in 1965 they presented a "Siouxtennial" in co-operation with local civic and business groups. The flats across the Big Sioux River from the community building (a Bureau project of the 1930's) were covered with the tents and trailers of visiting Indians, many of whom participated in a parade through the streets of Flandreau. 13 As one watched cars and trucks pass by, filled with Wisconsin Winnebagos and Fort Thompson Sioux in full regalia, drums beating, old-time chants blaring from loudspeakers, one could not help wondering what had become of the determination of the original Flandreau homesteaders to give up everything that smacked of their Indian past. A further question inevitably suggested itself: Could it be that the more prosperous an Indian group becomes, through acceptance of the white man's way of life, the more vigorous their sense of Indian identity becomes?

The same question might occur to one following the history of the Minnesota Sioux groups in the twentieth century. Nearly as acculturated as the Flandreau people, they accepted the Indian Reorganization Act even more decisively, and one group has in recent years held an annual pow-wow drawing Indians and whites from a wide area. Their history since 1900 is much more complex and full of incident than Flandreau's, but it has followed generally the same lines.

After the last congressional appropriation in 1899, the Minnesota Mdewakantons were under no agent, received no rations, and were the beneficiaries of no government services in their communities except for a day school at the Birch Coulee settlement. Almost the only business relations they had with the government concerned the disposition of the Sioux fund and the Santee claims case, and those matters were handled through the Santee Agency. Many of them lived on fee patent lands; others occupied portions of the tracts bought about 1890 and retained

____________________ 12 Carl W. Beck, Assistant to the Commissioner, to Mrs. Mary W. Hemingway, May 7, 1956, Flandreau School Agency (correspondence in possession of Bureau of Indian Affairs Central Office, Washington, D.C.); interviews with Superintendent B. B. Warner and Tribal Chairman Richard K. Wakeman, July 22, 1965. The tribal executive committee continues to hold monthly meetings, but it is difficult to obtain a quorum (20 per cent of the resident population), for the semiannual general council meeting called for by the constitution.
13 Moody County Enterprise (Flandreau), July 22, 1965.

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in government ownership. The picture one gets of them very early in the century varies from one colony to another. The Indians near the old agency site were described in 1901 as "practically self-supporting, honest, moral, and good citizens." Those living at the other settlements, however, were said to be living a gypsy life in tents or shacks, fishing and catching driftwood, picking berries, and occasionally working for white men. They were largely untouched by church influences, and their children were not being sent to any school. 14

As the years passed, the Scattered Sioux tended to gather mainly at Birch Coulee and Prairie Island. The forty-acre tract at Hastings was sold to the State of Minnesota in 1906 for inclusion in the state hospital property, and the Wabasha land, never permanently occupied, was finally transferred to the Fish and Wildlife Service in 1944. There was a gradual movement away from the Prior Lake lands, until by the 1930's only six families still lived there. Many of the people who owned or inherited assignments there actually lived in cities and towns throughout southern Minnesota and only occasionally tried to obtain a little income by leasing their lands. A few elderly people at Mendota continued to be cared for by the rector of Gethsemane church. Every month a ladies' committee would visit them and supply the really destitute ones with food and clothing to the amount of $1.25 or $1.50 per week. Elsewhere the old and indigent were cared for by relatives or by public and private charities in the communities where they lived. Some lived by begging. 15

The Minnesota Mdewakantons were paid their share of the Sioux

____________________ 14 Com. of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1901, p. 541; A. O. Wright to W.A. Jones, October 15, 1902, NARS, RG 75, LR, Sioux in Minnesota file.
15 U.S. Statutes at Large, XXXIV, 78; LVIII, 274; Henton to Morgan, July 24, 1889; Plat of Indian Lots, Scott County, dated October 8, 1904; Henry W. St. Clair to Andrew J. Volstead, October 24, 1904; John J. Faude to Acting Commissioner A. C. Tanner, June 1 and 8, 1900, NARS, RG 75, LR, Sioux in Minnesota file; Brief Memorandum Relating to Outlying Districts of the Pipestone Jurisdiction, May 1, 1937, NARS, RG 75, Pipestone School Agency. As early as 1898 only five out of the original sixteen assignments made at Prior Lake remained in Indian hands, and by 1904 only one Indian still held onto his land. Some died and some moved away; in either case the lands were usually sold. See Plat Book of Scott County, Minnesota ( [Philadelphia]: North West Publishing Co., 1898), p. 8. When an elderly Prairie Island woman died in 1914, a Red Wing newspaper commented that she had been a familiar figure on the city's streets: "Scarcely a week passed for years that she did not call on her friends in the business district for aid, which was always forthcoming." See Red Wing Daily Republican, February 16, 1914. Such items continued to appear in the newspapers until well into the 1930's.

