Treaties

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CHAPTER 18
The Santee Sioux and the Indian Problem
THE SANTEE SIOUX have come a long way since their first encounter with the white man in the winter of 1660. The course they have followed in the past three centuries has, unfortunately, been mostly downward. This is not to deny that the European invader brought material advantages which the Indians might have been centuries in attaining unaided. The life of the Santee Sioux in his aboriginal state was no doubt nasty, brutish, and short. His descendants today live longer, eat more regularly, and enjoy greater control over the natural environment than he ever imagined possible. Yet the world of the Indian before the European intrusion was one of immense potentialities, comparable to the Mediterranean world a few centuries before Christ. In Middle America a relatively advanced civilization had been developed, and its influence had spread into the southern and southwestern portions of the present United States. Although the Sioux, like the Germans and Scandinavians at an earlier time, were still stone-age savages when white men first broke in on them, who can say that they would not, like the northern Europeans, have received the torch of civilization from the south in time? Except for the absence of large animals susceptible of domestication, there is nothing about the American environment to indicate

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that the Indian would not have paralleled the white and yellow races in his progress toward civilization.

Unfortunately his progress--if it was that--was interrupted, his world shattered, and his culture largely supplanted by that of his conqueror. Unlike the peoples of Asia and Africa, he was displaced by the white invader and left with pitiful parcels of land, where he was constantly under pressure to abandon even his identity and become a white man. It must be admitted, however, that nineteenth century Americans, like their colonial predecessors, had tenderer consciences than most conquerors. Early in the process of conquest, a few of them sensed at least dimly that the Indian was being deprived of his traditional way of life and that it was morally incumbent upon the white man to offer him a substitute. Because of the ethnocentrism of European man and especially Anglo-Saxon man, the only substitute even considered was European civilization in what was assumed to be its highest form--that embraced by the men whose uneasy consciences were prodding them to think about the fate of the Indian. This meant that the Indian had to become an independent farmer and a Christian--there was some disagreement as to the order in which these transformations were to take place--after which the rest would follow in due course. Tribal customs and language would disappear, the white man's way of life and the English language would be universally adopted, and eventually the Indian, if he did not literally die out, would be absorbed into the general population.

This neat theory contained several fallacies. For one thing, almost all of those who sincerely wanted to find a way for the Indian to survive on a continent being overrun by white people failed to discriminate between the essential and the nonessential--between aspects of the white man's culture that the Indian would have to adopt in order to accommodate himself to the dominant civilization and aspects which he could very well ignore if only the white man would let him do so. Granted the inevitability of the occupation by Europeans of most of the American continent, there were two respects in which the Indian had to modify his culture if the two races were to share the continent in peace and harmony: Agriculture had to take the place of an economy based on hunting, fishing, and food-gathering; and intertribal warfare had to lose its centrality in the Indian system. Inasmuch as most tribes who originally occupied the present United States had some agriculture and some were almost totally dependent on it, the first of these necessary modifications would not have required so radical a transformation

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as many white men once believed. Because of the intimate connection of war with virtually every other aspect of life among most Indians, the second change would have been more difficult to effect, though an increased emphasis on agriculture would presumably have removed much of the motivation for warfare.

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These changes were necessary. But there was no necessity for the Indian to give up his language, his religion (except as it was connected with war), his dress, his family relationship system, or his preference for collectivism over individualism. Yet the agents and missionaries insisted that the whole cultural apparatus had to be jettisoned--quickly. They did not understand that culture change is selective; some features of the new culture are adopted and others rejected, and old traits are not abandoned until they have lost their usefulness and their hold on the imaginations of the people possessing them. There was no necessity for the native languages to be expunged; the advantages of knowing English would ultimately have become evident to those Indians most able to profit from a knowledge of the invader's language. Nor was there any good reason why a loincloth was less suitable attire for a farmer than pantaloons, why collective use of land was less satisfactory for people accustomed to such a system than ownership in fee simple, or why polygamy could not be tolerated until altered economic and social conditions made it no longer practicable. As for religion, there was no reason why an Indian farmer who danced to produce rain should be less successful than the white farmers who observed a day of prayer in hopes of bringing an end to the grasshopper plague of the 1870's.

The people who wanted to save the Indian might have accomplished more if they had tried to do less. But two conditions were required for the necessary culture change to take place: time for the Indian to see the necessity for the change and to make it himself, and a place for him to work out his destiny in comparative freedom from overt external pressure. Neither of these was granted him. The whites wanted the land, and if the Indian were to survive, he would have to change his way of life in a hurry. There was always--and still is--a certain irritation with the slowness of the Indian to come around to the position designated for him by his conquerors. As Roy Harvey Pearce has said:

Americans had always felt that the process of acculturation, of throwing off one way of life for another, would be relatively simple. To be civilized the Indian would have merely to be made into a farmer; this was a matter of an education for a generation or two. . . . But acculturation was not a simple process, as we know now, at least. For a culture is a delicately balanced

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system of attitudes, beliefs, valuations, conditions, and modes of behavior; the system does not change and reintegrate itself overnight, or in a generation or two. 1

Even if the white man had been more modest in his demands for culture change by the Indian, he did not permit the Indian time enough to accomplish even the necessary changes.

Nor was the Indian allowed to stay in one place long enough for the experiment to be tried. Two possibilities for acculturation existed: Indian tribes might either be permitted to remain as enclaves within predominantly white communities, learning from their neighbors much as European immigrants did, or they might be placed beyond the white settlements and there guided toward civilization by agents and missionaries, protected meanwhile from undesirable influences. Both techniques were tried, sometimes successively with a single tribe; all too often when the second expedient was adopted, white settlement caught up with the Indians, and they had to be moved repeatedly. There was much to be said for keeping the Indians in substantial isolation from the whites and letting this highly adaptable race pick and choose what it wished from the cultural inventory of the European within the framework of the existing system. That approach was tried repeatedly, by the British government late in the colonial period and by the United States government with its successive "Indian frontiers," and was finally abandoned only in 1907, when Indian Territory and Oklahoma became a single state.

