South Dakota, The Land and the Argument

South Dakota became the fortieth state on November second, eighteen eighty-nine, the same day as North Dakota, with President Benjamin Harrison signing both statehood proclamations and shuffling the papers so nobody could be certain which was signed first. The state was born out of Dakota Territory, carved up and divided partly to give the Republican Party two additional Senate seats.

It was a state built on an argument about whose land it was. That argument has never fully resolved. The nine federally recognized tribes of South Dakota hold a combined land base of several million acres, some of the most economically stressed communities in the United States. Pine Ridge Reservation regularly reports unemployment rates above eighty percent and average life expectancy figures that track closer to developing nations than to the American average. Those conditions are not accidental. They trace directly to the treaty violations, the forced relocations, the dam projects, the boarding school policies, and the land allotment acts that stripped the original estate of the Great Sioux Reservation down to fragments over the century and a half that followed the eighteen sixty-eight agreement.

And yet the Oceti Sakowin are not a diminished people. Language revitalization programs on Standing Rock and Cheyenne River are producing fluent young Lakota speakers for the first time in generations. The Standing Rock water-rights protests of twenty sixteen drew global attention to the question of what sovereignty means in the twenty-first century. The Crazy Horse Memorial continues to rise. The buffalo are grazing on Wolakota Prairie Farm, one of the largest tribally owned bison herds in North America, on the Rosebud Reservation. The argument about this land is ongoing. And the people who have been making that argument since eighteen sixty-eight have not stopped.