There is still an inside/outside line

Roots of Justice: A History of Race and Racism in Nebraska

Excerpt from A History of Native People in Nebraska, Part I, by Gabriel Bruguier

From 1990 to 2003, my father, [Leonard Bruguier], was the Director of the Institute of American Indian Studies at the University of South Dakota (USD). His journey there had taken him from the village of Greenwood on the Yankton Sioux Reservation, to the city of Yankton, South Dakota, where he excelled academically and athletically in high school but was the constant recipient of racist insults and segregation from the white student body, to the United States Marine Corps; where he served two combat tours in Vietnam; and as a “non-traditional student” to university studies at USD, and later at Oklahoma State University.1 Above all the numerous services he facilitated for Native students at USD, he believed that the most important aspect of the Institute was serving as a sacred home for the oral history of the Plains tribes. In 2002, he wrote of the Institute:

South Dakota Oral History Center serves as the heart of the Institute of American Indian Studies. The Center is important because it preserves the voices and life experiences of thousands of individuals from various locations throughout our universe. Because many of those people who shared themselves for posterity have departed from this life, the Institute’s director and staff view the recorded interviews as a repository of information and as a memorial to what these people accomplished and contributed to humanity. In the words of the Nakota Oyate, the South Dakota Oral History Center is nina wakan, very sacred.2

Elsewhere, he said of his role at the Institute, “I’ve been put in charge of keeping the voices. Many of the people are no longer with us. I consider it a very spiritual place.”3

Oral history, and especially Native oral history, was at the time a contested source of evidence for historians. It was dismissed by scholars as folklore, myth, or legend; not valuable to the historical record. Native historians pushed back against this; my father’s view was that “All history is built on oral history. Books and newspaper articles are just written oral history, but they are taken as fact.”4 The oral history that shaped him as a person, and consequently as a scholar, is as urgent then as it is now. It has come down to me, and I proceed as an extension of that legacy.

We are descendants of Chief Padaniapapi, also known as Struck By the Ree, a signatory of the 1858 Treaty of Washington and the leader of the Yankton Sioux Tribe as they transitioned to reservation life. Padaniapapi was troubled by the encroachment of white settlers on the border of the Yankton’s territory, on the east by what are now the states of Minnesota and Iowa, and on the south by what is now the state of Nebraska. Though there was dissent among the other headmen of the Yankton, Padaniapapi was resigned to treaty negotiations with the United States government in order to secure a permanent homeland for his people. Though he worked tirelessly to adopt the new way of life and encouraged it for the Yankton people, his efforts were hampered by the government’s failure to uphold

its end of the treaty. In 1865 he testified:

When I went to make my treaty, my grandfather (ie. the U.S. President) agreed, if I would

put three young men to work, he would put one white laborer with them to learn them; that I should put three young men to learn ploughing, and he would put one white man to learn them; also, three to sow, three to learn the carpenter’s trade, three to learn the blacksmith’s trade, and such other trades as we should want; and my great grandfather was to furnish one white man for each trade to learn the young men. My grandfather also said that a school should be established for the nation to learn them to read and write; that the young boys and girls should go to school, and that the young men who worked should have the same pay as the whites. My grandfather told me if my young men would go to work that the money going to those who would not work should be given to those who would work. None of these things have been fulfilled… .

My friend, I think if my young men knew how to sow, farm, carpenter, and do everything else, I could send the white men away; we ourselves should have the money paid the white men, and we should have plenty of money. If we had been learned all these things we could support ourselves, have plenty of money, have schools, and I could have written my great grandfather, and have got a letter from him; I could have written him myself what I wanted.

…If I had understood from what my grandfather told me that I was to be treated as I have been, I would never have done as I have done; I never would have signed the treaty.... The Great Spirit knows that I have spoken the truth; knows what I say”

These are the stories my father grew up with. The same stories have been told within countless families on the reservations of Nebraska and among those tribes that were relocated from their homelands. The larger historical reality that emerges is of the betrayal of sacred, binding agreements, of broken promises to be welcomed into a new nation, of prosperity that never came.

By the time of my father’s childhood, conditions on the reservation had barely improved. He recalled hard times and a people still struggling as the state around them prospered. Later in life he recalled of his childhood,

In the late 1940s, I can remember going hungry for two or three days at a time. It was hot … seemed like it never rained. We’d spend a lot of time at the river. We ate plants … Sheep Showers (Sheep Sorrel). They looked like four leaf clovers and tasted kinda [sic] sour … could make your nose wrinkle. We ate plums, rosebuds, and wild onions. I still eat Sheep Showers and plums … to renew my acquaintance with them. Our stories are the same. We carry them on because what they’re for… to draw strength from. When I remember how my relatives lived through hard times, I can cope with today, even though today…it’s not that much better. (emphasis mine)

For me, my father’s story is a significant part of the oral history of the Yankton people. It is an intermediate point between my relatives of early Yankton reservation life and our own time. I’ve started here to tell you where I come from, and why it is important to look back to the recent past to understand where we are now. While reflecting on the historical material that I present in this chapter, while comparing past times against the current political culture, I am often led to conclude as my father did so many years ago, that things are not much better than they were when he was recalling his childhood on the reservation. A difference, however, is that from my vantage point, I can qualify the thought to say that certain things are not much better. It is undeniable that material conditions have improved on reservations, and in the towns and cities in which the majority of Natives within the state of Nebraska live; that tribal communities in Nebraska, despite being located in food desserts, have been empowered (and fed) by Indigenous Food Sovereignty movements; and that we no longer have to fear unchecked naked aggression against us. Nevertheless, there is still an inside/outside line drawn between the white majority class and Native populations, with Natives still outside, and a widespread ignorance and occlusion of Native history and culture, to name just a few issues. And so the work must go on.

REFERENCES:

1 It brought me to tears to read about aspects of his student years in Yankton, which he never told me about, but were recorded by one of his mentors, Dr. Herbert Hoover, who featured my father as an exemplar of a modern-day Native man who is rooted in both traditional practices and the “modern” world. Herbert T. Hoover and Leonard R. Bruguier, The Yankton Sioux (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988), 95-7.

2 Leonard R. Bruguier and Scott E. White, “The Institute of American Indian Studies: A Tradition of Scholarly Pursuit,” Indigenous Nations Studies Journal 2 no. 1 (Spring 2001): 5. Online: https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/0e90ee11-54af-479b-ae60-301bc45eb964/content

3 Marjane Ambler, “History in the First Person: Always Valued in the Native World, Oral History Gains Respect among Western Scholars,” Tribal College Journal of American Indian Higher Education 6, no 4 (Spring 1995): https://tribalcollegejournal.org/history-person-valued-native-world-oral-history-gains-respect-western-scholars/

4 Ambler, “History in the First Person”

Palaneapope, “How the Indians Are Victimized by Government Agents and Soldiers,” in When Sorry Isn’t Enough: The Controversy Over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice, ed. Roy L. Brooks (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 254-256. https://doi-org.libproxy.unl.edu/10.18574/nyu/9780814739471.003.0046