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fund in 1907, and most of them shared in the proceeds of either the Sisseton-Wahpeton claims case in 1909 or the Santee claims case in 1924. Aside from those benefits, they were largely ignored by the government during the first three decades of the century. In 1915 the Episcopal Bishop of Minnesota, Samuel Cook Edsall, wrote Superintendent Frank T. Mann of the Pipestone Indian School, who had nominal supervision over the Minnesota Sioux, suggesting that those at Birch Coulee be issued some farm implements, which they might use collectively. Their land tracts were too small to be farmed profitably and were mostly leased to whites. Although Mann endorsed the proposal, it seems to have received no consideration at the Indian Office. 16 These people had been "turned loose," and, aside from operating a day school for their benefit, the government had no wish to involve itself with them again.

The day school lasted only until 1920. Taught until 1918 by Robert H. C. Hinman, son of the missionary buried at Birch Coulee, it followed the state course of study, slightly modified, and normally enrolled about twenty children. A school garden was raised on a nine-acre tract adjoining the building, and Hinman provided milk and butter for the children from his own dairy herd of four cows. Less than a year after Hinman retired to edit the Morton Enterprise, the school was ordered closed but was kept open until the summer of 1920 at the request of Superintendent Mann. It subsequently was taken over by Redwood County and has since been operated as part of the rural school system of the county. Elsewhere the Indian children attended either local district schools or boarding schools such as Pipestone or White Earth. The only other Mdewakanton colony large enough to have a predominantly Indian school was Prairie Island, where the Indian Bureau provided financial assistance to the district for Indian pupils. 17

For many years the Pipestone superintendent's dealings with the Indians were limited to matters relating to education, but gradually he was drawn into a closer relationship that more nearly resembled that of the ordinary agency superintendent toward the Indians under his jurisdiction. By 1927, Superintendent James W. Balmer was visiting the

____________________ 16 Samuel Cook Edsall to Superintendent Frank T. Mann, June 21, 1915; Mann to Sells, June 17, 1915, NARS, RG 75, Pipestone School Agency.
17 Report of L. F. Michael, Supervisor of Schools, December 18, 1913; Sells to Mann, November 24, 1919; Mann to Sells, November 28, 1919, and June 2, 1920; Peyton Carter, Supervisor of Schools, to Charles H. Burke, December 22, 1921; Ora Padgett to Burke, July 17, 1922; Tony Kuhn to Senator Henrik Shipstead, November 1, 1924, ibid.; Redwood Falls Sun, March 21, 1919.

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various settlements two or three times a year. At that time two years of drought had rendered most of the Indians destitute and in need of assistance from some agency--local, state, or federal. Balmer found that county officials, especially those in Goodhue County, were willing to co-operate in providing relief supplies and medicine. On his visit to Prairie Island he was accompanied by the county agent and other local authorities, who went with him from house to house issuing free seed for the coming planting season. 18

Despite the tendency to settle at the two main colonies, the Scattered Sioux were still widely scattered at this time. Besides mixed-bloods living like whites in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Wabasha, there were colonies of Indians at Granite Falls, Shakopee, Savage, and Red Wing, as well as at Birch Coulee and Prairie Island. In 1929, Balmer counted 554 in all. This was the first accurate estimate of their numbers in many years. 19 Many of the Sioux residing in Minnesota continued to be carried on the rolls of the Santee, Flandreau, Sisseton, and Yankton jurisdictions. Not until the 1930's, when the larger communities organized under the IRA and drew up tribal rolls, were any really accurate population figures available, and they were not particularly helpful in determining the numbers of the Minnesota Sioux who had become virtually assimilated to the general population.

The Depression struck the Minnesota Sioux much as it did the Flandreau colony, and early efforts to meet it followed the same pattern. Continued drought greatly reduced the amount of crops the Indians could grow on their small tracts, especially on the light, sandy soil of Prairie Island. The widespread unemployment of the early thirties eliminated off-reservation jobs as a source of income. Thus the economic situation of these Indians, poor enough in normal times, became

____________________ 18 James W. Balmer to Burke, April 14 and May 17, 1927, NARS, RG 75, Pipestone School Agency.
19 Balmer to Burke, April 14, 1927, and January 7, 1929, ibid. The figures of 150 at Birch Coulee and 779 elsewhere, first published in the Commissioner's Annual Report for 1899 and 1901, respectively, were repeated year after year. When new figures were adopted, they fluctuated so much from year to year as to be quite unreliable. In 1911 the figure of 350 is given for all Mdewakantons in Minnesota (p. 60 ). In 1913 the number is given as 300, including "Mdewakanton, Wapaquta, Sisseton, and Wahpeton at Birch Cooley" (p. 53 ). In 1914 there were supposed to be only 303, a figure which had fallen to 160 in 1916 and 164 in 1918 (pp. 80, 77, and 87, respectively). A more detailed breakdown in 1920 listed 303 Mdewakanton Sioux and 105 at Birch Coulee (p. 67 ). Another source gives 271 in 1920, 371 in 1930, and 548 in 1940 ( Governor's Interracial Commission, The Indian in Minnesota [ St. Paul?], 1947, p. 37). The federal census reports tell a still different story.

