Spotlight
Amelia Schafer and Kevin AbourezkICT and Rapid City Journal
Brandon Brave Heart stoodjust outside the powwow arbor late on the night of Aug. 2.
It was after 10 p.m. and the Oglala Lakota Nation Wacipi and Fair was abuzz with people dancing, drumming and visiting with friends and relatives. It was the second night of the annual powwow in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, and Brave Heart was visiting with a friend when he heard several loud pops.
The 40-year-old Lakota man and his friend looked at each other. “Are those real shots?” he asked his friend. Like a scene in a movie, people began running in all directions— mothers grabbed their children’s arms, women’s traditional dancers competing inside the arbor began rushing away fromthe arbor.
Brave Heart ran toward his drum group to look for his family, but when he got there, his two brothers, nieces, nephews and other family members weren't there. Men, women, children and elders lay on the ground near the powwow drum. Mothers and grandmothers hovered over the children and grandchildren, many of whom were crying.
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Brave Heart thought of his five children and wife at home, but decided in that moment to run toward where he had heard the gunshots, hoping he could help somehow.
Elsewhere in the powwow arbor, Karin Eagle ran toward the west side of the arbor where her infant granddaughter, daughter and nephew had been sitting, not far from where the shooting had occurred.
Like so many others, the 51-year-old Oglala woman didn’t know what was going on. Was it a mass shooting? Was anyone injured? These questions ran through her mind.
The powwow arbor, a circular structure with four sections each in one of the colors of the medicine wheel, was surrounded by chaos.
Eagle, a longtime women’s traditional dancer, had been asked to judge the women’s dancing competitions. When the shots rang out, she was in the middle of judging the teen girl’s traditional contest. Over a dozen girls danced inside the arena.
Midway through the competition, around 10:15 pm, Eagle heard several loud pops and saw people running from the arbor. Many of the teen dancers reacted slowly, not realizing what was happening, and some even had to be pulled from the arena by their loved ones. For some, the sound of the drum and singers drowned out the gunshots.
Throughout the dusty haze, Eagle screamed for the dancers to run and then ran to the arena’s west side.
Once she knew her family was safe, she went toward where the shots were fired. There, elders were stuck in their chairs unable to easily get down or move to safety.
“I thought, if I can’t pick them up and carry them to safety the least I can do is help them get down. I wanted them to know somebody cared about them,” Eagle said.
All around her, Eagle said she saw other community members helping those in need. A young couple gathered and shielded children who’d been separated from their families, others helped elders. Eagle said she didn’t see anyone who wasn’t helping out.
“I saw a lot of that, a lot of heroes,” Eagle said.
Nearby, Eagle saw a man lying on the ground, surrounded by paramedics and powwow security. She heard someone say a man had been shot. Nearby a young woman stood crying.
When Brave Heart got there, he saw people clustered around someone lying on the ground. He walked up to the crowd. As he got closer, a first responder stepped to the side, and he saw the man lying there and realized he recognized him. Walking closer to the man, Tom Thunder Hawk— bleeding profusely and in pain— reached his hand up to Brave Heart, who grabbed his hand.
“You’re going to be okay, bro,” he told his friend.
“It hurts, it hurts,” came the man’s weak reply.
He held his friend’s hand until paramedics loaded Thunder Hawk into an ambulance and drove away. Nearby, the powwow arena— only minutes before filled with the sounds of laughing children, booming drums and Lakota song— was empty and quiet.
‘It all snowballs into this’
In the hours after the shooting, powwow organizers and tribal officials met and decided to continue the powwow the next day. To ensure nothing else happened, they had metal detectors brought in, large bags were banned from the powwow grounds, and police officers from other tribes came to help out.
Two days after the shooting, Thunder Hawk died.
The 56-year-old Lakota man was a well-known and respected member of the Porcupine District, one of the nine political districts on the Pine Ridge Reservation. It’s a small community of about 1,000 people nestled in the middle of the 2.1 million-acre reservation.
