{"id":40461,"date":"2026-10-09T21:06:22","date_gmt":"2026-10-10T02:06:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/unitedresourceconnection.org\/cannon-ball-nd-58528\/a-homeland-shaped-by-exile-and-survival\/"},"modified":"2026-10-09T21:06:26","modified_gmt":"2026-10-10T02:06:26","slug":"a-homeland-shaped-by-exile-and-survival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/unitedresourceconnection.org\/cannon-ball-nd-58528\/a-homeland-shaped-by-exile-and-survival\/","title":{"rendered":"A homeland shaped by exile and survival"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Crow Creek Reservation marker. (Photo courtesy of hmdb.org)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

There are places where history remains safely in the past. Crow Creek is not one of them. The reservation on the east bank of the Missouri River in central South Dakota was shaped by war, forced removal, starvation, federal land taking and the damming of the Missouri. Those events explain who lives there, why they live there and the conditions the reservation faces today.<\/p>\n

Crow Creek encompasses portions of Buffalo, Hughes and Hyde counties, with Fort Thompson serving as tribal headquarters. Across the river is the Lower Brule Reservation. The tribe is organized into the Fort Thompson, Crow Creek and Big Bend districts. But there is no single tribe on Crow Creek. The history is diverse and complicated. The reservation covers roughly 400 square miles within its exterior boundaries, but only about 125,000 acres are held in trust for the tribe and individual Indian landowners.<\/p>\n

The history began thousands of years before there was a reservation. The Fort Thompson Mounds extend for miles along the river and contain evidence of nearly 5,000 years of occupation. The Crow Creek Massacre site, dating to about 1325, preserves evidence of a fortified village destroyed during warfare and environmental strain. Mandan and Arikara people also lived and farmed along this stretch before epidemics and other pressures drove their surviving communities north.<\/p>\n

Crow Creek became a reservation through a much darker chain of events.<\/p>\n

In 1862, the eastern Dakota in Minnesota faced hunger after losing most of their land through treaties, delayed annuity payments and dealings with traders and government agents. Crops had failed and government food stores remained closed while Dakota children went hungry. Trader Andrew Myrick reportedly answered pleas for food by saying the Dakota could eat grass.<\/p>\n

The Dakota War lasted only five weeks, but hundreds of settlers, soldiers and Dakota were killed. Not all Dakota supported it; some protected settlers or helped captives escape. That distinction mattered little afterward. Thirty-eight Dakota men were hanged at Mankato on December 26, 1862, in the largest mass execution in American history. Although the number spared by President Lincoln constituted the largest mass commutation in American history as well. Minnesota abolished the Dakota reservations, confiscated their remaining land and expelled the people.<\/p>\n

The Ho-Chunk were expelled, although their nation had taken no part in the war, be4cause they did nothing to help fight the Dakota.<\/p>\n

In spring 1863, about 1,300 Dakota survivors\u2014mostly women, children and old people\u2014were crowded onto steamboats and sent to Crow Creek. Nearly 2,000 Ho-Chunk were also forced there. They arrived at a dry place poorly suited to people accustomed to Minnesota\u2019s woodlands and lakes. Food was scarce, shelter inadequate and disease spread quickly. Hundreds died during the journey and first terrible months, many of them children. The Spirit of the Circle Monument near Big Bend Dam remembers more than 1,300 who died during the Crow Creek years.<\/p>\n

Crow Creek was not selected because it could sustain the people sent there. It was selected because the federal government needed somewhere to put them.<\/p>\n

Most of the surviving Ho-Chunk eventually escaped or moved south. A reservation for them was established in Nebraska in 1865. Most of the exiled Santee Dakota were moved again in 1866 to what became the Santee Reservation in Nebraska. Crow Creek, however, did not become empty. Lower Yanktonai people were gathered there during the 1860s, and Drifting Goose and his Hunkpati band settled there in 1880 after resisting the surrender of their homeland along the James River.<\/p>\n

This complicated history explains why Crow Creek cannot be reduced to a single band or a single removal. The tribe today identifies itself as the Hunkpati Oyate, and its people include Isanti or Santee ancestry, particularly Mdewakanton, along with Ihanktonwanna or Lower Yanktonai families and descendants from other parts of the Oceti Sakowin. Dakota is the traditional language. Crow Creek was first a place of imprisonment and exile, but the people made it a homeland.<\/p>\n

The federal government was not finished taking from that homeland.<\/p>\n

During the twentieth century, the Pick-Sloan Missouri River development brought huge dams, reservoirs and hydroelectric power to the region. The benefits went far beyond Indian country, but much of the cost was imposed directly on river tribes. Fort Randall Dam forced the relocation of the old Fort Thompson community in the 1950s. Big Bend Dam, completed in the 1960s, created Lake Sharpe and flooded more Missouri River bottomland.<\/p>\n

The land under the water was not the dry upland visible across much of the reservation. It was the best land: fertile soil, timber, gardens, wildlife habitat, homes and places of cultural importance. Crow Creek received compensation, including a later settlement for lands lost to Big Bend, but money held in federal accounts could not recreate the river bottom or restore the economy built around it.<\/p>\n

That loss helps explain modern Crow Creek. Much of the remaining land is better suited to grazing than farming. Agriculture, cattle, government jobs, the Lode Star Casino and guided hunting provide employment, but the economic base remains narrow. Families travel long distances for groceries, medical care and other basic services. The BIA manages about 125,000 trust acres and hundreds of leases and grazing permits, while more than half of its roads have been rated poor or failing.<\/p>\n

Still, Crow Creek should never be described only by what was done to it. It produced Oscar Howe, one of the most important Indian artists of the twentieth century, and Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, one of Indian country\u2019s strongest literary and intellectual voices. Vernon Ashley helped write the tribal constitution and carried a lifetime of knowledge about treaties, Dakota language and tribal government.<\/p>\n

Today the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe governs itself through an elected chairman and six-member council. Its people maintain schools, public services, wildlife programs, businesses and a political identity that survived every attempt to scatter or absorb them.<\/p>\n

The history of Crow Creek is a history of several peoples, not one. It reaches from ancient Missouri River villages to the Dakota and Ho-Chunk exiles of 1863, the Hunkpati and Lower Yanktonai families who made their lives there, and the modern tribal nation headquartered at Fort Thompson. The reservation was created as a place to remove unwanted Indians. The enduring achievement of the Crow Creek people is that they turned it into a homeland the United States could not erase.<\/p>\n

(James Giago Davies is an enrolled member of OST. Contact him at skindeisel@msn.com)<\/p>\n

The post A homeland shaped by exile and survival<\/a> first appeared on Native Sun News Today<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Crow Creek Reservation marker. (Photo courtesy of hmdb.org) There are places where history remains safely in the past. Crow Creek is not one of them. The reservation on the east bank of the Missouri River in central South Dakota was shaped by war, forced removal, starvation, federal land taking and <\/p>\n

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Shared by Native Sun News Today<\/a> October 9, 2026<\/p>\n

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