Monday, April 10, 2006

America's Bear Butte

A "ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealing"

Up to 60 different Native American tribes travel to the sacred Bear Butte in the Black Hills of South Dakota to fast and pray.

Two drag racing strips, a biker bar*, a convenience store, campgrounds, and housing developments have been constructed there. Now a group of businessmen has received an $825,000 grant from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development to build a rifle shooting range within a few miles of Bear Butte.

A lawsuit to stop this encroachment has been filed by six tribes. The Black Hills is a Native American's sacred ground and a 'white-man's' mountain resort. On the Black Hills Resorts site you can read about the 1983 case of Fools Crow v Gullet, where Native Americans tried to stop intrusion into their sacred grounds. (Result: they lost, of course.)

Nothing new

The U.S. government initially tried to prevent settlement of the Black Hills, having signed the 1851 Treaty of Ft. Laramie, which promised 60 million acres of the Black Hills "for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupancy of the Sioux".

Settlers respected the 1851 Treaty and accepted the fact that the Black Hills were sacred — until gold was discovered. Then they clamoured for access, and the government tried to force the Lakota (Sioux) to sell their remaining land (by then reduced to 20 million acres). This didn't work, so Congress enacted a new treaty in 1877 which seized the land, resulting in war and defeat for the Lakota.

A federal judge, reviewing the case in the 1970s, commented:
"A more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealing will never, in all probability, be found in our history."
Sources:
Sacred Land Film Project.
Manataka American Indian Council.
Bear Butte International Alliance.


* This is from the biker bar website, the Broken Spoke Saloon, 'the world's biggest biker bar', where new facilities are planned:
"Outside of the Broken Spoke Saloon, Sturgis County Line Amphitheater, Builder’s Bar, Schoolhouse and the Mexican Cantina, we want to leave the rest of this beautiful property untouched! So sit back with a cold one while watching a Bear Butte Sunset! It doesn’t get better than that."
(He originally planned to call his campground 'Sacred Ground' and build an 80 foot statue to honor American Indians!)

Construction has already started with grass being stripped from the base of Bear Butte.

On April 5th, boston.com news published this:
"Despite strong opposition from Indian groups hoping to prevent further encroachment on the mountain, Meade County authorities on Tuesday unanimously approved a beer license for a campground, biker bar and concert area."

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