When Columbus landed in the Bahamas, the chance for the American Indian to develop a civilization independently of the Old World was doomed. But at any time between then and the end of the nineteenth century it would still have been possible to permit him to accept what he wanted of European civilization at his own speed and in his own way, if only the white man had exercised restraint and understanding. The various attempts to secure for the Indian an opportunity to adjust gradually to the encroaching civilization show that there were men of good will, often in positions of authority and influence, who possessed some measure of those qualities. But the mass of the American people did not. It is well to remember that the Indian's worst enemy was not the whiskey dealer, the rapacious fur trader, or the corrupt Indian agent, but the American frontiersman, whom every school child has been taught to revere as the embodiment of all that is

____________________ 1 Roy Harvey Pearce, The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civilization ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1953), p. 66.

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admirable in the national character. We should not forget that the pioneer pictured by Walt Whitman as proudly bearing the torch of civilization into the wilderness was also the man who saw the Indian mainly as an obstacle to be removed, preferably with a bullet.

That is why the idea of Indian enclaves in settled country never really worked so long as the land they occupied was good enough to attract white men. The Cherokees did the impossible and accepted the white man's civilization in the hope of being allowed to stay in their homeland of northwestern Georgia. But even this remarkable achievement did not save them from expulsion when popular sentiment became strong enough and when the President of the United States refused to back up the decision of the Supreme Court in their favor. In Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, and finally Indian Territory itself the process was repeated. Grant Foreman tells, in The Last Trek of the Indians, how the civilized Wyandottes and the partially civilized Shawnees and Delawares were persecuted and harried out of Kansas by white men who wanted the farms they were successfully cultivating. If Doty's treaty had been passed by the Senate, the same thing would undoubtedly have happened in Minnesota sooner or later, as indeed it did when the Winnebagos were hustled off their reservation in 1863 on the pretext that they had at least sympathized with the Sioux during the uprising.

Corrupt as the old Indian Bureau often was, its leaders were nearly always more sympathetic toward the Indian than the typical white frontiersman. So were many of the men in Congress, though they usually bowed to political expediency when their constituents brought pressure on them to get a particular band of Indians off some land that was wanted for settlement. Such responsiveness to public opinion, coupled with the fact that the men who formulated Indian policy, sympathetic though they might be, knew nothing about the processes of culture change and would have rejected with horror the notion of cultural relativity if it had been presented to them, largely explains the course taken by the United States government in its relations with the Indians in the nineteenth century. The amazing thing is that the Indians survived at all, with anything of their old culture clinging to them.

Not all of the harm done to the Indians was the work of their enemies. So far as the assault on their culture is concerned, perhaps the greatest damage was done by those who regarded themselves as their best friends--the missionaries. Neither the loftiness of their motives nor

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the selflessness of their devotion to the Indians they sought to convert is questioned here, nor does there seem to be any doubt that many of them knew the Indians better than any other white men did. But their singleminded determination to Christianize the Indians, born of their unshakable conviction that Christianity--their own particular brand of Christianity--was the true religion, blinded them to everything good in the Indian character that grew out of or could be identified with the native religions. In their reduction of the Dakota language to writing they performed a valuable service, just as some of the Ponds' writings provide much of the evidence on which modern ethnologists base their reconstructions of the aboriginal culture. A Mennonite missionary named H. R. Voth studied the Hopis intensively and made important contributions to the science of ethnology, but by his frontal assault on the value system of those people he also contributed to the factionalism and individual psychological instability that exist today among them. 2 Likewise the missionaries to the Sioux, with their stress on man's innate sinfulness and the need to accept Christianity, not only undermined the sanctions and controls of the old faith but probably damaged the emotional and psychological balance of those who came under their influence.

Under the combined assault of the missionaries and the government officials, the culture of the Santee Sioux was shattered--not only those portions of it that were irreconcilable with the altered conditions imposed upon the Indians by European conquest, but also those features which in no way prevented the Indian from becoming a farmer and which might have had great utility as something to hold to during the transitional period. One can go further: much was lost that might have enabled the Indian to live in the modern world more successfully than the white American, whose extreme individualism often creates psychological tensions and sometimes renders him a menace to his fellows. If this thesis is accepted, then it becomes possible to argue that the greatest crime committed by the white man against the Indian was not in stealing from him a continent, but in denying to him the right to be an Indian--trying to deprive him of his racial and cultural identity.

At the same time that the effort was being made to transform the Indian into a white man, he was losing the land base that afforded him

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____________________ 2 Harry C. James, The Hopi Indians ( Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1956), p. 30. James describes the church erected by Voth as "an offensive eyesore on the landscape and a monument to religious persecution and intolerance." See also Laura Thompson, Culture in Crisis ( New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950), pp. 35-36, 136-141.

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the only means of competing economically with other Americans. In these two deprivations--loss of culture and loss of land--may be found the roots of the "Indian problem" as it exists today. Even if the cultural transformation had been as rapid and as complete as its proponents expected, most Indians could not have made a satisfactory living on the land left to them after allotment. Excoriation of nineteenth-century Indian policy and those who made and administered it will not seem like beating a dead horse if we recognize that the problem this policy was supposed to solve still exists, in different form. Most Indians, including the Santee Sioux, continue to be poorer than other Americans and to constitute a financial burden on the more prosperous segments of ours society. For the federal government to renege on its promises and abandon its services to the Indians would only transfer the problem to agencies less capable of handling it. Hence the termination talk of the 1950's was at best premature and at worst merely the latest disguise for a design to get at the Indians' remaining resources.

If the Indian problem is to be solved within any finite period of time, the solution will have to proceed along the lines suggested by Gordon Macgregor in Warriors Without Weapons. Speaking of the Pine Ridge Sioux, he says: "They need a way of working themselves out of the present poverty through a permanent economy based on available resources. They need also greater self-direction to permit the regeneration of society." 3 The implication here and elsewhere in Macgregor book is that, although outside guidance and help will be needed, the solution will ultimately have to come from the Indians themselves. If external influences can work to relieve the anxiety and insecurity that beset them, he suggests, perhaps something will happen within the group that will enable them to improve their condition. Since the psychological problem of the Santee Sioux much resembles that of the Pine Ridge people, though in less acute form, the same principles ought to apply in any discussion of remedies for their plight.

