A seventh tribe in South Dakota, the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe, banned Gov. Kristi Noem on May 14.

During a Tuesday meeting, the Crow Creek Tribal Council voted unanimously to ban Noem from entering its central South Dakota reservation.

The decision comes on the heels of the Yankton Sioux Tribe’s decision to ban Noem on May 10 and the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate’s banishment on May 7.

These bans have been made following the governor’s accusations that Mexican drug cartels are operating on tribal land in South Dakota. Noem also accused tribal governments of benefiting off of the alleged cartel presence and of failing their people, particularly youth. 

Tribes are now exercising their sovereignty by indefinitely banning the governor from tribal lands in the state.

As sovereign nations, tribal governments are allowed to ban anyone from their lands. According to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, tribes possess the right to regulate activities within their jurisdiction, which includes the banishment of persons, Native or non-Native.

Previously when questioned about being banished from the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe in early April, Noem’s Communication Director Ian Fury said Noem encourages tribes to banish cartels from tribal lands. 

The Crow Creek Sioux Tribe’s decision leaves the governor only able to enter two of the nine reservations in the state, the Lower Brule Reservation in central South Dakota and the Flandreau Santee Reservation in eastern South Dakota.

The governor’s communications director did not respond to a request for comment about her recent banishments. 

The Crow Creek banishment came moments after Noem announced the creation and appointment of a tribal law enforcement liaison.

Algin Young, the former police chief of the Oglala Department of Public Safety, was announced as the tribal law enforcement liaison on May 14. Young left his position on April 21 after his contract with the Oglala Sioux Tribe expired, interim police chief John Pettigrew said in an interview with ICT and the Rapid City Journal. 

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Amelia Schafer
ICT + Rapid City Journal

PINE RIDGE, S.D. — The walls of the Oglala Sioux Tribe Victim Services building are lined with missing person posters. Dozens of faces and names of men and women, all from the Pine Ridge Reservation, who have gotten little to no justice.

Fifty years ago in February 1974, Delema Sits Poor and her friend left their school at the Seventh Day Advent Church in the number four community (also called Wakpamni), about eight miles from the Pine Ridge community. The two set out to walk along an unpaved backroad towards Manderson, South Dakota. Despite below-zero temperatures, the two 12-year-old girls were determined to reach their destination.

High winds and heavy snow set in during their walk. At some point, Sits Poor’s friend began to develop frostbite so she opted to walk to the nearby Red Cloud Indian School, but Sits Poor kept walking, wearing only a white down-filled jacket with brown bell-bottom pants and sneakers. The Oglala/Mniconju Lakota girl was never seen again.

The next morning, once the snowstorm cleared, her family traveled to Pine Ridge to find a phone and call for help. Her father filed a police report, and her cousin called the National Guard.

In the days following Sits Poor’s disappearance, ground and air searches were conducted around the Calico community where Sits Poor may have walked – a rugged remote area with miles of winding buttes, steep valleys and thick brush. Late last year a three-year-old boy was found alive after disappearing in the same area.

Family members said they felt that after the seventh day of searching the push to find Sits Poor ended.

“They just stopped looking, back in those days I got the impression that they weren’t very helpful,” Sits Poor’s cousin Genevieve Chase In Sight-Ribitish said. “We never got any responses from her missing person’s report we filed, no one came to ask us about her, we haven’t gotten any updates.”

On the 50 anniversary of her disappearance, the Sits Poor family continues to search for answers.

“I tried looking for her many times, people would call and say they’d seen her in Rosebud or in Denver, and somebody told me they saw her around Pine Ridge with a man. I searched everywhere, we’d go everywhere,” said Sits Poor’s older sister Rose Thunder Club.

After seven years, Sits Poor was declared dead. The family suspects that foul play may be involved in her disappearance.

“We hang in there hoping that one day she would walk in the door or we’d see her around somewhere,” Chase In Sight-Ribitish said.

At only 12 years old, Sits Poor was just beginning to find herself. She was getting into rock music, her brother Frank Sits Poor said. She’d just gotten a new Lynyrd Skynyrd cassette tape.

“She was just 12, just a kid, just getting started,” Thunder Club said.

Raised by her grandmother, a fluent Lakota speaker, Sits Poor spoke Lakota and was engaged with her culture.

“Delema was a really beautiful person, she was caring and loving and kind, she never hurt anybody,” Chase In Sight-Ribitish said.

Sits Poor’s disappearance is among dozens of unsolved cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women in South Dakota.

