(C) South Dakota Searchlight
This story was originally published by South Dakota Searchlight and is unaltered.
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Noem unintentionally inspires unity among tribes [1]
['Dana Hess', 'More From Author', 'January']
Date: 2024-01-18
The nine American Indian tribes in South Dakota are each struggling with similar problems. In their own ways, they’re all seeking solutions that will boost economic development, fight drug addiction and poverty, all while dealing with a host of other challenges.
While they tend to go their separate ways as they tackle many of these issues, they can count on one person to bring them together in a united front: Gov. Kristi Noem.
Their united stand against the governor is on permanent display at the Capitol Rotunda. A new exhibit of tribal flags has just two flags from South Dakota’s nine tribal nations — Rosebud and the Standing Rock Sioux.
The law creating the rotunda display was passed in 2021. Four years in the making, the display is missing seven flags, a testament to the governor’s often rocky relationship with the tribes.
The tribes have often seen Noem as an adversary. She clashed with tribal leaders over COVID-19 checkpoints on reservations and she was at odds with the tribes over a law she backed that would have kept them from protesting an oil pipeline. Tribal leaders criticized Noem for what they saw as an insufficient state response to a winter storm last year that killed six people on the Rosebud Reservation.
Despite the missing flags, David Flute, secretary of the state Department of Tribal Relations, told South Dakota Searchlight that he credits Noem with being “very diplomatic in her approach to working with the tribes.” A four-year effort that nets two out of nine flags looks like the opposite of diplomacy.
Flute was at the center of an earlier event that brought the tribal leaders together in an unprecedented way. Prior to the 2020 legislative session, Noem announced that Flute would be the speaker for the Legislature’s annual State of the Tribes address.
Traditionally, the speech was given by one of the tribal leaders. The tribes were upset with this perceived slight, even though Flute is a member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate. In response to Noem’s announcement, the tribes organized what they called the Great Sioux National Tribal Address. They planned for it to take place at the Wakpa Sica Reconciliation Place in Fort Pierre after the State of the Tribes address.
Noem uncharacteristically relented to pressure and invited Crow Creek Sioux Tribal Chairman Lester Thompson to replace Flute as that year’s State of the Tribes speaker. Despite that change in plans, the Great Sioux National Tribal Address went on, bringing together leaders of all nine tribes in South Dakota in an unprecedented display of unity.
A four-year effort that nets two out of nine flags looks like the opposite of diplomacy.
In this year’s State of the Tribes Address at the Capitol, Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribal Vice President Cyndi Weddell talked about economic development on her reservation as well as the need for better state laws concerning Indigenous foster children, seeking to keep the children close to their families so that they can learn about their culture.
The speakers at the Great Sioux Nation Tribal Address went much farther afield, covering Weddell’s topics but also voicing their frustration about the meth epidemic, the lack of drug and alcohol treatment centers, infrastructure needs and the lack of action on the disappearances and murders of Native American women. Sadly, all of those are still problems that need to be addressed.
To be fair, it would be impossible for any state to reverse the problems caused by decades of federal policies that stripped Native Americans of their land, herded them onto reservations and neglected those reservations until they became pockets of poverty, crime and addiction.
Yet, there is obviously more that South Dakota can do. As often as she can, Noem lambasts the federal government for waste and inattention to the state’s needs, saying that South Dakotans must look to themselves to solve their problems. Well, the members of the tribes are South Dakotans, too.
The relationship between the tribes and the state should be one of cooperation rather than antagonism. That puny flag display at the Rotunda stands as a symbol of how much more work is left to be done.
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https://southdakotasearchlight.com/2024/01/18/noem-unintentionally-inspires-unity-among-tribes/
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