Thunder Hawk was a tokala, or warrior, Oglala Sioux Tribe President Frank Star Comes Out told ICT and the Rapid City Journal. As a tokala, it was his duty to protect others.
Thunder Hawk was shot when attempting to break up a fight. It was an isolated shooting, not an attempted mass shooting, Star Comes Out said.
In 2006, federal officials drastically reduced funding for the tribe’s public safety programs, frustrating the tribe’s efforts to stop violent crime, including shootings. Star Comes Out said those funding cuts forced the tribe to reduce its tribal police force from 120 officers in 2006 to about 30 today.
Following the shooting, the tribal president placed some of the blame for the attack on the loss of federal funding for his tribe’s public safety efforts.
“It all snowballs into this,” Star Comes Out said. “So what do we do now? What are the next steps?”
In November, the tribe declared a state of emergency regarding public safety, but not much has changed since.
“My prayers go out to the Thunder Hawk family,” Star Comes Out said. “We’ll be looking into measures and features to prevent this from happening again. Pray for all the tribes that have powwows coming.”
One last prayer
In the days following his death, those close to the Thunder Hawk family have worked to fulfill their duties as Lakota relatives and provide support to the wife and children he left behind.
Santee Witt hosted a Native American Church Devotion Service at the Porcupine School Gym in honor of Thunder Hawk and with the help of two other church leaders was hosting a Native American Church funeral meeting Aug. 16 at the gym.
“It gives the family a chance to express something because he hears, he knows before he makes his ultimate journey,” Santee Witt said.
In many ways, Witt lived a life in unison with Tom Thunder Hawk.
Both men served as cultural educators for Pine Ridge Reservation schools. Thunder Hawk was a cultural educator at Loneman School in Oglala and Witt is a cultural specialist for the Lakota Waldorf School near Kyle. Both participated in the Native American Church— Thunder Hawk as a roadman, Witt as an ordained minister.
And for nearly 20 years, the two men were married to sisters. They shared family gatherings, prayed together in ceremonies and even adopted each other’s children in the Lakota way. Witt became Thunder Hawk’s son’s hunka father, and Thunder Hawk became Witt’s daughter’s hunka father.
Eventually, however, both men’s wives left them, but years later tried to reunite with their ex-husbands. It was there that the two men’s paths diverged.
When their wives were away from them, Thunder Hawk would express his hope to Witt that his wife would return to him. Thunder Hawk shared his belief that his wife still loved him and would eventually realize that. Witt, however, struggled to forgive his own wife.
“I didn’t take her back, but he ended up doing that for his,” Witt said. “That’s the kind of heart he had.”
Now Thunder Hawk’s wife says goodbye to the man who took her back, and Witt says prayers one more time for the man who walked beside him for so many years.
WHITECLAY: The Beginning
WHITECLAY — They came here first in the 1870s: farmers and ranchers seeking a better life in the Sandhills of northwest Nebraska.
Others came, too, alcohol peddlers seeking to turn a profit by selling booze to the Oglala Lakota, who had been forced onto the nearby Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1877.
In 1882, President Chester Arthur responded to pleas to end alcohol sales near the reservation by setting aside a 50-square-mile buffer zone south of Pine Ridge. But President Theodore Roosevelt reopened the zone to settlement in 1904.
It didn’t take long for a community to form near the reservation, as nearly 100 settlers were given land there, including Tom Dewing. The town took Dewing’s name for less than a year.
A post office named after nearby White Clay Creek was established in late 1904. The town has been popularly known as Whiteclay since, although its official name remains Dewing.
By 1940, the town had 112 people.
By 2010, it had 10 people, four beer stores and a steady supply of vagrants.
Eli Bald Eagle called Whiteclay home for six years before sobering up and heading back to the reservation in 2015. He said he watched a lot of his friends die over the years while drinking and panhandling on the streets.
Still, he said, nothing could have convinced him to stop drinking until he made the decision himself. He told a New York Times columnist visiting Whiteclay in 2012: “Nobody’s going to stop us from being alcoholics.”