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fully as serious as that of the Santees, Sissetons, and Devils Lake Indians, though involving fewer people. To meet the immediate crisis, Balmer distributed aid to the needy during the winter of 1929-1930 but found the available funds too small to take care of everyone. The next winter the home of one of the oldest Prairie Island women was repaired and painted, and fifty blankets were issued by the county nurse. Purchase orders were issued to twenty people there. Essentially the same kind of aid went to the other settlements. 20 Work relief was slower in being initiated here than on reservations, where the superintendent was in daily association with the Indians and had them as his primary responsibility. On the other hand, the relatively small number of Indians concerned and the comparative wealth of the counties where they lived made it possible for their most pressing welfare needs to be met, for a time at least, by local agencies.

The first significant assistance from the Indian Bureau came through the Indian Emergency Conservation Work program in 1934, when $5,347.63 was paid to men at Birch Coulee and Prairie Island for road construction and the development of springs and wells. The Indians received 90 per cent of that money in the form of pay checks issued at the end of each month; the remainder was withheld and paid in two installments the following winter, when there was no work to be had. Although the amount of IECW funds used in the next few years dropped sharply, the loss was more than compensated for by employment provided by the WPA. By 1937, WPA checks accounted for nearly 60 per cent of all income received by the Birch Coulee group. Because there was no WPA unit in Goodhue County, work of this kind did not begin at Prairie Island until that year. 21

The rehabilitation projects were woefully underfinanced at first. In 1936, Superintendent Balmer requested an appropriation of $16,425 but received only $6,400 for all the Minnesota groups. The money was

____________________ 20 Balmer to Charles J. Rhoads, July 18, 1930, and January 14, 1931, NARS, RG 75, Pipestone School Agency.
21 Peter J. Lightfoot to Collier, February 1, 1935; Lightfoot, "The Rehabilitation Program Pipestone Jurisdiction, Minnesota," [ 1937]; Shirley N. McKinsey, "An Economic Survey of the Lower Sioux Indian Community, Morton, Minnesota," 1937, ibid. The McKinsey survey and a similar one done on Prairie Island by Clyde G. Sherman ( "An Economic Survey of the Prairie Island Indian Community in Minnesota," 1937) are extremely useful studies. They include inventories of the economic potential of each community and list all livestock, farm machinery, etc., available to the Indians. They were intended as the starting point for a thoroughgoing rehabilitation of the communities.

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to be disbursed in the form of loans to those who might be expected to repay them, or as outright grants to the elderly and infirm. About twothirds of it was used for loans at Birch Coulee, about one-third at Prairie Island and Prior Lake. With this money a start was made toward repairing existing houses and building small one-room dwellings to relieve overcrowding and provide living space for the homeless. 22 In 1937 another $6,500 was made available, and the program moved into high gear. Larger sums were allotted in 1938 and 1939, with the result that living conditions among the Minnesota Sioux were greatly improved. Many houses had basements for the first time, and the additional storage space thus provided served as an incentive to the Indians to increase their gardening. Many were also inspired to buy furniture or paint what they had and make other improvements on their own initiative. 23

Besides the benefits to individual families, an important item in the program for each of the two principal communities was to provide the people with a community building. At Birch Coulee county officials were so impressed with the rehabilitation program that they offered to furnish the materials for such a building. Half the crew of WPA laborers who had been working on houses were transferred to the project, which got under way in the summer of 1937 and was virtually completed by the end of that year, although the formal dedication did not take place until the next spring. More than a thousand people attended the ceremony, at which talks were made by Episcopal Bishop Stephen E. Keeler of Minnesota, Superintendent Balmer, state WPA director Victor Christgau, and Xavier Vigeant, representing the Washington office of the Bureau. The building, constructed of red tile blocks, contained a main hall seating 125, a stage, a basement with kitchen, a dining room, a cloak room, and a furnace room. A somewhat similar but less pretentious community building was erected at Prairie Island in 1939. 24

All the improvements had a stimulating effect on the Indians at the two communities. Early in 1938, Thomas Columbus, secretary of the

____________________ 22 Lightfoot, "Rehabilitation Program"; McKinsey, "Economic Survey"; Balmer to Collier, February 21 and March 9, 1936, ibid.; Morton Enterprise, April 2, 1936.
23 D. E. Murphy to Balmer, March 3 and 15 and April 7, 1937; Balmer to Collier, August 28, 1937, and August 1, 1938, NARS, RG 75, Pipestone School Agency; Morton Enterprise, June 25, 1936, and December 16, 1937.
24 Balmer to Collier, February 3, 1938; Thomas Columbus to Collier, January 25, 1938; Clara Madsen to Collier, August 2, 1939, NARS, RG 75, Pipestone School Agency; Morton Enterprise, June 3 and December 16, 1937, and June 2, 1938.