What can non-Indians do to bring about an improvement in the condition of the Indian? Even though the role white people can play in the regeneration of Indian society must and should be only a minor one, there are some things they can do. In the first place, they need to rid themselves of some stereotyped notions and hackneyed opinions. In the nineteenth century the standard argument was that the Indians' culture needed to be destroyed because it constituted an obstacle to their

____________________ 3 Gordon Macgregor, Warriors Without Weapons ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946), p. 212.

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success in a white-dominated world. In the twentieth century the line more commonly heard runs something like this: It's a pity that our grandparents insisted on stamping out the Indian culture, but they did a good job, and now there isn't enough left to bother trying to preserve; so the Indians had better hurry up and go the rest of the way to total acculturation. The fact is, however, that the Indian culture is not dead. Among some tribes it retains remarkable vitality, and enough survives even among the Santee Sioux to be taken into account whenever policy decisions are made with regard to them. Though some of the survivals of the aboriginal culture constitute a handicap to the Indians possessing them, non-Indians should not arrogate to themselves the right to decide which traits are serviceable and which are not and to deliberately try to wipe out the latter. There are enough pressures for conformity, both within the law and outside it, to accomplish this end indirectly.

Throughout the long period that the United States government has been trying to solve the Indian problem, it has been faced with a series of dilemmas which really boil down to one. In the late nineteenth century the agent worried about how to get his Indians to support themselves by farming, when every step in that direction brought a loss in government assistance but Indians who made no effort to help themselves received rations and supplies gratis. The modern form of this dilemma amounts to this: How can the freedom necessary to develop responsibility be reconciled with the protection and guidance needed to prevent disaster? The Indian Bureau has again and again been accused of paternalism, and no doubt there was at one time ample justification for the charge. On some reservations the average Indian lacks initiative and tends to go to the superintendent about all sorts of trivial matters. This is the result of decades of paternalism and decisionmaking by white men for Indians. Beginning with the Meriam Report and more noticeably in the Collier administration, there was a concerted effort to turn more and more of the decision-making over to the Indians. If they make mistakes, those mistakes have a certain educational value, provided they are not too serious.

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The Santee Sioux have not, in the present century, been faced with decisions of such magnitude as the one the Indians of the Fort Berthold Reservation had to contend with when they received a settlement for land lost through the construction of the Garrison Dam and had to decide whether to use it for a tribal program or expend it in per capita payments. Furthermore, many of them have been making most of their own decisions for a long time; the Flandreau people and the Minnesota

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colonies have experienced little of the paternalism that was characteristic at Fort Berthold and Pine Ridge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Because of their comparative freedom, they tend to resent evidences of paternalism. When a Red Wing newspaper published a series on "Brotherhood Begins at Home," the president of the Prairie Island community council replied with a courteous but critical letter, in which he objected to the assumption that non-Indians know better than the Indian what is good for him and that they are therefore justified in determining the course of Indian policy, regardless of the wishes of the beneficiaries. Whether these implications were really present in the series is less important than the Indian reaction. The Prairie Island leader also stressed the right of a group of people to retain its own identity--a "peculiarity in the Indian character elsewhere called patriotism by other Americans." 4

His comment may have been an oblique reference to the view, explicitly stated in the series, that the ultimate destiny of the Indian is to be biologically as well as culturally assimilated to the dominant white race. This notion, expressed by William Byrd in the early eighteenth century, seems to have more staying power than almost any other myth about the Indian, despite the fact that, while full-blood Indians are a dwindling minority, the proportion of Indian blood in people who identify as Indians may well be increasing. Not only are Indians growing in numbers; they are remaining Indians. Despite a constant draining off to urban centers, most reservations continue to be overpopulated; and those individuals and families who move away tend to gather in Indian communities and to associate chiefly with Indians in their new homes. In 1954 participants in the Wenner-Gren Conference at the University of Chicago discussed the question of assimilation and concluded that, although individual Indians are disappearing into the general population, most Indian tribes are holding onto their identity. Speaking of the possibility that the present Indian communities might vanish within the foreseeable future, they expressed the view that no one could expect "such group assimilation within any short, predictable time period, say, one to four generations. The urge to retain tribal identity is strong, and operates powerfully for many Indian groups." 5

____________________ 4 Letter from Norman Campbell, in Red Wing Daily Republican Eagle, March 6, 1961. Campbell wondered, in view of our record in Indian affairs, "How can a nation like ours venture forth to solve human relations problems on a world wide scale?"
5 John Provinseet al., "The American Indian in Transition," American Anthropologist, LVI ( June 1954), 388. Another symposium on Indian affairs concluded that

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Although the people at the Wenner-Gren Conference were probably thinking mainly of the large western reservations, their conclusion applies with almost equal validity to the small groups of Santee Sioux scattered through the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Minnesota. Everywhere except at Santee and Lower Sioux their numbers are increasing or at least holding their own. The number of colonies in Minnesota has dwindled since the first census was taken in 1883, but those that have disappeared--Faribault, Hastings, Wabasha--were gone by the first decade of the twentieth century. Except for Prior Lake, where the land holdings are scattered, the others at which land was purchased have survived and give no indications of disappearing. If anything, the Indians'group consciousness and sense of identity seem to be increasing.

Another phenomenon observed among Indians today is pan-Indianism--the tendency for people to think of themselves as Indians rather than as Sioux or Chippewas or Winnebagos and to exchange surviving elements of their once diverse cultures. Besides such surface manifestations as the almost universal adoption of the Plains Indian headdress, pan-Indianism is evident in the growing awareness by Indians of their common problems and a growing consciousness that the old tribal differences are insignificant in comparison to what they all have in common. At times, when old grudges against the white man are aired, it can take a somewhat belligerent form. A newspaper report of the 1963 meeting of the National Congress of American Indians was headlined "Indian Battles for Rights -- in Reverse" and went on to say that Indians want, not integration, but recognition of their identity as a separate race. Robert Burnette, retiring president of the NCAI, was reported as saying, "We are first-class citizens and more." 6 Although this attitude has not manifested itself openly among the Santee Sioux, it promises to become a force to be reckoned with there as elsewhere.

