Locals speak out on land swap

RAPID CITY – Around 40 residents showed support for a resolution in Rapid City Council that would take the first steps in resolving three outstanding land deeds that are related to the Rapid City Indian Boarding School, but there were around 5 residents who voiced concern for the project.

A few council members noted that a few residents raising concern for the resolution was disconcerting, and so the Native Sun News Today sat down to hear their side of the argument amongst the many proponents.

One of the Rapid City residents against the resolution is Charmaine White Face who provided an open letter to the BIA regional director, Tim LaPointe, which was read at the Rapid City Council meeting. The letter, which is from the Native American Indian Community of Rapid City, SD, and the Black Hills Area Council of Representatives, reads “hearing on the news and reading in the local Rapid City Journal that a couple of individuals were saying they represented the Rapid City American Indian Community was disconcerting as our records show that they have never attended one of our meetings.”

The Native American Indian Community of Rapid City, SD, and the Black Hills Area, as noted by the letter, has voted on a constitution, held monthly meetings for several years, and voted to elect three representatives. Those three representatives are George Jewett, Theresa Spry, and Charmaine White Face, all of whom were not consulted about a land swap in the past years of work.

Both sets of White Face’s grandparents were children who attended the Rapid City Indian Boarding School, and her mother worked at the sanatorium when it was a tuberculosis clinic. “I remember when the community, the people in the community, lobbied congress so we could have Sioux San made a hospital after they were going to shut it down,” she said. “Now it seems like there are opportunists coming in and trying to speak for the community when we can speak for ourselves.”

White Face describes those who are negotiating a land deal as opportunists, a word chooses carefully. “I say opportunists because the community cannot and did not have an opportunity to meet about this when, if they were working on this a long time as the mayor said, then why didn’t they come to our community meetings and talk to people?” she asked. Meetings, which were held at the Mother Butler Center on the third Thursday of every month, have halted since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous to the pandemic, monthly attendance to the meetings varied but could be seen as high as 150 to 200 people.

White Face went on to note that the 2017 letter which the Rapid City Indian Boarding School Lands Project presented to Rapid City Council was addressed to the superiors of tribes and the only people addressed in Rapid City was the superintendent of the Rapid City Area Schools and the mayor of Rapid City.

Another member of the community who spoke against the resolution was Aaron Circle Bear. “The bigger issue is not a new issue to me,” he said. “I knew they were researching the land and where the children were, and in the process they learned about this land issue. To me, none of that is an issue, because I support research. If anybody wants to research anything then it is what it is. When I recently learned about this was in the last two weeks, and now there are negotiations between the city and this Rapid City Indian Boarding School Lands Project and that is when I became concerned and I became involved.”

Circle Bear pointed concern to some of the community members who showed support for the resolution because they were not actually Rapid City area residents. A notable amount of the speakers were from the Pine Ridge reservation and he said that visiting Rapid City once a year does not make you an area resident. Some of the speakers, he said, even came from a national area.

“So many people that night talked about Sioux Addition and how they moved the Indians further out of town and how hard that was for my ancestors to get the resources they needed because they were so far north of town,” he said. “But they are in favor of moving further out of town? That does not make sense to me.”

Speaking on the three businesses operating on the outstanding land deeds, he said “my feeling is that my ancestors didn’t want to move either, but they were forced to.”

The discussion of accepting a resolution will have resumed on Nov. 10 and 12:30 p.m. during a working session for Rapid City Council. No official action will be taken on the topic.

 

(Contact Travis at travisldewes@gmail.com)

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