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Birch Coulee council, wrote Commissioner Collier that as a result of the program nearly all the houses were in good repair, health conditions had improved, and the people were looking forward to their farming program. "Words could not convey to you," he concluded, "the thanks and gratitude from our people for the many wonderful things done for our community in the past year." 25 Balmer had earlier written that the Indians took great pride in their rehabilitated homes and were expressing their appreciation in many ways. Since the program had begun, "an entirely different atmosphere" had prevailed among the Indians, who were "more contented and happy" and doing what they could to better their economic condition. 26

Unfortunately, IECW and WPA work provided only temporary employment, and the appearance of prosperity created by the rehabilitation program would be only a mockery unless a stable economic foundation could be provided for these people. As elsewhere, the Bureau saw the long-range solution in terms of increasing the Indians' land base, which was then obviously inadequate. Their holdings at the beginning of the Depression consisted of 470 acres at Birch Coulee, 120 acres at Prairie Island, and 258 acres at Prior Lake, all in government possession, and small tracts of fee patent land at each of those places. Some of the latter were in immediate danger of being lost because of long unpaid taxes. The small assignments of government land--thirteen to twenty-two acres to a family--were insufficient for anything but subsistence gardens. Balmer now outlined purchases that would not only provide enough land for those living in the existing Indian communities but increase the holdings sufficiently to permit those living in towns and cities to settle on farms if they wished. 27

Before land purchases could be made under the IRA, the communities concerned had to accept that important piece of legislation. They did so by the decisive margin of 94-2, in an election held October 27, 1934; at Birch Coulee the vote was unanimous. The next step was to form councils and draft constitutions and bylaws. A problem arose in this connection, in that the Minnesota Mdewakantons, having ex-

____________________ 25 Columbus to Collier, January 25, 1938, NARS, RG 75, Pipestone School Agency.
26 Balmer to Collier, August 28, 1937, ibid.
27 Balmer to Cooley, December 26, 1935; "Brief Memorandum Relating to Outlying Districts," May 1, 1937; Balmer to Collier, July 18 and August 14, 1935, ibid. At Prairie Island 38.07 acres remained in Indian possession, 38.92 had been sold or otherwise disposed of to white owners, and the rest of the original 80 acres had been taken over for a railroad right-of-way, except for a tract of less than an acre which belonged to the Episcopal Diocese of Minnesota.

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pressly abandoned their tribal relations as a condition of receiving the benefits provided in the 1880's, were ineligible to organize as a tribe. Inasmuch as each community had been more or less on its own for many years, the first intention was for each to organize independently, as an Indian community. By mid-summer of 1935, Birch Coulee had drafted a tentative constitution and bylaws, and Prairie Island had begun work on one. Although a speech by Henry Roe Cloud at a mass meeting later that year led the Minnesota Sioux temporarily to discard this plan in favor of organizing as a single group, they finally decided, after further discussion with Bureau representatives, to return to their original plan for separate organizations. Both groups voted on their constitutions in 1936 and on corporate charters the next year and approved them by decisive margins. 28

The land purchases made for the Minnesota Mdewakantons were much more modest than Balmer had envisioned. Although something over 1,200 acres were added at Birch Coulee (now officially renamed Lower Sioux), Prairie Island was increased by only 414 acres, and no land was bought at Prior Lake. The people at Lower Sioux thus enjoyed a substantially improved land situation, but the amount available at Prairie Island was altogether inadequate, especially in view of the limited agricultural possibilities of the land there. The insufficiency of the purchase at Prairie Island was partially disguised by the fact that the Indians were permitted to use a larger tract of flowage land behind Lock and Dam No. 3 on the Mississippi. Although this land was periodically subject to inundation and thus unusable as farm land, it was thought that the Indians could trap, hunt, fish, obtain firewood, make maple sugar, harvest wild rice, and dig swamp potatoes and swamp bananas there. 29 It might have been of real benefit to an earlier generation, but by the 1930's the Minnesota Sioux were no longer making much use of the native resources of the soil that their ancestors had exploited with considerable success.