And even though the 56-year-old Lakota man is sober and seeking to start his own small landscaping business on the reservation, his views on efforts to choke the flow of beer in the town haven’t changed.
“I understand they cut Whiteclay off, but what they didn’t cut off was the drinking.”
PHILOMENE LAKOTA: 1950s
Philomene Lakota would ride in a wagon with her parents to the town they knew as Dewing.
The high school Native language instructor and elder said a woman who owned a trading post would let her pick out a cookie from a jar every time she entered.
“It was our community’s first image of a town,” Lakota said. “It started out as that.”
The town quickly devolved, however, after a ban against alcohol sales to Natives was lifted in 1954 and the Oglala people began drinking in the bars. Shootings occurred there regularly in the 1970s as American Indian Movement activists fought those loyal to former Oglala Sioux Tribal President Dick Wilson, Lakota said.
“That was a place to go and do your battles.”
DAVID ROOKS: 1970-2000
David Rooks and his high school buddies would sneak out, “borrow” a parent’s car and drive to Whiteclay on Friday nights.
The 61-year-old freelance journalist grew up just northwest of Pine Ridge. Whiteclay was an Old West town, where bar fights would inevitably spill out onto the streets.
Hecetu, he says. That’s just the way it was.
Rooks spent more than two years working at a beer store as a clerk and assistant manager.
His time there instilled compassion in him for those who drink in Whiteclay and for those who sell alcohol there, knowing the compromises he was forced to make with his own conscience to peddle beer to his people.
He said he had to take responsibility for his own actions to get sober 25 years ago.
The Lakota people need to do the same, he said.
“The problem still exists. They think they’ve won a great victory. They haven’t.”
FRANK LaMERE: 1990s-present
Riding through on a hot day 20 years ago, seeing 50 people drunk beneath the sun — some passed out, some fighting, some peeing in the street — Frank LaMere formed his first definitive conclusions about Whiteclay.
He turned to his driver that day, an elder and fellow visitor from Winnebago country in northeast Nebraska.
"I said, 'Fred, someone needs to do something about this sh*t,'" LaMere recalls.
The reply: If LaMere wanted something done, he'd need to do it himself.
Two years later, when protesters marched in response to the deaths of Wilson Black Elk Jr. and Ronald Hard Heart just outside Whiteclay, and state and federal lawmen blocked the highway in their path, LaMere and a friend were the first to cross the barricade.
Nine people were arrested that day, including LaMere: "That's the beginning of it."
In the decades since, LaMere has become the most outspoken, persistent opponent of Whiteclay beer sales.
"We did not let it go," he says."I had resolved that I would never go away, and I have not.”
VIC CLARKE: 1990s-2000s
When Vic Clarke's family moved to Whiteclay in 1993, his sons were 10, 8 and 6.
They stayed another 20 years.
Clarke, a longtime grocer, bought one of Whiteclay's two markets from a family that had owned it 55 years, moving his wife and children into the attached five-bedroom house.
The boys played hide-and-seek with friends in the store, and played catch with street people outside. They never felt unsafe, Clarke says.
"It's not like this is a bad area to live. ... We'd have (youth) baseball teams come stay in Whiteclay. Their parents wouldn't show up, but they'd let the kids come stay with us."
Clarke believes the media has made Whiteclay worse, portraying such a simple, negative image of the place that it drove non-alcohol-related businesses away.
And he says Whiteclay beer sales have long served as a scapegoat for the Oglala Sioux Tribe — an easily identified, external enemy to deflect attention from tribal government's lack of will to address the reservation's internal problems.
"I blame the tribe for a lot of things," he says. "They want to place blame on everybody else."
DON PREISTER: 2002-2005
Don Preister fought for change in Whiteclay before it was cool.
The former Omaha state senator introduced bills each year from 2002 to 2005 that sought to re-establish a 5-mile alcohol-free buffer zone around the Pine Ridge Reservation and ban liquor licenses in cities that lack adequate law enforcement. He introduced a 2006 bill that would have funded a Whiteclay police force through a new tax on alcohol.
