Rapid City hotel owner found guilty of assaulting Native American protesters
A Pennington County jury found Connie Uhre, one of the owners of the Rapid City Grand Gateway Hotel, guilty on two counts of simple assault on Friday, October 13, 2023. The charges were filed for actions Uhre took against peaceful legal Native American protestors in May 2022.
There are several different definitions of simple assault in South Dakota. Uhre was specifically charged with attempting by physical menace or credible threat to put another in fear of imminent bodily harm, with or without the actual ability to harm another person. The State’s Attorney’s Office reported that the trial concluded with a unanimous verdict by the six-man, six-woman jury.
“This case is actually quite simple,” said Deputy Pennington County State’s Attorney Rachel Lindsay during closing arguments of the assault trial Friday afternoon. “She was mad, and she assaulted three people.”
Uhre’s attorney, Jim Sword, defended her in court by emphasizing her age (76 years old) and short stature (4 feet, 11 inches). In Sword’s characterization, Uhre is a small, elderly woman who was afraid of the protesters, despite the fact that Uhre initiated the confrontation. Officials report that a sentencing date has not been set yet and that Uhre faces up to one year in jail and a $2,000 fine for each of the two counts.
After the verdict was announced, Lindsay continued, “…It is imperative that we, as Americans, are able to exercise our First Amendment right to assemble peaceably and without fear of bodily harm. Tonight’s verdict sends a clear message that those who try to disrupt that process will be held accountable.”
Leading up to the assault charges, in March 2022 Uhre ignited a firestorm of protest against her Rapid City family and their businesses when she posted racist social media comments following a fatal shooting at the Grand Gateway Hotel. She posted that all Native Americans were banned from the family-owned hotel and the Cheers Lounge within the hotel.
The hotel then refused service to Native Americans in at least two documented incidents within days after Uhre made the offensive social media posts. The racist comments and the illegal exclusion of Natives from the public accommodations activated ongoing organized outrage from both the local Indigenous community as well as local government and business leaders.
NDN Collective, an Indigenous advocacy organization with offices in Rapid City, immediately filed a federal class-action lawsuit against the hotel and against Uhre, alleging racial discrimination. The entire bar staff at the hotel plus some other hotel employees quit, according to South Dakota Public Broadcasting (SDPB). The hotel shut down for about a month.
To further intensify the situation, on May 27, 2022, Connie Uhre confronted several peaceful protestors outside the hotel and sprayed them with a chemical cleaning product. The attack was caught on a cell phone camera and shown to police. Later the same day, she was arrested and charged with three counts of simple assault. One of the three protestors who were victims of the attack was not present to testify in court so the jury acquitted Uhre on the third assault charge.
Sunny Red Bear, Racial Equity Director at the NDN Collective, was a protestor sprayed directly in the face. “This is what we mean when we say that white supremacy is violent,” she said following the assault. “… Now that we’ve seen that (Uhre) was willing to commit a physical act of violence – in public and in broad daylight – I hope that people will begin to understand and believe us when we say how dangerous and REAL racism is.”
Red Bear later commented, “It’s beyond time for Rapid City to uncover and address the insidious racism that Indigenous people here are forced to navigate every single day. We are a vital part of this community and deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. …This is bigger than just forcing the Uhre family out of business for their racist policies – it’s about addressing systemic racism in our community at all levels by holding people accountable.”
In a statement issued the day of the assault, Bre Jackson, Executive Assistant to the President & CEO of NDN Collective, said, “As a lifelong Rapid City community member, Lakota woman and mother, I find the racist acts by the Uhre family – whose businesses operate in a predominantly Native part of town – infuriating and unacceptable. I implore everyone to write to our city and state leaders to call for the enforcement of the US Code 42 in the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits businesses from practicing discrimination and segregation.”
Jackson continued, “We will not quietly walk away from this issue or give passes that allow racists to do business as usual. It is past time for a reckoning, one where we put an end to all of forms of racism.”
The Department of Justice and NDN Collective are still pursuing lawsuits against the Uhre family business in federal court for civil rights violations. Myron Pourier Sr., the father of the young Native American man whose murder at the Grand Gateway prompted Uhre’s racist online comments and the resulting protests, has also filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Uhre and the family business.
Racial tensions have been on-going in Rapid City which is located on land pledged to the Lakota Nation in the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, and in the state, which has a 10 percent Native American population. A history of conflict between Native Americans and non-natives dates back to Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer’s illegal trek through the Black Hills, the sacred Paha Sapa to the Lakota, in 1874.
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October 21, 2023