Seth Tupper
The Daily Republic
Saturday, April 19, 2008
tinyurl.com/5ffgo9 WOUNDED KNEE — Across a chasm of 118 years, dim echoes of the Ghost Dance are once again rolling through the sweeping vistas of the South Dakota Badlands and reverberating against the starkly beautiful sediment walls. Some Sioux Indians once believed the dance would return all of their lands. That dream died in 1890 on the blood-stained ground near Wounded Knee Creek, but today a diminished version of the dream — tempered by a hefty dose of reality — is sprouting on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in southwest South Dakota, home to the people of the Oglala Sioux Tribe.
Unbeknownst to many off the reservation, the tribe and the National Park Service are considering management changes for the rarely visited but astoundingly pristine South Unit of Badlands National Park. The options include a greater tribal share of the South Unit’s management, or even a complete return of the South Unit to tribal control.
It’s an apparently unprecedented set of proposals that, at least symbolically, would represent a reversal of the centuries-old tradition of land grabs by the U.S. government. More than that, the proposal brings hope of economic development, cultural preservation and community pride to some leaders of a reservation that, to the outside world, is known mostly for rampant alcoholism, poverty and joblessness.
“We can manage the South Unit as a park,” a determined Monica Terkildsen, of the Oglala Sioux Parks and Recreation Authority, said this week. “I know we can do that. I have total faith that we have enough expertise here to do that.”
Some people are nervous, though, about handing roughly half of a national park over to a tribe with a history of turmoil. Several white owners of Badlands-area tourist attractions and campgrounds would rather see the National Park Service retain control.
“From the track record of the tribe, I don’t know how that would work,” said Phillip Kruse, owner of Circle View Guest Ranch near Interior. “It wouldn’t hurt my feelings if the tribe manages it, as long as it’s done well. But from what I’ve seen of the tribe, it’s usually not done that well.”
A divided park
The South Unit is a 208-square-mile area that could be described in ranching terms as Badlands National Park’s “back 40.” It’s vastly different from the North Unit, which is the part of the park most tourists see.
The North Unit contains the Badlands Loop road, which connects at both ends to Interstate 90. The North Unit also contains the park headquarters and virtually all of the park’s modern amenities.
The South Unit, meanwhile, contains virtually nothing but nature — “table mesas offering sweeping panoramas, incredible canyon washes and ravines, and foreboding walls,” according to Park Service literature.
Guy White Thunder, a weathered 84-year-old tribal member, summed up the South Unit this way:
“God has created the scenery there, and it’s how it should be.”
Even the ownership of the two units differs. The North Unit is owned by the federal government and managed by the National Park Service, while the South Unit is owned by the Oglala Sioux Tribe and located entirely within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation. The lands that today constitute the South Unit were taken by the federal government during World War II for use as a bombing range, and were later set aside as a South Unit of Badlands National Park.
Officially speaking, the South Unit is managed jointly by the tribe and the National Park Service through a memorandum of agreement that dates to 1976. In practice, though, the Park Service has most of the control.
Years of debate over the South Unit’s management have finally led the Park Service to begin a formal process that will determine a general management plan for the future. Four concepts are under consideration, each with a progressively larger role for the Oglala Sioux Tribe.
Concept 1 would retain the status quo;
Concept 2 would introduce greater sharing of management duties between the tribe and the National Park Service;
Concept 3 would turn management over to the tribe with technical assistance from the Park Service;
and Concept 4 would give all control over the South Unit to the tribe.
“This concept,” National Park Service literature says of Concept 4, “would deauthorize the South Unit of Badlands National Park and end NPS management there.”
A series of 13 open-house meetings was conducted April 7 through Friday to allow public input on the process. Ten of the 13 meetings were at reservation towns, and the other two were at Rapid City and Wall.
A team consisting of tribal and Park Service officials will propose a management plan during the fall of 2009. Among the four current concepts, the three that include greater tribal involvement are all said to require congressional approval.
A greater tribal role
Badlands National Park Superintendent Paige Baker, a tall and imposing Mandan-Hidatsa Indian from North Dakota, said all options for the South Unit’s management will receive consideration — not only the options that are on the table, but others that have come up as a result of public input. He cautioned against overreaction to any potential changes.
“I think it’s important to underscore the fact that while the management may change, I don’t see the tribe closing this off to anybody,” Baker said. “I mean, it’s part of their economic development to continue maintaining the park or maintaining an area in which the public would be welcomed.”
Despite the uncertainty about how the South Unit will be managed in the future, some tribal members are pushing forward under the assumption of a greater tribal role. Tribal officials have been negotiating the purchase, for instance, of the Badlands Ranch and Resort and the Badlands/White River KOA campground, the owners of both facilities said this week. Both are located about 20 miles east of the South Unit’s northeast fringe.