Of the cases currently listed in the South Dakota Missing Persons’ Clearing House, 54 percent are Indigenous despite Indigenous people making up only 9 percent of South Dakota’s population.

The count listed in the Clearing House is also an undercount. Sits Poor is not listed and never has been, as well as a few other older cold cases from Pine Ridge. This is because they were never filed and added to the system, according to the South Dakota Attorney General’s Office.

Related: Public safety commissioner seeks change in Alaska’s MMIP response

Dozens of Indigenous women went missing and were murdered on the Pine Ridge Reservation in the 1970s. There’s no official number of how many women disappeared or were killed during this time. Sits Poor’s own mother, Phyllis White Dress was murdered in 1976, two years after her daughter’s disappearance.

One of the oldest cases, Beatrice Tallman-Curry, was brought to justice because her case piqued the interest of a law enforcement officer several years after her disappearance.

“There’s no one set or list of names, they’re all scattered everywhere,” said Susan Shangreux-Hudspeth, Oglala Lakota and director of Oglala Sioux Tribe Victim Services. “There’s just no justice. No one has been arrested. It takes someone dedicated to bringing this to justice.”

As time moved, young family members like Eagle Louse and her brother Bo Sits Poor never got to meet their aunt. While they never met her, they grew up with her by hearing stories about her. How helpful she’d been to her family, how much she loved her grandmother, how silly she could be.

“These are traumatic events for these families, all of these (cold cases) they have a story, she was somebody,” said Amanda Takes War Bonnett, Oglala Lakota and public education specialist for the Native Women’s Society of the Great Plains.

Sits Poor’s father, mother, grandma and several of her siblings died without answers.

“My grandpa went to the grave looking for her, my mom did too,” said Tawny Eagle Louse, Sits Poor’s niece. “It would just be nice to get some closure.”

Many aspects of Sits Poor’s disappearance are unknown. Some documents list her as last seen on February 4, 1974, while others list February 20. Additionally, it’s unclear if Sits Poor made it to her friend’s house and disappeared leaving, or if she never made it to her destination.

“It’s like finding a needle in a haystack,” Chase In Sight-Ribitish said. “There’s so many brick walls and things we don’t know.”

Sits Poor’s disappearance broke her father’s heart, Frank Sits Poor said.

“I think it tore my family apart when she disappeared, the love kind of dwindled,” Eagle Louse said.

Around 2018, Thunder Club and Chase In Sight-Ribitish said they were contacted by an investigator for the Oglala Sioux Tribe’s newly founded cold case unit. Despite speaking with the investigator a few times, they never heard back.

With no updates and limited information, the family continues to hope and pray for Sits Poor’s return.

“Every chance we get we go up into the hills and look,” Chase In Sight-Ribitish said. “Anytime the relatives get the chance they’ll go back there and look. Anything suspicious we move it around and look around for her.”

Anyone with information about Sits Poor’s disappearance can contact the Oglala Sioux Tribe Police Department at 605-867-5111 or report to the Beauru of Indian Affairs Missing and Murdered Unit by texting 847411 to BIAMMU or calling 1-833-560-2065. 

This story is co-published by the Rapid City Journal and ICT, a news partnership that covers Indigenous communities in the South Dakota area.

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Amelia Schafer
ICT + Rapid City Journal

RAPID CITY, S.D. – As temperatures dipped below zero Friday, January 12, Rapid City officials decided to close a makeshift warming shelter that was to serve Indigenous homeless people.

Two Native-serving nonprofits – Woyatan Lutheran Church and Wambli Ska Society – had planned to open the military grade warming tent as an additional shelter. But Friday afternoon, city administrators issued a stop work notice to organizers.

“When city staff went to the property to issue an order not to proceed with the use of that tent, it was with the acknowledgment that the permits had not been secured, but that we had a bigger crisis on hand,” said Vicki Fisher, Rapid City community development director. “We have a cold spree that we’ve not experienced in a long time. And we have a lot of vulnerable people that need to be sheltered. So the message was you don’t need to take down a tent. Just please don’t use it. It is so frigid that the action of trying to heat it would put those people in jeopardy of a fire.”

Around 4:30 p.m. Rapid City Police Officer John Olson, escorted by Lt. Tim Doyle, arrived to issue the stop work order. Chris White Eagle, leader of the Lakota Center at Woyatan Lutheran Church, spoke with Olson and Doyle and said he was told the Pennington County Jail could be used as a temporary shelter if the Cornerstone Mission and Care Campus hit max capacity.