Although the Minnesota Sioux were all served by district schools by

____________________ 28 Lightfoot to Indian Office (telegram), October 28, 1934; McKinsey, "Economic Survey"; Balmer to Collier, July 18 and December 19, 1935; Charlotte T. Westwood and J. R. Venning to Collier, December 21, 1935, ibid. The Prior Lake community was deemed too small for separate organization and was placed under the jurisdiction of Lower Sioux.
29 "Brief Memorandum Relating to Outlying Districts," May 1, 1937; Madsen to Collier, August 2, 1939, ibid.; 82nd Cong., 2nd Sess., H. Rpt. 2503, p. 62; United States Department of Interior, Reports, September 1960, United States Indian Population and Land: 1960, p. 14.

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the 1930's, the Bureau played some part in improving educational facilities for them and inducing more of the children to attend. At Lower Sioux the former day school was still in use and enrolled about thirty pupils. With the aid of their WPA earnings, the local people cleaned up and beautified the school grounds. 30 At Prairie Island the situation was somewhat different. With the removal of the recently purchased lands from the tax rolls, District 132 no longer had a tax base sufficient to maintain the school, and in 1939 the district was dissolved and the school placed directly under county administration. When the community hall was built, the small school building was moved to a site near it so that the hall could be used for shop work and noon lunches. In return, the school authorities agreed to furnish heat for both buildings. A well-qualified male teacher was hired in the fall of 1939, after several years when inadequately trained young women had held the job. Among the innovations adopted here was inviting the sixth, seventh, and eighth graders to attend council meetings, so that they could become familiar with the work of the council, on which they might eventually serve. 31

The discussion so far has concerned exclusively the old Mdewakanton colonies at which land purchases had been made between 1887 and 1891. There was another settlement of Sioux in Minnesota, however, which had never been recognized by the Indian Bureau, despite the fact that it came into being about the same time as the other communities. About 1887 some of the Sissetons who had established the Brown Earth colony drifted back to the old reservation area in Minnesota, just below the town of Granite Falls. Although county officials tried as early as 1891 to persuade the federal government to take responsibility for those people, who were then destitute, nothing was done toward obtaining land for them. Most of them owned small tracts purchased with their own funds. A few had bought land with trust funds derived from the sale of restricted allotments, and their tracts carried restrictive clauses. Except for these few, the lands came to be so encumbered with delinquent taxes that by the 1930's the Indians occupying them had only squatters' rights. 32

____________________ 30 Morton Enterprise, September 24, 1936; Columbus to Collier, January 25, 1938, NARS, RG 75, Pipestone School Agency. In 1937 the Morton newspaper reported that the children were studying Indians; the first grade had learned such words as "travois," "moccasin," and "tipi." See the Morton Enterprise, April 29, 1937.
31 Madsen to Collier, August 2, 1939; Balmer to Collier, December 21, 1939, NARS, RG 75, Pipestone School Agency.
32 "Historical Data of Early Settlement of Upper Sioux Indian Community," accompanying Balmer to Collier, November 7, 1938; Balmer to Collier, June 14,

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Although the original members of the Granite Falls group were Sissetons or Wahpetons, in about 1910 a number of Santees arrived, both from the Santee Reservation and from Flandreau. They were later joined by a scattering of Minnesota Mdewakantons and Yanktons, so that in time the settlement came to consist of a not-altogether-harmonious collection of people of different origins, enrolled under several jurisdictions. Because most of them were reluctant to send their children to school in Granite Falls, a district school was built for them in 1920. Called upon by the clerk of the Granite Falls school to explain their status, the Pipestone superintendent investigated the Indian settlement but did not actively take charge of it at that time. After the Collier administration took office and the IRA was passed, their status became a matter of greater moment, and they were placed under Balmer's supervision on March 1, 1936. 33

The immediate reason for this action was that the Granite Falls group wished to organize under the IRA but found itself unable to do so because the Sisseton Reservation, where most of its members were enrolled, had rejected the act. The Granite Falls people had voted 42-35 in favor of the IRA at an election held April 6, 1935, but their votes were counted at the various jurisdictions under which they were enrolled. The principal demand for organization came, not from the Sisseton majority, but from a few families of mixed origins calling themselves Santees or Mdewakantons. Their spokesman was Mrs. Sophie Wilson, a woman of one-fourth Indian blood whose four marriages had given her a large number of relatives and in-laws. Throughout the 1930's she bombarded Superintendent Balmer, Commissioner Collier, Secretary of the Interior Ickes, President Roosevelt, and several congressmen with letters concerning the Granite Falls group. 34

When Balmer took over supervision of the group, he found them on

____________________ 1935, ibid.; Mair Pointon, Yellow Medicine County Auditor, to Thomas J. Morgan, January 7, 1891, NARS, RG 75, LR, Sisseton Agency. The Indians in their correspondence commonly refer to themselves as Wahpetons; they are referred to here as Sissetons because they were enrolled at the Sisseton Reservation.
33 "Historical Data"; Clerk of Granite Falls schools to Padgett, December 20, 1920; Padgett to Sells, December 22, 1920; Balmer to Collier, April 13, 1936, NARS, RG 75, Pipestone School Agency.
34 Lightfoot to Baker, January 16, 1935; Baker to Indian Office, April 12, 1935, Sophie Wilson to Collier, October 1, 1935; Archie Phinney to M. L. Burns, March 29; 1938; Phinney to Collier, March 19, 1939, NARS, RG 75, Pipestone School Agency. The correspondence concerning the Granite Falls group is voluminous and the information contained in it sometimes conflicting.