Some of the tribal members’ optimism might be derived from Baker, who replaced white superintendent Bill Supernaugh in 2005. While attending a public meeting about the South Unit on Thursday in the village of Wounded Knee, Baker said the South Unit management situation was “one of the reasons I was interested in the job — one of the reasons, not the entire reason.”
Baker declined to identify a personal preference for the South Unit’s future.
“We’re going to definitely look at the management of the South Unit, and it will be changed in some way, and that’s what we’re doing right now,” he said. “That’s my best response.”
Baker made it clear Thursday at Wounded Knee, though, that he has more than a professional interest in the South Unit. He told the audience of about 20 people that his parents were forced to move from the Missouri River bottomlands during the 1950s, when the federal government constructed the Garrison Dam.
The plight of Baker’s parents paralleled that of some Oglala families — an estimated 125 to 250 — who in the 1940s were forced to surrender the land that eventually became the South Unit. The land, which up until then had been under tribal control, was taken for use as an Army Air Corps bombing range during World War II and was later used as a National Guard artillery range.
“There’s a lot of similarity between what happened to your grandparents and my parents, actually,” Baker told the people at Wounded Knee.
Part of the bombing range land was eventually returned to the tribe, but much of it was transferred to the government’s Department of Interior in 1968 and then authorized as a South Unit of Badlands National Park. The federal government’s cleanup of spent shells and unexploded ordnance continues to this day.
Storied past, uncertain future
The bombing range is only one part of the South Unit’s rich and complex history. It’s that history that makes the South Unit so important to the Oglala people, yet sparks so many diverse opinions about how it should be managed.
It’s believed, for example, that some of the last Ghost Dances of the 1800s were conducted in the South Unit on what today is known as Stronghold Table.
The Ghost Dance movement began among Indians of the southwest United States during the late 1880s and spread quickly to other tribes. Some Sioux Indians believed that the Ghost Dance, as they practiced it, would remove white people from the earth so that the Indians could reclaim their lands.
Historians say there was an increase in Ghost Dance activity by Sioux Indians in 1890 that may have caused a panic among some whites and contributed to a deployment of additional U.S. troops. On Dec. 29 of that year, a force of 500 U.S. Cavalry troops killed an estimated 200 to 300 Indian men, women and children who were camped alongside Wounded Knee Creek. The massacre reportedly was incited by a shot that rang out as a soldier attempted to disarm an Indian man in the camp.
Some sources say the massacre survivors sought refuge on Stronghold Table. That episode of history received renewed attention six years ago, when a group of Indians camped on the Stronghold Table to protest a proposed fossil dig in the South Unit. Some of the protesters said the dig would disturb Indian burial sites and artifacts.
At the time, protesters established a Web site that contained the following passage:
“The lands of the South Unit belong to the future of our people, including the unborn. The wishes of the people are that NPS get off of the South Unit and that the South Unit be controlled by the Indian people from now on.”
There is some question, though, about what the tribal government would do with unfettered control of the South Unit. Some tribal members want to maintain the unit as a park and improve visitor access, while some see potential in different uses such as mining, grazing and farming. Others think the land should be returned to descendants of the original owners.
The idea of maintaining and developing the area further as a park has economic merits, according to some tribal members. They envision a new South Unit entrance where admission could be charged to benefit the tribe, and where nearby Indian-owned shops and campgrounds could serve tourists.
Agricultural uses also have economic potential. Some grazing already is allowed in the South Unit, with lease payments to the tribe. More could be allowed, in addition to wheat farming, if the tribe gained full control of the South Unit and chose to exploit its agricultural potential.
The mining potential in the South Unit is owed to the presence of zeolite, a mineral with uses ranging from water softening to nuclear waste treatment. Some say the South Unit should be opened up to exploit that resource.
There also are prehistoric fossils in the South Unit, some of which were damaged during the bombing range days or taken by fossil poachers. It’s unknown what access paleontologists would be granted under tribal-only management of the South Unit.
Not everybody on the reservation sees a tribal role in the future of the South Unit. Some prefer the tribe’s current, minimal role and do not want changes. During the public input meetings, they spoke about the tribal government’s mismanagement of its own affairs.
“One person, he wrote the word ‘embezzlement’ (on a marker board) — ‘there are too many embezzlements going on, they’re always in the red,’ you know, that type of stuff,” said Terkildsen, “so they don’t trust the tribe.”