Perhaps such an attitude, though to a white person it may sound chilling or ludicrous, depending on how seriously he takes it, carries

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____________________ "Indian groups residing on reservations (homelands) will continue indefinitely as distinct social units" and that "even though many Indians continue to live in separate communities with some distinctive cultural patterns, integration into the life of the larger society can still take place." See Edward P. Dozier, George E. Simpson, and J. Milton Yinger, "The Integration of Americans of Indian Descent," American Academy of Political and Social Science Annals, CCCXI ( 1957), 165. These authors distinguish sharply between "integration" and "assimilation."
6 Indian Battles for Rights--in Reverse, Minneapolis Star, September 13, 1963. A useful discussion of pan-Indianism is James H. Howard, "Pan-Indian Culture of Oklahoma," Scientific Monthly, LXXXI ( November 1955), 215-220.

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with it the real hope for the Indian. The nonwhite peoples of the world have been asserting themselves in recent years, and the long domination by Europeans of Asia and Africa has been broken. Why should not the American Indian demand more for himself, now that the emperor has been discovered to have no clothes on, the growling dog to have no teeth? The growing strength of such organizations as the NCAI, with their potential for influencing the course of legislation, suggests that Indians are becoming more articulate. In the nineteenth century too few Indians had acquired enough education to be really articulate, and those who had were inclined to identify with the whites and to share the prevailing views on civilizing the Indian. But now that educational opportunities are reaching the reservation Indian, there is hope that a considerable body of educated Indians will emerge who are not alienated from their people and who will insist on a better life for those who choose not to migrate to the cities where young people of all races have traditionally sought jobs.

Indians would, of course, be less reluctant to leave the reservation if they could be reasonably sure of a friendly reception elsewhere. This does not mean simply a job for which they are qualified; so long as an Indian is second choice for a job, he has little opportunity to demonstrate his qualifications. And so long as the stereotype of the lazy, unreliable Indian persists, he will be second choice at best. Since it is currently unfashionable to express such racial stereotypes publicly, one seldom encounters this view in books, magazines, or newspapers, but anyone who lives near an Indian reservation or even talks casually with non-Indians in such a community soon hears it expressed. And occasionally it finds its way into print. In 1960, Desert magazine received a letter from a reader protesting against the amount of "Indian rot" published in the magazine. "If you would like to see Indians as they really are," the writer advised, "go up to Parker, Arizona any weekend and hang around the beer joints. Parker is a real Indian town." 7 Discrimination against Indians is an established fact in both Dakotas and exists in less obvious form in Nebraska and Minnesota. Racial prejudice among school children is one of the reasons for the high drop-out rate among Prairie Island Indians attending the Red Wing school, according to a study prepared in 1964. 8 Although the burden of conquering prejudice

____________________ 7 Letter from Will T. Scott, in Desert, XXIII ( October 1960), 4. Scott claimed to know Indians, having lived most of his life in Indian country and shared his blankets with the Apache scouts who were tracking Pancho Villa in 1916.
8 Red Wing Daily Republican Eagle, September 11, 1964. This study was conducted

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falls mainly on the non-Indian, there is much that the Indian can do to prove the inaccuracy of sweeping generalizations about his race.

Not all of the Indians' unwillingness to leave their reservations is due to fear of discrimination against them elsewhere. Many Indians, like people of other races, feel a deep attachment to their home territory, however limited its resources may be and however dreary it may look to the casual visitor. Whatever its limitations, the reservation is a place where an Indian can be an Indian, where he does not have to adapt himself to alien manners and alien values. This desire to remain an Indian is something else that white Americans find difficult to understand, perhaps because most of them are descended from people who gave up their traditional ways to become Americans. Yet until it is understood, non-Indians cannot fulfill their rightful role in helping the Indian to achieve his destiny. So long as this determination to remain an Indian is thought of in purely negative terms--as sheer stubbornness or as a defense mechanism to cover a sense of inadequacy--the general public will continue to propose solutions that demand a reorientation of the Indian personality along white American lines.

The Meriam Report stressed the need to consider the desires of the individual Indian in any policy planning. Specifically, it said, "He who wishes to merge into the social and economic life of the prevailing civilization of this country should be given all practicable aid and advice in making the necessary adjustments. He who wants to remain an Indian and live according to his old culture should be aided in doing so." 9 Under the Collier administration this philosophy was adopted and practiced, but during the 1950's attention was concentrated on helping the Indian to leave the reservation and "join the mainstream of American life," to quote the cliché so overused by the advocates of termination and relocation. As long as there are plenty of white Americans who have no desire to "join the mainstream of American life," what wonder is it that an even higher proportion of Indians do not?

In a pluralistic society that professes to prize diversity (even while it embraces a surface uniformity), surely there is room for groups as well as individuals who depart noticeably from the norm. Every society

____________________ by a "committee of welfare, juvenile and school officials." Children questioned said that about 25 per cent of the white children were unfriendly toward Indians; teachers were said to give fair treatment to all.
9 Lewis Meriam et al., The Problem of Indian Administration ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1928), p. 88. The Meriam commission pointed out that unless the Indians who wished to stay Indians were aided, they might become a menace.

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needs its marginal men--its Thoreaus and its Veblens--who are in it but not of it and hence are in a position to criticize it more perceptively than those who participate fully in it. Can American society not profit from marginal groups as well as marginal men--provided, of course, that they are not marginal simply in the sense of being economically deprived? Indians have often proved shrewd critics of the white world. A body of educated, articulate Indians who remained outside the mainstream of American life could be of incalculable benefit to the society surrounding them. Perhaps Americans would get along better with the rest of the world if they were more frequently reminded that they have in their midst people who do not wholly share the prevailing value system. They need to know that their value system is not the only one that men have found worth embracing. The Sentinel, the organ of the National Congress of American Indians, stated the case well for the preservation of Indian value systems:

We must have a variety of real values and differences so that any person has many real options for living in our society. We believe that allowing total development of Indian communities on their own basis will be a major step in providing that variety in American life which is so necessary to a healthy society. 10

Understanding the Indian's point of view and his desire to remain an Indian requires knowledge. Hence perhaps the most important way the white man can help solve the Indian problem is to inform himself on the history and present condition of these people about whom he really knows very little. Indifference and apathy are more serious obstacles to true understanding than outright prejudice, if only because they are vastly more widespread. For every white man who nourishes active hostility toward Indians, there are hundreds who neither know anything about them nor care to know anything. Those who think they know something may only be the victims of myths and stereotypes. To stir people out of their ignorance and complacency is one of the tasks of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In 1948, Gordon Macgregor wrote that an agency superintendent "must always continue to enlighten the general public on Indian affairs for better Indian-white relations, and to overcome the unbelievable amount of mis[in]formation and prejudice about Indians." 11 But superintendents are usually too busy with

____________________ 10 NCAI Sentinel, XI (Winter 1966), 2.
11 Gordon Macgregor. "The Resources, People and Administration of Fort Berthold Reservation North Dakota," Missouri River Basin Investigations Reports, No. 60, p. 15. Mimeographed ms loaned by the Aberdeen Area Office, Bureau of Indian Affairs.