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the horns of a legal dilemma. They could not organize under the IRA because they were not on a separate reservation, and land could not be purchased for a reservation until they had organized under the IRA. A legal way out was eventually found, but organization was temporarily stalled when it was discovered that each member of the group would have to renounce his rights at the jurisdiction where he was enrolled. When the Sissetons agreed to do that, plans went ahead once more. 35

Land purchases amounting to 745.66 acres were made in 1938, but the New Upper Sioux Indian Community, as it called itself, did not organize under the IRA. The legal obstacles having been removed or bypassed, only internal dissension could prevent consummation of the plan, and that is precisely what happened. A semblance of harmony was maintained while the constitution was being drawn up in 1936 (somewhat prematurely), but by late 1937 friction between the Sissetons and the Santee faction was so great that the suggestion was made that the latter join the Lower Sioux for organizational purposes. At one point a plan was approved by which only the non-Sissetons would be permitted to organize; it of course drew a protest from the Sissetons. 36

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Curiously, although the majority had agreed to give up their rights on the Sisseton Reservation, their opponents were not willing to relinquish their reservation rights. Mrs. Wilson refused to give up her membership at Santee or forty acres of land she had acquired on the Sisseton Reservation through one of her husbands. She carried sufficient weight to guarantee that the first assignments made after the Upper Sioux reservation was proclaimed, on October 6, 1938, were given to members of her group. In 1939 she and some of her relatives visited Wash-

____________________ 35 Balmer to Collier, June 14, 1935, April 13, 1936, and September 22 and November 9, 1937; John Herrick to Balmer, August 11, 1936; Zimmerman to Balmer, April 19, 1937, ibid. The Yanktons were under the Rosebud jurisdiction after the Yankton Agency was closed in 1933. Balmer wrote Augustine L. Hook, Land Field Agent for the Bureau, on April 13, 1936, that there were seventeen Sisseton families, three Flandreau, one Mdewakanton, and six Santee and Yankton (no distinction made) at Granite Falls. At Birch Coulee there were twenty Mdewakanton families, eighteen Flandreau, and one Sisseton; and at Prairie Island there were twenty Mdewakanton families, three Flandreau, two Santee, and one Sisseton. The composition of those groups was actually more varied even than these figures show, for the McKinsey survey also showed seven whites, two Mexicans, and one Negro at Birch Coulee. Prairie Island has at various times included whites, Winnebagos, Chippewas, and even a Cherokee.
36 Wilson, William R. Cavender, and Fred Pearsall to Balmer, May 14, 1936; Joe Jennings to Indian Organization, December 10, 1937; Phinney to Burns, March 29, 1938; Balmer to Collier, August 29, 1938, ibid.

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ington and talked with Bureau officials and with Senator Henrik Shipstead. Members of the Sisseton faction promptly wrote to Shipstead that the group he had met with were only a small minority in the community. Although this was true, upon her return Mrs. Wilson carried a roll of paper bearing the words "Ind Off Wash D.C.," with which she impressed people. Later she endeavored to gain support at Prairie Island, tried to prevent the Sissetons from using the community building erected in 1941, and kept up her agitation for years, always arguing that the Sissetons were intruders and should be excluded from any organization that might be set up. 37

In view of the factionalism prevailing and the reluctance of the majority to start a community organization under such circumstances, a Bureau field representative advised that the matter be dropped for the time. A board of trustees was set up, however, chiefly to advise the superintendent on the use of rehabilitation funds. The officers elected in 1942 were entirely from the Sisseton group. Torn by factionalism and lacking an effective community organization, the Upper Sioux colony has remained something of a thorn in the side of Bureau officials and the subject of controversy among the local white population. More than half the families live on fee patent lands along the highway between the IRA purchase and the city of Granite Falls. The center of their community is the Presbyterian church, which bears the name "Pejuhutazizi," a variation of the name of the Williamson mission. Upper Sioux thus lacks the unity of the other groups, though it is economically better off than Prairie Island, and in recent years the internal dissension may have diminished somewhat. 38

The Minnesota Sioux groups were caught up in the termination controversy during the 1950's. An effort was made to show that they were as nearly ready as any other Indians in the country to get along without Bureau supervision. It was pointed out that their educational, health, and welfare needs were handled largely by local agencies and