“We looked at him like, ‘Are you saying that’s our option, to save your life you need to go to jail,’” White Eagle said.

Earlier on Saturday Rapid City Police Department Community Relations Director Brandyn Medina said that if all other options were exhausted, the Pennington County Jail could be used as a temporary shelter.

“I think they [Olson and Doyle] were speaking on generalities and talking about it on a broad spectrum,” Medina said. “It’s not saying that we would find charges to put somebody in the jail or charge them criminally so they could go into the jail, it’d be in a total noncriminal context. It would be simply using the extent of our resources to make sure that nobody was turned away into the cold.”

Later on Saturday, Medina said the county sheriff’s office clarified that the jail would not be used as a temporary shelter and that the existing resources would suffice.

A Facebook post from the Rapid City Municipal Government Saturday morning stated there is an “abundance of space” at city shelters.

“At no point since this cold snap began has the Care Campus or Mission been full or turned individuals away. Anyone seeking shelter during this frigid cold spell are reminded to seek shelter at either facility,” the post said.

Medina said law enforcement officers are conducting extra patrols to contact and transport individuals struggling with the cold.

Several local Native nonprofits had come together to serve homeless people following the closure of the Hope Center, a shelter that served mainly Native people. Those organizations are working to provide food, water and shelter to those who either cannot go to the Cornerstone Rescue Mission or the Care Campus or don’t feel comfortable going.

“A lot of them don’t like going on to the Campus. A lot of them don’t like going to the Mission,” White Eagle said. “The mayor is making it very clear that those are our resources, and that’s the only thing that they have.”

As a backup, the Lakota Homes Oyate Center has been opened for those in need of a warming shelter or a meal. Various Indigenous community groups will be serving meals at the Oyate Center throughout the day.

“If you call anywhere around the Native community right now, there’s people cooking, there’s people driving, there’s young men walking under the bridges,” said NDN Collective Founder and CEO Nick Tilsen. “We’re getting out of our vehicles. We’re helping the people, we’re getting rides and we’re trying to utilize every service that’s available. An army tent in the middle of winter is totally last resort.”

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The City of Martin, South Dakota and the Oglala Sioux Tribe are at odds over a public records request sent by the tribe.

The City of Martin has asked that the Oglala Sioux Tribe waive its sovereign immunity or pre-pay an undetermined amount of attorney fees and administrative fees for the records it requested. The South Dakota American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is challenging this through the South Dakota Office of Hearing Examiners.

On August 25, under the South Dakota Sunshine Act, the tribe requested records relating to potential violations of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, according to the South Dakota ACLU.

The initial request from the tribe asked for an extensive list of documents, each of which span a time range of 20 years, including election results, redistricting maps (boundary changes and reorganization plans), agendas from meetings where redistricting was discussed, any and all analysis of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act or Gingles factors and more.

On September 11, the City of Martin denied the tribe’s request unless the tribe waived its sovereign immunity and paid upfront for time spent gathering records and attorney fees for 20 years’ worth of records. City representatives said the requested attorney’s fees were included as many of the records required an attorney’s assistance to locate.

After the denial, the tribe got in touch with the South Dakota ACLU. Working with the ACLU, the tribe narrowed the requested records down to a 10-year time frame from 20.

The tribe, represented by the ACLU, Native American Rights Fund and Public Council, is appealing the City of Martin’s stipulations before the South Dakota Office of Hearing Examiners.

The ACLU said the charging of attorney fees and request to waive tribal sovereignty are unreasonable.

“Why do they not want to produce these records without imposing these very stiff, punitive demands on the tribe like making them pay agreed to prepay attorneys fees in an unknown amount and also waive their tribal sovereign immunity,” said Stephanie Amiotte, legal director of the ACLU of South Dakota and a citizen of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, in a phone call. “It certainly begs the question, why aren’t they just producing these records as they would to any other requester if, in fact, everything is in accordance with the Voting Rights Act or the law.”

The City of Martin said it’s asking for attorney’s fees to be charged due to the nature of the documents requested.

“The requests are vague and broad, leaving it difficult for a layperson to determine whether a statutory exception applies,” said Sara Frankenstein, an attorney representing the City of Martin. “Many of the requests require legal analysis as to whether the documents sought are excluded from public disclosure pursuant to South Dakota law. Additionally, the request sought documents spanning over twenty years. Such a huge and broad request is taxing on the City of Martin’s resources and its citizenry. The City of Martin is small, and resources are thin.”