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their main job to be able to devote much time to public relations work. The ball must be carried a good share of the time by people outside the Indian Service, people whose access to information may be more limited than that of the Bureau official.

In enlightening the general public, as in dispelling prejudice, considerable responsibility rests on the Indian himself. Some forwardlooking tribes are undertaking their own public relations programs. Museums, usually run jointly by the tribe and the Bureau, can be found here and there; newsletters are published by several groups; and of course many Indians contribute letters to newspapers and thus reach a wider audience than they could perhaps reach in any other way. 12 Indians can also help improve their collective image by cooperating, as most do, with serious investigators belonging to other races. Like other people, especially those in lower economic groups, Indians resent anything that looks like snooping into their private affairs, and the line separating a mere frivolous curiosity from a scientific or scholarly interest is sometimes pretty thin. The more thoroughly and objectively their history and contemporary culture are studied, however, the better chance there is that the American public, which finally determines the general course of Indian policy, will awaken from its complacency and lend its support to a sound program.

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The history of the Santee Sioux is the history of the American Indian. Mutually profitable early contacts with Europeans were followed by a massive onslaught on the native culture, partly deliberate, partly fortuitous. Then came forced land cessions, removal to a reservation, smoldering resentment that erupted in a bloody but abortive protest, vindictive punishment, and a long, dismal period of attempted acculturation, ending in poverty and demoralization. If the outlook has been brighter since 1933, the flicker of hope has by no means yet been fanned into a real flame. Like their past, the future of the Santee Sioux will probably parallel that of the rest of the Indians in this country. A gifted, resilient, durable people, they may yet realize something of their potential if the white man will give them a chance.

_________ 12 The anti-Indian tirade that appeared in the letter in Desert magazine elicited a response (among many others) from an Indian who remarked: "The white man looks down on the Indian for some unexplained reason. Those who claim to 'know' Indians take it for granted that some mysterious law of life made them superior to the Indian people--or any other dark skinned race, for that matter." See letter from Jimmie. James , in Desert, XXIII ( December 1960), 6. An agency superintendent, who prefers not to be identified, told the author: "This town is full of 'Indian experts,' who know less about Indians than people a thousand miles away."

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Epilogue
In one respect, Nebraska's Santee Sioux Reservation reached its low point in the early and middle 1960s, when the population dipped below three-hundred. The Santee post office had been discontinued in 1957, there were several vacant buildings in the village, and most of the Indian-owned land (both tribal and allotted) was leased to white farmers. One might have felt safe in predicting that the reservation would soon be abandoned except for a few elderly people who had nowhere else to go. Yet precisely the opposite occurred, with the result that Santee has become a busy, vibrant community, its population and employment opportunities growing, its identity and sense of Indianness revived.

Just when and why the turnaround occurred is not entirely clear. It had begun before the end of the 1960s, and it was partly the result of an infusion of federal funds during that decade. A housing project created jobs, which in turn attracted people back to the reservation who had moved to Sioux City, Norfolk, or elsewhere in search of employment. The change was perceptible by 1972, in the form of a flock of new houses on the site of the former agency and the bituminous surfacing of the road from Nebraska State Highway 12 to Santee. These and other changes made it possible to venture the guess that "there [might] be occurring a movement back to the reservation and a revival of a sense of group identity." 1

The revival at Santee has manifested itself in many ways and may be considered under the headings of economic, educational, and cultural (or spiritual) renewal. Although many members of the tribe continue to leave the reservation, temporarily or permanently, to find jobs elsewhere, there are more jobs at home than there were in the early 1960s. Some of these are provided by the educational system: a Head Start program, a kindergarten through twelfth-grade school, and the Santee Campus of the Nebraska Indian Community College. Many people work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Public Health Service, the tribal government, and the state of Nebraska, which contracts with the tribe. Bector Dickinson, a phar-

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maceutical manufacturer, has a plant on the reservation that employs sixteen people and may increase the number. 2

The tourist industry, centered on Lewis and Clark Lake, has not benefited the tribe greatly thus far, but it holds out promise for the future. Skiing, water sliding, and other sports have been developed commercially by private concerns in the Devil's Nest area, and the tribe, which owns 1,500 acres of land there, has been doing some preliminary negotiating for a share in this enterprise. Unlike the other Santee groups in neighboring states, the Nebraska branch of the tribe has not yet entered the field of commercial gaming, chiefly owing to restrictions placed on gambling by the state. Negotiations were underway in the summer of 1993, however, and it seemed only a matter of time before the tribe would be able to enter this lucrative endeavor that has radically changed the economic condition of so many Indian groups. 3

Construction on a succession of housing projects, most of them carried out in cooperation with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), has been another source of employment. These projects have come in a series of spurts, in 1969-70, 1974-75, and 1980, and have markedly altered the appearance of the Santee community. 4 The largest cluster of houses is located west of the site of the now-vanished Santee Normal Training School, along blacktop streets that wind over the gently rolling landscape. The care with which the houses and lawns are maintained gives the lie to the old stereotyped view, once held by many whites, that Indian dwellings are invariably neglected and acquire a clutter of dead car bodies and other junk.

The Nebraska reservation differs from the other Santee reservations in that more use is being made of tribal lands. In 1974 about 2,400 acres were acquired for a tribally owned ranch, which now supports about 600 cattle, mostly cows. Moreover, there has been a sizable increase in the amount of tribal land--from 2,563 acres in 1960 to about 20,000. As tribal officials point out, this is only a fraction of the original 115,000 acres, but at least it represents an improvement in recent decades. 5

All in all, it is estimated that between 200 and 250 people (out of a 1990 reservation population of 740) are employed on or adjacent to the reservation. 6 Although this figure leaves much room for improvement, it does suggest a better state of affairs than prevails on many Indian reservations. Economic development is on the upswing, and if casino gambling comes to Santee, together with a

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planned expansion of the tribal ranch and a greater share in the tourist potential, the reservation community will be in far better shape than anyone would have expected in the bleak years that preceded the exciting events of the past quarter-century.