None of those bills made it out of committee, though he did help secure a $100,000 federal grant that allowed tribal police and Nebraska State Patrol troopers to enforce laws within each other’s boundaries.
Preister takes pride in being among the first to call for change in Whiteclay.
“I couldn’t turn a blind ear to their cause, even though it seemed like a lost cause.”
JOHN MAISCH: 2013 to present
John Maisch spent the first 20 years of his life in Nebraska, growing up in Hastings and Grand Island.
But he had never heard of Whiteclay until he was an alcohol regulator in Oklahoma.
His curiosity to learn more led him to produce a documentary about life on Whiteclay’s streets, “Sober Indian/Dangerous Indian,” which he used to rally support to close the beer stores.
But he credits a 6-year-old girl with effectively shutting them down.
Arianna Boesem’s story of being born with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder to a mother who drank daily in Whiteclay finally struck home the real impact of beer sales on the innocent, Maisch said.
About a month after the stores had closed, Maisch traveled to Whiteclay by himself. It was a Sunday afternoon when he stepped out of his car and onto the streets that only a month before would have been filled with men and women drinking and begging for change.
“It was silence, like how a town of nine should sound.”
PATTY PANSING BROOKS: 2016-present
Strategy put Patty Pansing Brooks at odds with some close allies over the past 18 months.
Recruited by LaMere, Maisch and other activists to be a legislative voice against Whiteclay beer sales, the Lincoln state senator found herself disagreeing with them on how to approach the issue.
"I felt a compulsion to do something and to look at it from a bunch of different angles," she said. Others wanted a more straightforward approach.
She recalls poring over state liquor laws and other laws connected to Whiteclay.
What she learned: Law enforcement is not only important, but legally necessary for alcohol sales to be allowed in a Nebraska community.
Her realization prompted a key hearing at the Capitol, where a Sheridan County commissioner acknowledged Whiteclay lacked adequate law enforcement. The statement triggered a review of the Whiteclay beer stores' licenses by the Nebraska Liquor Control Commission, which ultimately shut them down.
Now Pansing Brooks is leading efforts to develop businesses and services in Whiteclay, alongside state Sen. Tom Brewer of Gordon, who represents Sheridan County and is the Legislature's first Native member.
"I cannot imagine they're going to reopen those stores," she says.
SAM O’ROURKE: 2017
He's helping build a new Whiteclay.
Sam O'Rourke, a 43-year-old Lakota entrepreneur, owns the contracting company that's moving dirt and pouring concrete for a Family Dollar here.
He's also considering launching a storage business of his own in Whiteclay, assuming the beer stores remain closed and other commercial development follows.
"If they keep the alcohol out, I think there's potential to bring some business," he says. "Whiteclay is prime property."
Unrestricted by the reservation's limits on property ownership, O'Rourke, 43, sees potential for Pine Ridge entrepreneursto launch businesses in Whiteclay, whose main customers would be their own people. That could grow Whiteclay into an incorporated town with local ordinances, its own law enforcement and stable infrastructure.
He's ambivalent about the beer stores themselves, he says.
However, "We can't go backward."
Lasting legacy: From Dewing to Whiteclay, 1870-2017
WHITECLAY: The Beginning
WHITECLAY — They came here first in the 1870s: farmers and ranchers seeking a better life in the Sandhills of northwest Nebraska.
Others came, too, alcohol peddlers seeking to turn a profit by selling booze to the Oglala Lakota, who had been forced onto the nearby Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1877.
In 1882, President Chester Arthur responded to pleas to end alcohol sales near the reservation by setting aside a 50-square-mile buffer zone south of Pine Ridge. But President Theodore Roosevelt reopened the zone to settlement in 1904.
It didn’t take long for a community to form near the reservation, as nearly 100 settlers were given land there, including Tom Dewing. The town took Dewing’s name for less than a year.
A post office named after nearby White Clay Creek was established in late 1904. The town has been popularly known as Whiteclay since, although its official name remains Dewing.