____________________ 37 Jennings and Phinney to Collier, October 17, 1938; John Roberts, Walter A. LaBatte, and Herbert Ironheart to Shipstead, February 17, 1939; Wilson, et al., to Collier, February 14, 1939; Balmer to Collier, March 22, 1939; affidavits from Wilson et al., to Shipstead, February 13, 1941; Phinney to Collier, August 9 and September 9 and 10, 1941, ibid.
38 Phinney to Collier, September 9, 1941; John McGue to Christian H. Beitzel, August 27, 1947; Zimmerman to D. E. Murphy, April 7, 1947; Balmer to Collier, September 25, 1943, ibid.; interview with Mr. Casimir L. LeBeau, Acting Superintendent, Minnesota Agency, Bemidji, Minnesota, July 30, 1965; Granite Falls Tribune, April 6, 1957.

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that most of the Indians were employed in nearby towns or in the Minneapolis--St. Paul area. The land-assignment system had not worked because of the uncertainty of the individual's tenure and the restrictions imposed on the use of the land. The best solution, it was asserted, was to prepare an up-to-date census roll and divide up the lands and land proceeds as equitably as possible. 39 Discussions between Bureau representatives and the Indians went on in 1953 and 1954, and the councils at Prairie Island and Lower Sioux drew up resolutions calling for legislation to grant individuals fee simple title to the tribal lands. At Upper Sioux there was opposition to the plan, though the majority were represented as favoring it. On January 26, 1955, Senator Edward Thye introduced a bill (S. 704) in Congress to provide for termination of federal supervision over those lands. While the bill was in committee, opposition developed, not only from the Indians (who probably had not understood all the implications of termination when they went on record as favoring it), but also from some local white people, who realized that their welfare burden would be increased, and from the Governor's Commission on Human Rights, which said the bill "would not adequately protect the interests of the Indians in the interim period." 40 The bill never reached the Senate floor, and termination talk died down in the later 1950's.

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The three little Sioux communities in Minnesota are scarcely visible in the midst of the general white society. Because they are Indian colonies in an overwhelmingly white area, however, they receive more attention than their size would warrant. Prairie Island especially has been given considerable publicity in recent years, perhaps because of

____________________ 39 83rd Cong., 2nd Sess., H. Rpt. 2680, pp. 73, 402-403.
40 Resolution adopted February 7, 1953, by Prairie Island Community Council; Area Director Don C. Foster to Commissioner Glenn Emmons, August 27, 1953; Mrs. William Lee to Senator Edward Thye, March 2, 1954; Acting Area Director K. W. Dixon to Emmons, March 25 and May 12, 1954; Emmons to Lee, April 7, 1954; Acting Area Director R. G. Fister to Emmons, October 28, 1954; Mrs. Joseph Campbell to Representative August H. Andresen, March 28, 1955; Emmons to Andresen, April 8, 1955; Area Director R. D. Holtz to Emmons, February 14, 1956; Congressional Record, 84th Cong., 1st Sess., pp. 11954-11955. The above correspondence is on file at the Bureau of Indian Affairs Central Office, Washington, D.C. Portions of it were consulted at the Minneapolis Area Office. When the Pipestone jurisdiction was discontinued in 1951, these groups were placed temporarily under the Minneapolis Area Office and then, in 1954, turned over to the new Minnesota Agency. See "Background data relating to the Sioux Indians in the Southern part of Minnesota," August 1958 ( BIA release in possession of Prairie Island Community Council officers).

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the apparent survival there of more of the old culture than at the other settlements. 41 The interest being shown in these communities suggests two things: that they have not been assimilated and that at least some white people familiar with them are concerned about the fact. To those who still see the solution to the Indian problem exclusively in terms of total assimilation, the survival of these colonies as identifiable social units reflects the failure of whites and Indians alike to achieve the desired goal. To others, who see nothing inherently bad in the retention of racial and community identity in the face of external pressures for conformity, the failure, to the extent that there is one, seems to be not the existence of these communities, but the persistence of poverty and its attendant evils in them.

There is no doubt that people living at Prairie Island and Upper Sioux are poor. Nor is there much doubt that their poverty is due largely to the limited economic opportunities available to them. But one should not therefore conclude that more extensive land purchases in the 1930's would have solved the economic problem. No doubt the Indians would be better off if they had more land; but, given the recent trends in agriculture, it is unrealistic to suppose that many would succeed in the present highly competitive world of farming. Besides, most of them, like most white Americans, prefer jobs that take them off the land, either temporarily or permanently. Since all the Minnesota Sioux groups arc fairly close to towns large enough to afford some employment, many of their people commute to work; others have moved away to cities where jobs exist.

