In 1904, Scandinavian settlers began moving onto the Spirit Lake Dakota Indian Reservation. These land-hungry first and second generation immigrants struggled with a poverty nearly as severe as that ...of their Dakota neighbors. Yet the homesteaders’ impoverishment did not impede native dispossession: by 1929, Scandinavians owned more reservation land than did Dakotas. In the words of Helena Haugen Kanten, who staked a claim with her widowed mother in 1905: “We stole the land from the Indians.”
How did this extraordinary, largely unknown encounter between Dakota people and Scandinavian immigrants come to pass? Who were the people who experienced this episode in U.S. history? What does their experience teach us about landtaking, dispossession, and coexistence? This book upends prevailing assumptions about the experience of Native Americans, immigrants, and women in this period. It reveals Scandinavians’ and Dakotas’ resistance to assimilation, and their use of citizenship to combat attacks on their cultures. It documents women’s use of land to leverage resources for themselves and their families, and recounts the efforts of Dakota women to gain autonomy in the use of their allotments, even as Scandinavian women staked and “proved up” their own claims. It chronicles the intertwined stories of Dakotas and immigrants—women and men, farmers, domestic servants, and day laborers—and their shared and contrasting struggles to maintain a language, sustain a culture, and navigate their conflicted ties to more than one nation.
Beard was not only a witness to two major battles against the Lakota; he also traveled with William "Buffalo Bill" Cody's Wild West show, worked as a Hollywood Indian, and witnessed the grand ...transformation of the Black Hills into a tourism mecca. Beard spent most of his later life fighting to reclaim his homeland and acting as "old Dewey Beard," a living relic of the "old West" for the tourists.
Eastern red cedar (ERC, Juniperus virginiana L.) is a common tree species in agroforestry plantings and has great potential for bioenergy production due to physical and chemical characteristics of ...its biomass. The objective of this study was to assess the effects of ERC plantings on carbon (C) sequestration and selected soil quality parameters in existing plantings across the northern U.S. Great Plains. Nine locations were selected in five states with mean annual precipitation (MAP) from 446 to 999 mm and mean annual temperature (MAT) from 4.4 to 10.0°C. Infiltration was measured using the twin ring technique at nine sites in each tree planting and adjacent field (crop, pasture, or hay) at each location. Following infiltration measurements, a 4.8 cm‐diameter soil core to 30 cm depth was collected from inside one infiltration ring of each pair for bulk density, pH, aggregate stability, soil organic carbon (SOC), and total nitrogen (TN) analyses. Penetration resistance in 2.5 cm increments to 30 cm depth was measured in the other infiltration ring. SOC stocks under ERC were significantly higher than in the adjacent field soil at five of the locations and, for all locations, averaged 16.8% greater than in the adjacent field. The estimated SOC accumulation rate for the eight locations with uniform tree stand age averaged 0.30 Mg C ha−1 year−1. Most locations had higher TN and C/N and lower bulk density beneath ERC. Fewer differences for infiltration and penetration resistance and smaller and less consistent differences for pH and aggregate stability were observed. Tree aboveground C stocks were estimated to increase an average of 2.05 Mg C ha−1 year−1. Estimated tree aboveground biomass C and SOC stocks under ERC and in adjacent fields were strongly correlated with MAP. Potential ERC planting for C sequestration or bioenergy feedstock production is not likely to significantly degrade soil quality and may improve soil physical or chemical quality for locations in the US Great Plains.
Core ideas
Eastern red cedar (ERC) is a common tree species with biomass that is well suited for biofuel production.
ERC effects on soil quality should be evaluated if considered for bioenergy feedstock production.
Soils beneath ERC had higher SOC, TN, C/N, and lower bulk density than adjacent fields at most locations.
ERC C accumulation and SOC were highly correlated with MAP.
ERC plantings had generally positive impacts on soil quality.
In this biography Gary C. Anderson profiles Sitting Bull, a military and spiritual leader of the Lakota people who remained a staunch defender of his nation and way of life until his untimely death.