Except for the Santee Normal Training School, the reservation was without its own educational facilities after the closing of the boarding school in 1909. Although it was served by district schools for many years, the Indian people yearned for their own school, which could follow a curriculum more suited to their children's needs. Their wishes were finally realized in 1974-75, when a school was built at Santee. At first limited to kindergarten through eighth grade, it subsequently added a four-year high school. The needs of at least some of the young people for post-secondary education are met by the fully accredited two-year community college, one of three branches of the Nebraska Indian Community College. Tribal officials, presumably reflecting the wishes of their constituents, would like to see an increase in the amount of specifically Indian cultural materials in the curriculum, especially at the secondary level, taught by native people. 7

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As on other Indian reservations, there has been at Santee a rejection of the assimilationist philosophy that dominated Indian policy until the 1930s, if not longer, and a heightened interest in the traditional culture, which, contrary to the beliefs of many whites early in this century, was not dying but only suppressed. An annual powwow is held the third week of June, when many of the 2,260-plus enrolled members who live away from the reservation come "home" and join in the festivities, along with Indians from other reservations. And of course Santees attend and often participate in similar celebrations around the country and in Canada.

On a deeper level there is increased interest, especially on the part of young people, in the aboriginal culture that government agents and missionaries tried so hard to stamp out in the late nineteenth century. Tribal leaders have expressed the belief that three or four generations will be needed for the recovery of the old culture and for acceptance by the non-Indian population of their neighbors' right to preserve this culture. 8 Meanwhile, the Indian people are becoming increasingly comfortable in and accepted by the white world around them. In addition, most of them consider as part of their history the missionary culture represented by the Santee Normal Training School, the site of which is regarded as a sort of shrine. The Santee Sioux, if they have not solved all their problems yet--who in

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our society has?--seem well on their way toward doing so.

The recovery evident at Santee is even more strikingly noticeable at the Sisseton, or Lake Traverse, Reservation, where conditions in the 1960s were as dismal as anywhere on the northern Great Plains. A much larger--and growing--population both heightened the seriousness of the problems and enhanced the possibilities for their solution. With help from outside the reservation, the Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux have improved their lot to a degree that could scarcely have been imagined in the mid-1960s. And in the process the tribe, seemingly acculturated beyond any hope of reversal in the 1930s, has recovered much of its traditional culture and seems determined to retain it and pass it on to the next generation.

From a reservation population of 2,315 in 1960, the tribe has grown to about 5,500, with roughly an equal number of enrolled members living off the reservation. For election purposes, the reservation is divided into seven districts, each containing at least one population center: Old Agency, Big Coulee, Enemy Swim, Long Hollow, Buffalo Lake, Heipa-Veblen, and Lake Traverse. As has been the case ever since the opening of the reservation in 1891, following allotment, the Indian communities are interspersed with white-owned farms and villages predominantly white in population. 9 (The official South Dakota state highway map does not recognize the Sisseton reservation, though it shows all the others in the state except the Yankton Reservation.)

A major concern in the 1960s was the land situation. As a legacy of allotment, not much more than 10 percent of the original reservation of nearly a million acres remained in Indian hands. Only 650 acres of this was tribally owned; except for 122 acres of governmentowned land, the rest--109,378 acres--was allotted land, much of it in a tangled heirship status and thus to all practical purposes unusable. After several failed attempts over a period of nearly fifty years, Congress finally passed an heirship bill in 1984. The provisions of the act (Public Law 98-513) limited the inheritance of allotted lands to close relatives and to interests of at least two and half acres (outside municipalities). If there were no close relatives or if the person's interest was less than two and a half acres, the land would go to the tribe. Heirs must also be members of the tribe. Nonmembers would receive only a life estate; upon their decease the land would pass to the tribe. The act also granted the right of eminent domain to the tribe for such purposes as "to eliminate fractional heirship interests. . . . , to consolidate tribal interests in land, to develop agricul-

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ture and . . . for other public purposes. . . ." As a result of this legislation, there has been a substantial shift of land from individual ownership to tribal ownership. By 1993 the allotted lands were down to about 81,000 acres, the tribal lands up to about 27,000 acres. 10

The land problem at Sisseton has not, of course, been solved. The individual tracts are too small for efficient operation under modern conditions, and so not many Indians even try to farm. But as elsewhere, the land is perceived as the most valuable resource the Indians have left, and they are determined to hang on to it. There are plans for using it more productively, too. In the summer of 1993 a proposal for setting up a tribally owned cattle operation was being considered. At the same time it was planned to bring 65 buffalo to the reservation in the fall. 11

Fortunately, the land is not the only potential source of income available to the Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux, many of whom find employment in industry, both on and off the reservation. Besides the various types of government jobs mentioned in connection with Santee, there are two small industrial enterprises on the reservation: Power Sentry, an electronics plant, and Dakota Western, a plastic bag factory that employs about 23 people. Watertown, a city of 15,649 inhabitants about sixty miles from the center of the reservation, has a quilting factory and a chicken processing plant; the latter has proposed operating a bus for the convenience of Indian employees living at home. 12

The Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux have also joined the great number of Indian groups that have taken up commercial gaming as a source of income. Agency Bingo, on the reservation, and the Dakota Sioux Casino in Watertown are owned and operated by the tribe. The former employs 45 Indians, the latter 153. Besides the employment opportunities offered by these facilities, receipts are used to underwrite tribal programs. 13

The Lake Traverse Reservation has undergone changes of a highly visible nature since the 1960s. In 1974 the agency, which had been in the town of Sisseton ever since 1923, was moved to a site near the old Good Will Mission, where there was still a Presbyterian church. This site, renamed Agency Village, became the principal center of activity on the reservation, with a large housing project, the tribal offices, Agency Bingo, a store called the Trading Post containing a postal station, a coin laundry, a credit union, the educational complex, and other conveniences. Although some tribal facilities are in Sisseton, the creation of Agency Village has given the Indian peo-

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ple a political, economic, and cultural center that they can regard as their own and not part of the predominantly non-Indian town.