By 1940, the town had 112 people.
By 2010, it had 10 people, four beer stores and a steady supply of vagrants.
Eli Bald Eagle called Whiteclay home for six years before sobering up and heading back to the reservation in 2015. He said he watched a lot of his friends die over the years while drinking and panhandling on the streets.
Still, he said, nothing could have convinced him to stop drinking until he made the decision himself. He told a New York Times columnist visiting Whiteclay in 2012: “Nobody’s going to stop us from being alcoholics.”
And even though the 56-year-old Lakota man is sober and seeking to start his own small landscaping business on the reservation, his views on efforts to choke the flow of beer in the town haven’t changed.
“I understand they cut Whiteclay off, but what they didn’t cut off was the drinking.”
PHILOMENE LAKOTA: 1950s
Philomene Lakota would ride in a wagon with her parents to the town they knew as Dewing.
The high school Native language instructor and elder said a woman who owned a trading post would let her pick out a cookie from a jar every time she entered.
“It was our community’s first image of a town,” Lakota said. “It started out as that.”
The town quickly devolved, however, after a ban against alcohol sales to Natives was lifted in 1954 and the Oglala people began drinking in the bars. Shootings occurred there regularly in the 1970s as American Indian Movement activists fought those loyal to former Oglala Sioux Tribal President Dick Wilson, Lakota said.
“That was a place to go and do your battles.”
DAVID ROOKS: 1970-2000
David Rooks and his high school buddies would sneak out, “borrow” a parent’s car and drive to Whiteclay on Friday nights.
The 61-year-old freelance journalist grew up just northwest of Pine Ridge. Whiteclay was an Old West town, where bar fights would inevitably spill out onto the streets.
Hecetu, he says. That’s just the way it was.
Rooks spent more than two years working at a beer store as a clerk and assistant manager.
His time there instilled compassion in him for those who drink in Whiteclay and for those who sell alcohol there, knowing the compromises he was forced to make with his own conscience to peddle beer to his people.
He said he had to take responsibility for his own actions to get sober 25 years ago.
The Lakota people need to do the same, he said.
“The problem still exists. They think they’ve won a great victory. They haven’t.”
FRANK LaMERE: 1990s-present
Riding through on a hot day 20 years ago, seeing 50 people drunk beneath the sun — some passed out, some fighting, some peeing in the street — Frank LaMere formed his first definitive conclusions about Whiteclay.
He turned to his driver that day, an elder and fellow visitor from Winnebago country in northeast Nebraska.
"I said, 'Fred, someone needs to do something about this sh*t,'" LaMere recalls.
The reply: If LaMere wanted something done, he'd need to do it himself.
Two years later, when protesters marched in response to the deaths of Wilson Black Elk Jr. and Ronald Hard Heart just outside Whiteclay, and state and federal lawmen blocked the highway in their path, LaMere and a friend were the first to cross the barricade.
Nine people were arrested that day, including LaMere: "That's the beginning of it."
In the decades since, LaMere has become the most outspoken, persistent opponent of Whiteclay beer sales.
"We did not let it go," he says."I had resolved that I would never go away, and I have not.”
VIC CLARKE: 1990s-2000s
When Vic Clarke's family moved to Whiteclay in 1993, his sons were 10, 8 and 6.
They stayed another 20 years.
Clarke, a longtime grocer, bought one of Whiteclay's two markets from a family that had owned it 55 years, moving his wife and children into the attached five-bedroom house.
The boys played hide-and-seek with friends in the store, and played catch with street people outside. They never felt unsafe, Clarke says.
"It's not like this is a bad area to live. ... We'd have (youth) baseball teams come stay in Whiteclay. Their parents wouldn't show up, but they'd let the kids come stay with us."
Clarke believes the media has made Whiteclay worse, portraying such a simple, negative image of the place that it drove non-alcohol-related businesses away.
And he says Whiteclay beer sales have long served as a scapegoat for the Oglala Sioux Tribe — an easily identified, external enemy to deflect attention from tribal government's lack of will to address the reservation's internal problems.