Doubts and competition
There’s plenty of visual evidence to back doubts about the tribe’s stewardship of the South Unit. An example is the 20-mile drive south from the town of Scenic, near the North Unit, to the tribe’s White River Visitor Center, in the South Unit. Both sides of the highway are heavily littered with garbage.
Yet, atop the South Unit’s Sheep Mountain Table, those troubling sights vanish. The elevation and remoteness sweep everything from view except ground, sky, birds and bison, and it’s possible up there to forget the seemingly intractable problems below.
Upon leaving those literal and figurative heights, though, visitors are quickly returned to reality. This week, the first sign of humanity greeting visitors exiting the Sheep Mountain Table Road was an empty case of Budweiser.
Some reservation outsiders whose businesses are affected by the South Unit choose their words carefully when discussing such things with reporters. They fear coming off as racist or insensitive.
One of those people is Ted Hustead, a third-generation owner of Wall Drugs, who could lose some tourist traffic if the South Unit becomes a greater draw. He does not oppose development in the South Unit, he said, but would oppose excessive promotion of the South Unit or a nearby proposed Crazy Horse Scenic Byway as alternatives to the existing Badlands Loop Road. That road leads westbound traffic directly to Wall and Hustead’s business.
“At the same time, I do not want to discourage any economic development for the tribe, so I’m kind of walking a tightrope,” he said.
Hustead and some others in Wall say they want either the current management to continue or a complete transfer of management to the tribe.
“I just don’t think the sharing would work,” Hustead said. “I think you should have it one way or the other.”
Terkildsen, of the Oglala Sioux Parks and Recreation Authority, said people in Wall have ulterior motives for supporting options No. 1 and 4.
“If things stay as they are, they continue to benefit from the tourist traffic,” she said. “And if concept four is selected, they know there’s going to be an issue about returning land.”
The issue of returning some or all of the South Unit acres to descendants of the original owners could divide the tribe and assure nothing gets done in the South Unit, Terkildsen said, which is what she thinks people in Wall desire.
“They’re afraid that if we become organized,” she said, “they’re going to lose their tourist dollar.”
‘Common sense’ option
After considering all the opinions and information, Terkildsen and some other leaders with the tribe’s Parks and Recreation Authority are leaning toward option No. 3 — management of the South Unit by the tribe, as part of a National Park and with technical assistance from the National Park Service.
Terkildsen said she began the process supporting a full return of the South Unit to the tribe, but was convinced that land requests from descendants would be too much for the tribe to handle.
She still thinks some consideration should be given to descendants of the original landowners as part of concept No. 3. That consideration could include naming trails and roads in the unit after honored ancestors, and compensating the descendants with some of the South Unit entrance fees.
“There’s got to be a healing there,” Terkildsen said.
Birgil Kills Straight, executive director of the tribe’s Parks and Recreation Authority, said funding for the South Unit’s maintenance and for compensation of the original landowners’ descendants will have to be worked out if concept No. 3 is selected.
“It doesn’t mention anything about money,” he said, “so if the tribe chooses to go that route, we’ll have to go to the U.S. Congress and request annual funding from them as another one of the parks that’s run by the tribe.”
Terkildsen is confident that the tribe could manage the South Unit effectively with the aid of the Park Service. She said the Parks and Recreation Authority members, who are elected, could save the South Unit from the tribal council politics that kill other well-intentioned plans.
She envisions a South Unit with some additional amenities for visitors, but not too many.
“There’s a unique tourist out there, like ecotourism, which is what I think we’d like to target so that we’re not damaging anything,” she said.
Clarence Yellow Hawk, chairman of the tribe’s Park and Recreation Authority, also supports concept No. 3 and its lead management role for the tribe, with assistance from the Park Service. He called it the “common sense” option and said the tribe is turning out enough capable people from Oglala Lakota College to successfully operate the South Unit as a park.
His voice, which surges out from the squalor of the reservation, carries in it some of the strains of hope that led Ghost Dancers to pray so desperately for the return of their lands.
But unlike his ancestors, whose only available refuge was the spiritual realm, Yellow Hawk sees a tangible road to better lives for tribal members. It includes taking greater responsibility for resources like the South Unit.
“The outside world says differently, says you’re never going to be successful,” he said. “You know, they’re wrong, because I believe we have the people and the capability to pull this off.
“The day of the incompetent Indian is gone.”
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The problems of acquistion are better than the current reality. Of course, keep in mind the government is divesting itself of National Park lands and programs in many other areas to meet budget constraints. I fail to view this wholly as an ethical offering but it matters not if the land is returned.
For anyone who's seen Thunderheart
(if you haven't -- great film!!), this is the area called Red Deer Table in the film. I believe it was filmed there -- the Stronghold is shown in the film too. Beautiful land.
