Our Homeland

The Lower Brule homeland has no formal boundaries. In common with tribal peoples across the world, we, the Kul Wicasa Oyate, a large group of related families within the Lakota Nation called the Sicangu (burned thighs), lived freely for thousands of years. Our lands are the vast expanse of plains and prairies between the Rocky Mountains and the Great Lakes within the basin of the Missouri River.

Well before the end of the 19^th century we began to settle in the cottonwood forests and grasslands of the Missouri River valley and the rolling grasslands that reach far over the horizon towards the Black Hills. Unlike our ancestors, however, we must call this our permanent home, the Lower Brule Sioux Reservation. After the first agents of the United States government traveled through our lands in 1804, our world soon filled with conflict, confinement and starvation. Between 1851 and 1963, the US government forced us to accept their form of land ownership and then, through force of arms, brokered ‘treaties’ and ‘agreements’ that have resulted in the loss of most of our territory and the loss of the wealth of animals, plants and water that sustained us.

While we share a rapidly changing world with many other cultures, this past is part of our present and our identity. When we travel to our sacred sites and gathering places outside the Reservation, we always remain in our homeland, and we must always try to preserve and protect it from harm.

This is the history of Lower Brule territory and the lands we now call home.

Lower Brule Territory 1825- 1963

On June 22, 1825, representatives of the US government signed a treaty with several bands of Lakota, Yancton, and Yanctonnais at Fort Lookout on the Missouri River. Fort Lookout is on the southern boundary of the present-day Lower Brule Sioux Reservation. This treaty was seemingly “For the purposes of perpetuating the friendship which has heretofore existed, as also to remove all future cause of discussion or dissension”. To perpetuate this friendship, however, the Tribes had to admit “that they reside within the territorial limits of the United States, acknowledge their supremacy, and claim their protection”. Deeper into this agreement came a phrase that would have profound impacts on these assembled tribes – and every other Tribe in the Americas: “the limits of their particular district of country”. For the first time, the Sioux tribes faced an issue alien to their way of life – limits to their territory.

On September 17, 1851, at Fort Laramie, commissioners appointed by the President of the United States signed a treaty with representatives of the Lakota (Sioux), Cheyenne, Arapahoe, Crow, Assiniboine, Gros-Ventre, Mandan and Arikara Nations. For the first time, Lakota people had to accept a specific portion of land as their territory: “commencing the mouth of the White Earth River, on the Missouri River; thence in a southwesterly direction to the forks of the Platte River; thence up the north fork of the Platte River to a point known as the Red Buts, or where the road leaves the river; thence along the range of mountains known as the Black Hills, to the head-waters of Heart River; thence down Heart River to its mouth; and thence down the Missouri River to the place of beginning”.

On October 14, 1865, the US government and several Lakota Sioux bands signed the Fort Sully Treaty, which established the Lower Brule Sioux Reservation as a tract of land extending north from below the mouth of the White River along the Missouri River to Fort Lookout – about 20 miles as the crow flies – and west ten miles in depth.

Three years later, in 1868, the second Fort Laramie Treaty reduced the entire Lakota land base established in 1851. The Great Sioux Nation, including the Lower Brule Reservation, now extended from the Big Horn Mountains in the west to the east bank of the Missouri River.

The Indian General Allotment Act of 1887 (Dawes Act) allotted Indian lands into 160-acre tracts to individual heads of households and 80 acres to adult males – allowing the US government to sell off unallotted lands within reservation boundaries to non-Indians. The US government’s explicit goal was to break up reservations and to force Indians to assimilate into the dominant Euroamerican culture.

The next assault on the Lakota land base was the Act of March 2, 1889, which broke up the Great Sioux Nation into smaller reservations. The southern boundary of the Lower Brule Sioux Reservation was moved north from the White River to where Fort Lookout stood on the Missouri River (the present boundary). This ‘new’ reservation, an area of 446,500 acres, was actually well within Lower Brule aboriginal territory.

In 1898, the US government forced an “agreement” on the Brule relating to tribal members who continued to resist removal to the Reservation north of Fort Lookout.  The Act of March 3, 1899 made these tribal members and their families members of the Rosebud Reservation – and transferred their rights to Lower Brule trust land.  This reduced the Lower Brule Reservation to 326,500 acres.