"I blame the tribe for a lot of things," he says. "They want to place blame on everybody else."
DON PREISTER: 2002-2005
Don Preister fought for change in Whiteclay before it was cool.
The former Omaha state senator introduced bills each year from 2002 to 2005 that sought to re-establish a 5-mile alcohol-free buffer zone around the Pine Ridge Reservation and ban liquor licenses in cities that lack adequate law enforcement. He introduced a 2006 bill that would have funded a Whiteclay police force through a new tax on alcohol.
None of those bills made it out of committee, though he did help secure a $100,000 federal grant that allowed tribal police and Nebraska State Patrol troopers to enforce laws within each other’s boundaries.
Preister takes pride in being among the first to call for change in Whiteclay.
“I couldn’t turn a blind ear to their cause, even though it seemed like a lost cause.”
JOHN MAISCH: 2013 to present
John Maisch spent the first 20 years of his life in Nebraska, growing up in Hastings and Grand Island.
But he had never heard of Whiteclay until he was an alcohol regulator in Oklahoma.
His curiosity to learn more led him to produce a documentary about life on Whiteclay’s streets, “Sober Indian/Dangerous Indian,” which he used to rally support to close the beer stores.
But he credits a 6-year-old girl with effectively shutting them down.
Arianna Boesem’s story of being born with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder to a mother who drank daily in Whiteclay finally struck home the real impact of beer sales on the innocent, Maisch said.
About a month after the stores had closed, Maisch traveled to Whiteclay by himself. It was a Sunday afternoon when he stepped out of his car and onto the streets that only a month before would have been filled with men and women drinking and begging for change.
“It was silence, like how a town of nine should sound.”
PATTY PANSING BROOKS: 2016-present
Strategy put Patty Pansing Brooks at odds with some close allies over the past 18 months.
Recruited by LaMere, Maisch and other activists to be a legislative voice against Whiteclay beer sales, the Lincoln state senator found herself disagreeing with them on how to approach the issue.
"I felt a compulsion to do something and to look at it from a bunch of different angles," she said. Others wanted a more straightforward approach.
She recalls poring over state liquor laws and other laws connected to Whiteclay.
What she learned: Law enforcement is not only important, but legally necessary for alcohol sales to be allowed in a Nebraska community.
Her realization prompted a key hearing at the Capitol, where a Sheridan County commissioner acknowledged Whiteclay lacked adequate law enforcement. The statement triggered a review of the Whiteclay beer stores' licenses by the Nebraska Liquor Control Commission, which ultimately shut them down.
Now Pansing Brooks is leading efforts to develop businesses and services in Whiteclay, alongside state Sen. Tom Brewer of Gordon, who represents Sheridan County and is the Legislature's first Native member.
"I cannot imagine they're going to reopen those stores," she says.
SAM O’ROURKE: 2017
He's helping build a new Whiteclay.
Sam O'Rourke, a 43-year-old Lakota entrepreneur, owns the contracting company that's moving dirt and pouring concrete for a Family Dollar here.
He's also considering launching a storage business of his own in Whiteclay, assuming the beer stores remain closed and other commercial development follows.
"If they keep the alcohol out, I think there's potential to bring some business," he says. "Whiteclay is prime property."
Unrestricted by the reservation's limits on property ownership, O'Rourke, 43, sees potential for Pine Ridge entrepreneursto launch businesses in Whiteclay, whose main customers would be their own people. That could grow Whiteclay into an incorporated town with local ordinances, its own law enforcement and stable infrastructure.
He's ambivalent about the beer stores themselves, he says.
However, "We can't go backward."
This story is co-published by the Rapid City Journal and ICT, a news partnership that covers Indigenous communities in the South Dakota area.
Amelia Schafer is the Indigenous Affairs reporter for ICT and the Rapid City Journal. She is of Wampanoag and Montauk-Brothertown Indian Nation descent. She is based in Rapid City. You can contact her at aschafer@rapidcityjournal.com.
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