The belief in American exceptionalism reached its apex during the 1800s and was expressed as a God-given passport called "Manifest Destiny". Among its victims were Native Americans. The Sioux ...resisted, eventually claiming that Indians, not the whites, were the chosen people. The destruction of Indian culture paved the way for the U.S. empire building. Frank Fiske observed this confrontation firsthand in North Dakota, where Sitting Bull was held, then killed, and Fiske's photographs enliven his account.
Examines how settler colonial and sexist infrastructures and narratives order a resource boom Over the past decade, new oil plays have unsettled U.S. energy landscapes and imaginaries. Settling the ...Boom studies how the disruptive forces of an oil boom in the northern Great Plains are contained through the extension of settler temporalities, reassertions of heteropatriarchy, and the tethering of life to the volatility of oil and its cruel optimisms. This collection reveals the results of sustained research in Williston, North Dakota, the epicenter of the “Bakken Boom.” While the boom brought a rapid influx of capital and workers, the book questions simple timelines of before and after. Instead, Settling the Boom demonstrates how the unsettling forces of an oil play resolve through normative narratives and material and affective infrastructures that support settler colonialism’s violent extension and its gendered orders of time and space. Considering a wide range of evidence, from urban and regional policy, interviews with city officials, media, photography, and film, these essays analyze the ongoing material, aesthetic, and narrative ways of life and land in the Bakken. Contributors: Morgan Adamson, Macalester College; Kai Bosworth, Virginia Commonwealth U; Thomas S. Davis, Ohio State U; Jessica Lehman, Durham U.
To Come to a Better Understandinganalyzes the cultural encounters of the medicine men and clergy meetings held on Rosebud Reservation in St. Francis, South Dakota, from 1973 through 1978. Organized ...by Father Stolzman, a Catholic priest studying Lakota religious practice, the meetings fit the goal of the recently formed Medicine Men's Association to share its members' knowledge about Lakota thought and ritual. Both groups stated that the purpose of the historic theological discussions was "to come to a better understanding." Though the groups ended their formal discussions after eighty-four meetings, Sandra L. Garner shows how this cultural exchange reflects a rich Native intellectual tradition and articulates the multiple meanings of "understanding" that necessarily characterize intercultural encounters.Garner examines the exchanges of these two very different cultures, which share a history of inequitable power relationships, to explore questions of cultural ownership and activism. These meetings were another form of activism, a "quiet side" without the militancy of the American Indian Movement. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and archival analysis, this volume focuses on the medicine men participants-who served as translators, interpreters, and cultural mediators-to explore how modern political, social, and religious issues were negotiated from an indigenous perspective that valued experience as critical to understanding.
Situating Dakota language and oral tradition within the framework of decolonization, Remember This! Dakota Decolonization and the Eli Taylor Narratives makes a radical departure from other works in ...Indigenous history because it relies solely on Indigenous oral tradition for its primary sources and privileges Dakota language in the text.   Waziyatawin Angela Wilson, both a historian and a member of the Dakota Nation, demonstrates the value of oral history in this bilingual presentation and skillful analysis of the stories told by the Dakota elder Eli Taylor (1908–99). Taylor lived on the Sioux Valley Reserve in Manitoba, Canada, and was adopted into Wilson’s family in 1988. He agreed to tell her his story and to share his accounts of the origins, history, and life ways of the Dakotas. In these pages he tells of Dakota history, the United States–Dakota Conflict of 1862, Dakota values, and the mysterious powers of the world. Wilson gracefully contextualizes and complements Taylor's stories with a careful analysis and distillation of the narratives. Additionally, she provides an overview of Dakota history and a substantial critique of the use of oral accounts by mainstream historians.   By placing Dakota oral tradition within the academic discipline of history, this powerful book illuminates the essential connections among Dakota language, history, and contemporary identity.
South Dakota is quietly nestled in the grasslands and Black Hills, but its history is far less hidden. One day at a time, author Brad Tennant presents intriguing, event-driven anecdotes of state ...history. On July 17, 1925, the state American Legion passed a resolution to initiate American Legion baseball. On April 29, 1930, Congress passed an act honoring the deceased chiefs of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and the valiant men who made the supreme sacrifice in service in World War I. Celebrate an entire year of history in the Mount Rushmore State or enjoy it one day at a time.