The Reservation boundary was fixed for less than ten years. The Act of April 21, 1906, allowed the US Government to take 56,560 acres of unallotted lands in the Stanley County portion of the Reservation and provide them to non-Native homesteaders.

That same year, the Act of May 8, 1906 (Burke Act) allowed the Secretary of the Interior to convert an Indian allotment, which could not be bought or sold, to fee land (saleable to non-Indians, and subject to taxation), even without the knowledge or permission of the allottee. This was typical of divisive measures that contributed to the steady erosion of Lower Brule land well into the 20th century, as tribal members, enduring great poverty, were forced to sell their allotments to non-Native ranchers and farmers.

In 1923, a group of non-Indian writers and social scientists formed the American Indian Defense Association (AIDA) and elected a social worker named John Collier as executive secretary. The AIDA promoted American Indian cultural autonomy by recommending radical changes in the US government’s approach to Indian land rights and culture. When US President Franklin J. Roosevelt appointed John Collier as Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1933, it created a tide of change. Unlike previous government politicians, commissioners, and agents, Collier understood the starkly different concept of land held by aboriginal peoples, as he stated in his annual report to the government in 1938: “the Indian by tradition was not concerned with possession, did not worry about titles or recordings, but regarded the land as a fisherman might regard the sea, as a gift of nature, to be loved and feared, to be fought and revered, and to be drawn on by all as an inexhaustible source of life and strength”.

The constant efforts of tribal representatives, non-Indian activists and Commissioner Collier’s work within the government resulted in the Indian Reorganization Act, June 18, 1934 (Wheeler-Howard Act), which finally eliminated the discreditable land grab initiated by the Indian General Allotment Act of 1887. It stated that “hereafter no land of any Indian reservation, created or set apart by treaty or agreement with the Indians, Act of Congress, Executive order, purchase, or otherwise, shall be allotted in severalty to any Indian”; that “the existing periods of trust placed upon any Indian lands and any restriction on alienation thereof are hereby extended and continued until otherwise directed by Congress; and that “the Secretary of the Interior, if he shall find it to be in the public interest, is hereby authorized to restore to tribal ownership the remaining surplus lands of any Indian reservation heretofore opened, or authorized to be opened, to sale, or any other form of disposal by Presidential proclamation, or by any of the public land laws of the United States”.

In two final acts of aggression, the US government took the entire bottomland of the Missouri River valley under two federal acts, the Fort Randall Taking Act (1958) and the Big Bend Taking Act (1962).  These lands, 22,296 acres of prime, rich floodplains and terraces that gave us places to live and water, food, and fuel were sacrificed in the interests of the state of South Dakota and the other downstream states wanting to protect their farmers and valley inhabitants from flooding and make money from power generation and tourism. The entire town of Lower Brule, once the largest settlement between the Missouri and the Black Hills, was inundated – sixty-nine percent of the reservation families forced from their homes, miles of roads, housing, farm and ranch buildings, a rodeo arena and a race track lost, many ancestral areas, including worship and gathering places, flooded or destroyed, and whole cemeteries of our people once again uprooted and moved to higher ground! This left us with an open wound, as every year, the crashing waves of Lake Francis Case and Lake Sharpe eat away more land and more of our ancient cultural sites.

Lower Brule Territory 1963 - present

After almost 150 years since the signing of the Fort Sully Treaty, the Lower Brule Sioux Reservation is a checkerboard of lands with several different kinds of ownership: land belonging to the Tribe or tribal members, held in trust by the US government (trust lands, tribal lands, and allotted lands); and land removed from trust and owned outright by tribal and non-tribal individuals (fee lands). The boundaries between the variously classified lands are not marked, making it difficult for persons on the Reservation to determine the ownership status of any given site.

The most urgent priority in this complex cultural landscape has been the return of lost lands. As almost half the property in the Reservation was non-Indian- owned as late as the 1950s, the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe has established an aggressive land re-purchase and consolidation program.  With the Tribe’s long-time Chairman, Michael B. Jandreau, as its strongest advocate, we have regained at least 20% of this land.  We have also recovered several tracts of our aboriginal territory:  93 acres in Oacoma, near one of our old Agency sites; 1,080 acres five miles from the great sacred hill, Bear Butte, near Sturgis; and two ranches of nearly 13,000 acres next to the western boundary of the Reservation.