BOOK REVIEW: ‘The Lakotas and the Black Hills’

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• Other
• Jeffrey Ostler
• Black Hills
• University Of Oregon
• United States Of America

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THE LAKOTAS AND THE BLACK HILLS: THE STRUGGLE FOR SACRED GROUND”
By Jeffrey Ostler
Viking, $22.95 227 pages

The legendary Black Hills encompass an area about 120 miles long and between 40 and 50 miles wide. Most of this often wild and beautiful terrain lies in southwestern South Dakota. A portion is across the border in Wyoming.

It’s a region that has long been in deep dispute, as University of Oregon history professor Jeffrey Ostler shows in his lucid and always even-handed “The Lakotas and The Black Hills,” subtitled “The Struggle for Sacred Ground.”

The Lakota regard the area as sacred, the place where their holy men and women have visions. The tribe, Mr. Ostler shows, sees the Black Hills as the spiritual “center” of its history, territory where the Lakota should be sovereign.

But Lakota land it is not, except for a small portion. Much of the region is state and federal land, and when the land isn’t government property, it is privately owned - a network of ranches and towns that have been in the hands of non-Lakotas for many generations.

Even more directly insulting to many Lakota, notes Mr. Ostler, is that each year more than 3 million tourists visit Mount Rushmore.

For most of them, the reason for their visit isn’t interest in the Lakota, but a desire to witness the likenesses of four U.S. presidents on the side of a mountain.

Mr. Ostler traces the 19th-century origins of the dispute in the confrontation between an increasingly larger numbers of white settlers with the Lakota, a highly migratory tribe that followed buffalo herds and ranged widely across the region.

It is a familiar story in the annals of frontier America: The Lakota had vague notions about land ownership, while the whites arrived with highly evolved ideas when it came to private property.

But the author also tells a second, equally dramatic story, and that is the sea change that came in the attitude of white Americans toward the Indian.

From the 19th-century view of Indians as savages worthy of extinction if they resisted assimilation into white society, the 20th century came to regard them as people deeply wronged by white aggression and whose just grievances call out for remedy.

It’s this 180-degree change, as Mr. Ostler explains, that has given the Lakota hope that the Black Hills will some day be theirs. As the author notes, however, ownership is now in limbo, and how it will be resolved “is anyone’s guess.”

The Lakota are a Northern Plains tribe divided into several smaller groups with names like Hunkpapa and Oglala. (The Dakota, a closely related tribe, speaks a very similar language that sounds the name with a “D” rather than an “L.”)

As Mr. Ostler points out, several Lakota are among the best-known of American Indians. In the 19th century, Sitting Bull (who defeated Custer at Little Big Horn) and Crazy Horse (another great warrior) were Lakota leaders whose names became household words in their own time.

In the 20th century, the great visionary Black Elk was a Lakota, whose book, “Black Elk Speaks,” published in 1932, is an enduring Indian classic, still widely read.

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