The educational complex referred to alone consists of the Tiospa Zina Tribal School, offering a course of study from kindergarten through twelfth grade, and the Sisseton Wahpeton Community College, an accredited two-year institution. The school was started in 1981 (though the present physical plant came along later) and from the beginning included both elementary and secondary work. The school has designed its curriculum to suit the needs of its students, including an emphasis on native culture. One issue of the newspaper project a list of thirteen Dakota words, with pronunciations, that the TZTS students were learning. Unlike its counterpart at Santee, the community college is an independent institution, not a branch of a larger system. 14

Inasmuch as a lack of decent living quarters was a long-standing deficiency on the Lake Traverse Reservation, much effort in recent years has gone into housing projects. Besides the new houses at Agency Village, there are similar, if smaller, clusters at eight other locations, including the towns of Sisseton and Peever. The SissetonWahpeton Housing Authority, working in cooperation with HUD, has been responsible for these projects. As at Santee, the houses and yards appear to be well maintained. While thanking the low-rent housing tenants for keeping up their lawns, the Housing Authority has had to remind them that they are responsible for the lawnmowers they sign out. 15

The native culture, under assault from the beginning of EuroAmerican contanct until the 1930s, has shown the same resilience and survival power on the Lake Traverse Reservation that it has elsewhere. It persists not only in the schools but also in such forms as the annual tribal celebration. In early July 1993 the Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux held the 126th annual wacipi, or powwow. The Fourth of July event had an international as well as an intertribal flavor; one of the announcers was from the Sioux Valley (Oak River) reserve near Griswold, Manitoba. 16

Another vehicle for the expression and transmission of community spirit is the official tribal newspaper, Sota Iya Ye Yapi, founded in 1968. A professionally edited weekly, it concentrates on news of interest to the people of the reservation. The issue for June 17, 1993, for example, contained articles on the dedication of the monument commemorating the repatriation from the Smithsonian Institution of the remains of 34 tribesmen, an announcement of a special elec-

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tion to determine the wishes of tribal members concerning a selfgovernance initiative, the approval of a grant from the National Archives to enable the community college to establish a tribal archive, the eighth-grade graduation at the tribal school, and a report on the stocking of reservation lakes with walleye fry, to mention only the most conspicuous. There were also shorter items on topics of more widespread concern, such as ways of recycling oil, examples of sexual harassment, HIV testing and counseling, and an aerobics class.

As this sampling of newspaper items suggests, the Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux resemble other people in that they are interested chiefly in matters that affect them immediately and personally. Some of these matters are the same as those that concern the general population, a few are of special interest to Indians in general, and many have to do with events on the Lake Traverse Reservation. Although the people living on the reservation have much more contact with the outside world than their forebears did a century ago, there is a very definite consciousness of themselves as a people, with interests and concerns different from those of the surrounding white population--this despite the deliberate attempt by the agents of the Indian Bureau to scatter the Indians over the reservation so that they and the whites would mingle and eventually form one people.

The Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux Tribe and its reservation are much larger than the other fragments into which the Eastern Sioux were split following the events of 1862. Despite the dispersed nature of Indian settlement on the reservation, therefore, the tribe is better situated to preserve its identity and perhaps even to constitute an economically viable unit than the other groups who claim descent from the four subtribes that lived in what is now Minnesota at the time of the earliest major contacts with Europeans. If what the tribe has accomplished in the quarter-century since 1968--reflected in the distinctly upbeat tone of the tribal newspaper--can be taken as an augury of the future, it stands an excellent chance of achieving its goals.

The history of the Devils Lake Reservation since the late 1960s parallels that of Sisseton, even to the passage of an act by Congress to facilitate land consolidation. As on the Lake Traverse Reservation, there have been changes, mostly for the better, both visible and invisible to the eye of the visitor. Here too there have been economic developments of considerable importance, improvements in housing, and expansion of the educational system.

Although the heirship problem at Devils Lake had not reached

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the proportions noted at Sisseton, by the 1960s it was serious enough. In an attempt to alleviate the problem before it worsened, Congress in January 1983 passed Public Law 459, Title II of which was called "The Indian Land Consolidation Act." Title I, which applied specifically to the Devils Lake Sioux Tribe, authorized the Secretary of the Interior to acquire by purchase or other means, including exchange, additional lands within the boundaries of the reservation, such lands to be held in trust for the tribe or individual members thereof. Another provision authorized the tribe to purchase inherited lands from nonmembers. 17

Title II (which applied to Indian tribes generally) provided for the purchase by the tribe of inherited fractional interests with the consent of over 50 percent of the owners, subject to certain restrictions, and for conveyance to the tribe of inherited interests amounting to less than 2 percent of the total acreage of the tracts involved. It will be seen that, although specific provisions of this act differ from provisions of the Sisseton bill, the intent is much the same: to put a stop to the further division of inherited lands and to make it easier for the tribe to build up its land base. The law contained one interesting provision not found in its Sisseton counterpart. Section 109 states that the "Devils Lake Sioux Reservation, North Dakota, is hereby declared the permanent homeland of the Devils Lake Sioux Tribe." 18

In 1960 the Devils Lake Reservation embraced 49,193 acres of allotted land, 2,080 acres of government-owned land, and only 120 acres of tribal land. A decade after passage of the land consolidation act the figures were 39,950.4 acres of allotted land, 268 acres of government-owned land, and, 11,329.6 acres of tribal land. 19 Although the total acreage reveals a net gain of only 155 acres, there was probably a net loss in the two decades before passage of the act, more than offset by acreage acquired after 1983.