Generally, tribal sovereignty allows tribes to be free from lawsuits whether private or commercial, much like any other nation. The tribe is choosing to pursue action through the Office of Hearing Examiners because it says the conditions sought by the City of Martin are unreasonable or sought in bad faith.

The City of Martin’s legal counsel said the city requested that the tribe waive its sovereign immunity to ensure the request would be paid should it be fulfilled.

“Due to sovereign immunity, the City does not have legal recourse for collecting the applicable fee should the Tribe not pay, and the amount may be substantial if the ACLU continues to demand 20 years’ worth of broad-ranging documents,” Frankenstein said.

Frankenstein also said if the Oglala Sioux Tribe or ACLU refuses to pay for the records request or sovereign immunity is not waived, Martin taxpayers will have to foot the bill.

The ACLU said a request to waive sovereign immunity reflects a larger problem facing Indian Country.

“It really carries bigger implications than that because it amounts to a gradual erosion of the constitutionally protected status as a sovereign nation,” Amiotte said. “We see that every day in attempts by states to take that sovereign status away through encroachment on jurisdictional issues, and just other areas that tribes really do enjoy that status as a sovereign nation to govern in a manner that other governments are allowed to govern.”

Records shared with the Rapid City Journal and ICT suggest the City of Martin did share a January 2022 redistricting map with the tribe; however, no other records will be shared without pre-payment.

“The ACLU’s press release is wildly inaccurate,” Frankenstein said in an email to the Journal and ICT. “First, the City has yet to deny any document requested, other than broadly asserting a general denial that protected or privileged documents will not be disclosed, if the ACLU truly seeks them. The ACLU is not contesting the withholding of protected or privileged documents, so no denial of records is at issue here. In other words, there has been no ‘denial’ to trigger any judicial review.”

The City of Martin and Bennett County are within the exterior boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation and are considered by the Department of the Interior to be reservation land. State agencies, however, such as the South Dakota Department of Transportation, generally list Bennett County as not being within the reservation. Census records indicate roughly half of Martin’s population is non-Native.

In 2005, the South Dakota ACLU attempted to sue the City of Martin for Voting Rights Act Violations. After an 11-day bench trial, the claim was dismissed.

The post Voting rights at center of tribal dispute with city appeared first on Buffalo’s Fire.

Researchers from across the country are studying how to improve electrical grids across the country with a focus on underserved, rural communities.

Through a four-year, $750,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, South Dakota State University, University of Maine, University of Alaska Fairbanks, and University of Puerto Rico Mayague will examine how climate change affects electrical grids. The project is titled “STORM: Data-Driven Approaches for Secure Electric Grids in Communities Disproportionately Impacted by Climate Change.”

“The basic idea is to go to a few specific communities, and through community engagement, figure out what are the challenges that they are facing with regard to the impact of extreme weather on the power grid, and then solve some of those issues in terms of community outreach and engagement, designing new methods to make the grid more resilient,” said Tim Hansen, associate professor in SDSU’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and co-principal investigator on the project.

Hansen said the research project is based in strategic locations in which different weather events occur. Alaska, for example, deals with extreme cold, while Puerto Rico deals with storms and flooding.

The common issue is that all the events impact the power grid, he said. “Our focus is on power grid resiliency from different perspectives.”

As part of the project, the researchers will work with community members on engagement. Hansen told the Daily Yonder it will be a ground-up approach so see what the community is willing to adopt.

Daisy Huang is an associate professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and mechanical engineer. She also conducts research at the Alaska Center for Energy and Power, which looks at optimizing power, mostly in rural communities around Alaska. She said the rural communities are mostly not connected to the state grid.

“So they’re all on their own diesel fired power plants. And so we look at ways to integrate renewables [and] optimize their diesel for maximum efficiency,” she told the Daily Yonder.

Huang said she is also interested in creating educational programs around STEM.

“The idea is looking from a community perspective – what their energy needs are, and how we can translate that – in parallel – developing educational programs around kids learning about energy systems, [like] engineering or STEM in general, math, physics.”

There will also be a virtual reality lab for remote power and energy research studies between all the participating institutions, Hansen told the Yonder.

He said that many of the researchers on the project are young investigators. “It’s a very good opportunity for the [National Science Foundation] to really build up the mentorship, and really build a lot of people’s long-term careers off of the back of this,” he added.

The post Study Looks at Climate Change Effects On Rural Electrical Grids  appeared first on The Daily Yonder.