Although the Minnesota Sioux are more fortunately located than their tribesmen in Nebraska or the Dakotas--a fact reflected in their relatively superior economic state--they live in the midst of a rural

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____________________ 41 Among the more important articles about Prairie Island are Cynthia Kelsey, "Changing Social Relationships in an Eastern Dakota Community," Minnesota Academy of Science Proceedings, XXIV ( 1956), 12-19; Bud Ehlers, "Brotherhood Starts at Home," Red Wing Daily Republican Eagle, February 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 1961; Jay Edgerton, "Sioux Once Driven from Prairie Island," Minneapolis Sunday Tribune, October 30, 1949; and United States Public Health Service, "Basic Data: Prairie Island Sioux Community," December 7, 1959, ms. My own article, "The Prairie Island Community: A Remnant of Minnesota Sioux," Minnesota History, XXXVII ( September 1961), 271-282, is based principally on these and other published sources, the Sherman "Economic Survey," and personal interviews and correspondence with local people. An interesting, though not wholly reliable, article is Gareth Hiebert, "Sioux Village Offers Color of the Past," St. Paul Sunday Pioneer Press, August 7, 1960.

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population that is also more prosperous than that of the more westerly states, and the contrast is apparent to all concerned. Furthermore, they account for a disproportionate share of welfare cases and arrests for misdemeanors and petty crimes; the illegitimacy rate is much higher than among their white neighbors, and the number of behavior problems among school children is greater. And no one should be surprised to learn that discrimination against them as Indians exists, however muted and disguised it may be.

Yet it is possible to dwell too exclusively on the poverty and crime among the Indians and the prejudice against them among whites. Beyond question, these people are better off economically and socially than most of the other fragments of the Santee Sioux. To a visitor who has traveled widely on Indian reservations or even in poverty-stricken white rural areas, their communities, especially Lower Sioux, present a relatively prosperous appearance. 42 The shabbiness in evidence at Prairie Island and Upper Sioux may not be due entirely to poverty but may in part reflect a value system that places less emphasis on externals. Some Indians whose front yards are strewn with discarded beer cans and old tires may be earning as much money as the white owner of a house that is the epitome of neatness and order. Part of the effort that a white man might put into maintaining a house and yard that his neighbors are expected to envy may, among Indians, go to satisfy less tangible (but no less worth-while) desires.

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The celebrating and visiting other reservations that so many of the agents inveighed against in the nineteenth century still play an important role in the lives of the modern Sioux. Although the old ceremonies had largely died out among the Minnesota people before the ban was lifted in the 1930's, they continued to visit other reservations and take a more or less passive part in the celebrations there. In 1958, many years after the last drummer had died, the Prairie Island group inaugurated an annual pow-wow at which Indians from other places put on most of the show. Though never much of a financial success, the affair has continued ever since, chiefly as a means of bringing together Indians of various tribes and reaffirming their common identity as

_________ 42 The appearance of prosperity may, of course, be deceptive. The neatness of houses and yards at Lower Sioux is probably due more to community spirit than to a superior economic position. No one there attempts to farm any more, and off-reservation employment is not always readily available. As a result, many younger people moved away in the middle 1960's. By 1967, the community numbered only nineteen families, and there were time empty houses. Interview with Mrs. Pearl Blue, Secretary, Lower Sioux Community Council, April 8, 1967.)

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Indians. White visitors are welcome--sometimes they even take part in the dances--and account for a sizable share of the gate receipts, but the pow-wow is not primarily for their benefit. One may quibble about the authenticity of the dances and the costumes, but there is no denying that here is a small group of Indians, surrounded for the better part of a century by a wall of white people, who are asserting their racial identity and their determination to retain it.

Nor is this pow-wow the only way the Minnesota Sioux demonstrate that they are Indians, sharers in the culture, history, and destiny of their race. In 1961 five delegates--two from Prairie Island, two from Lower Sioux, and one from Upper Sioux--attended the American Indian Chicago Conference, at which a "Declaration of Indian Purpose" was drawn up. It was a valuable experience for them, one which gave them perspective on the Indian problem as it concerns Indians of diverse backgrounds and degrees of acculturation. 43 If there is more hope for the Minnesota Sioux and the Flandreau group than for the Santees elsewhere, it is partly because they seem to be seeking a way to reconcile the need for improved material circumstances with the need to retain their Indianness. They may not have found the solution, but they are aware of the problem and are not lost in apathy and defeatism. Together with the geographical advantages they enjoy, this willingness to face their problems and to specify conditions for its solution makes the outlook for them brighter than for any of the other Santee groups.

____________________ 43 American Indian Chicago Conference, Declaration of Indian Purpose ( Chicago: American Indian Chicago Conference, 1961), pp. 41, 45. Two delegates from Devils Lake and one from Flandreau also attended; Santee and Sisseton were apparently unrepresented.

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