In any event, an increase in the tribe's land base is no longer the most reliable measure of its economic well-being, for the Devils Lake Sioux no longer rely on farming as their principal source of income, as their ancestors were expected to do in the late nineteenth century and even, to some degree, as recently as the 1930s. Industry has come to the Devils Lake Sioux in the form of two tribally owned plants: the Sioux Manufacturing Corporation, which employs about 110, and Dakota Tribal Industries, employing about 200. The former began in partnership with Brunswick Corporation, which originally owned 60 percent of the business to the tribe's 40 percent. Eventually the tribe bought out Brunswick and now owns 100 per-

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cent of the firm, which manufactures camouflage netting, helmets, side panels for Bradley personnel carriers, and other military equipment. 20

Dakota Tribal Industries, which was incorporated in 1985 and began operation in December 1986, also manufactures military items and, like Sioux Manufacturing, has a contract with the Department of Defense. Both produced articles used in Operation Desert Storm. In 1990 Dakota Tribal Industries was declared Minority Business of the Year nationally. 21

Devils Lake has got into the commercial gaming business to an extent comparable to the Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux Tribe. At St. Michael, adjacent to the former Catholic school, the Dakotah Bingo Parlor and the Dakota Casino cater to the gambling instincts of visitors and incidentally employ about 175 people. Most of the receipts are used for economic and social development on the reservation. In July 1993 a third gaming emporium opened at Tokio, another small reservation town, where a member of the tribe also operates a grocery store-gasoline station. 22

Other individually owned businesses include a grocery store, a coin laundry, a restaurant, an electronics store, and a video rental ("Sioux-Per Video Vending and Sound"), all at Fort Totten, and the Mission Market at St. Michael. There are plans to promote tourism, especially at Tokio, and there is talk of starting a tribal bakery. 23

Despite all the economic activity reflected by these industries and businesses, and despite the jobs provided by the BIA, the tribal government, and the educational complex of the reservation, Devils Lake has a long way to go before it reaches anything like full employment. According to the tribal planner, unemployment, which once ran to over 80 percent, had dropped to 68 percent by the summer of 1993--a far cry from the small Sioux communities in Minnesota, where the claim is made that everyone who wants a ob now has one. 24

Devils Lake has shared with other reservations a great improvement in housing since the 1960s. Beginning in the next decade, several housing projects have changed living conditions for the better. As at Sisseton and Santee, relatively new houses, set along newly laid-out streets, cover substantial areas at Fort Totten, St. Michael, and elsewhere. The housing projects also involve refurbishing older houses, including those built during the 1970s. For the lowest-income people the turnkey, or mutual self-help, project has provided inexpensive housing. Much of the construction has been done by contractors who are tribal members. Water and sewer service is pro-

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vided by the tribally owned Sioux Utilities Commission; electricity is furnished by private utility companies. 25

Like Agency Village on the Lake Traverse Reservation, For Totten is served by two educational complexes: the Four Winds Tribal School and the Little Hoop Community College. Four Winds, opened in 1983, occupies a stunning building located on the crest of a hill. Grades from kindergarten to eighth grade are tribally operated, and grades nine through twelve constitute District 30, Benson County. In 1903 the elementary school enrolled 505 pupils, the high school 125. As at the other tribal schools, there is an emphasis on Dakota woonspe--learning Dakota culture--along with the standard curriculum of North Dakota schools. 26

Little Hoop Community College was chartered in 1974, when the tribe entered into a bilateral agreement with Lake Region Junior College, in the city of Devils Lake. The following year it began operation with offices in the tribal building and a staff of four. In 1980 the BIA conducted a feasibility study, as a result of which the college became an independent, tribally, controlled community college. In 1982 the bilateral agreement with Lake Region was terminated, and two years later Little Hoop moved into buildings formerly occupied by the Bureau-operated elementary and secondary schools. 27

Granted accreditation in 1990 by the North Central Association, Little Hoop offers both vocational and academic programs leading to the one-year vocational certificate and the two-year associate degree. It employs 13 full-time instructors and about 90 part-time instructors and has an enrollment of some 275 students. The enrollment is expected to increase when the college begins offering a program in casino training. The college operates on the semester system and schedules its classes with an eye to the available time of people with jobs and those in need of remedial work. It also administers the Comprehensive Child Development Program, the Office of Substance Abuse Program, the community library, and the Head Start program. Its 1993 budget was a little over $4 million. 28

In the 1960s the Devils Lake reservation was in the poorest shape economically of any of the Santee Sioux communities. So it is not surprising that in the 1990s its condition was less impressive than that of some of the other reservations. Despite the 68 percent unemployment figure, however, there was an air of optimism about Fort Totten, a sense of accomplishment and an expectation of better things to come. Like their fellows at Sisseton, the Devils Lake Sioux have regained a stronger pride in their culture and a conviction of their abil-

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ity to solve their lingering problems. Perhaps it is symbolic of this new attitude that membership on the tribal council is now a fulltime, salaried job.

The Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe gives the impression not so much of having changed direction sharply since the 1960s, as Santee and Sisseton do, as of having continued moving more rapidly in the direction already evident at that time. Finding employment locally and within commuting distance, the Flandreau people were relatively well off economically then and displaying a revived interest in their traditional culture. Much the same might be said of them today, except that they now enjoy more sources of income and seem to evince a stronger sense of community spirit and Indian identity.

There have been modest increases in both population--from 210 in 1965 to 250 in 1993 (but a total of 603 enrolled members)--and tribal lands--from 2,100 acres in 1960 to about 2,400 acres in 1993. There is no allotted land. Perhaps the most visible change is in the location of the community center. Most of the land acquired in the 1930s lay north of the town of Flandreau, along the Big Sioux River, and that is where the community building and powwow grounds were located. More recently a tract of federal land on the southwestern edge of the town was transferred to the tribe, and it is there that the bulk of commercial and residental development has occurred. In the early 1970s a tribally owned and operated motel, the First American Inn, was started, and in 1978 an extensive housing project was inaugurated, with assistance from HUD. A gaming facility, the Royal River Casino, was opened in October, 1990, and in the spring of 1993 a convenience store called The Mart began operation. 29 An unusually large tribal building for so small a group is located within sight of these various enterprises.

As they did in the 1960s, many members of the tribe find employment in the town or at the Flandreau Indian Industrial School, but the new tribal enterprises provide jobs for others. Receipts from the casino constitute a significant source of income. According to the policy adopted by the tribe, 35 percent of the receipts go to individuals (three-fourths to residents, one-fourth to nonresidents), 43 percent to economic development, 12 percent to general operations, 5 percent to a minors' trust, and 5 percent to a community fund. Nonresident enrollees have challenged what they regard as discrimination against them in the distribution to individuals. While the case is in litigation, a federal judge has frozen the casino profits, thereby depriving the tribe of access to funds for tribal projects. 30