Rapid City Council to find land to swap with Native community

In 1948 Congress gave the land belonging to the Indian Boarding School in west Rapid City to the City, the School District, the South Dakota National Guard, various churches and the Native Community - except the Native Community never got theirs.

The land in question is the Canyon Lake Activity Center, Clarkson Mountain View Health Care Facility, and Monument Health Behavioral Health Center worth more than twenty million dollars. “We’re not taking the land away, it’s going to be a land exchange for maybe some land that the city has somewhere else," says Council Member Darla Drew. "So don’t think we’re going to tale [sic] those centers and take them down, make the senior center move, make the hospital move. That’s not the point.” [KEVN teevee] 

Charmaine White Face sees a land swap differently and calls some involved in the negotiations "opportunists." 

Both sets of White Face’s grandparents were children who attended the Rapid City Indian Boarding School, and her mother worked at the sanatorium when it was a tuberculosis clinic. “I say opportunists because the community cannot and did not have an opportunity to meet about this when, if they were working on this a long time as the mayor said, then why didn’t they come to our community meetings and talk to people?” she asked. White Face went on to note that the 2017 letter which the Rapid City Indian Boarding School Lands Project presented to Rapid City Council was addressed to the superiors of tribes and the only people addressed in Rapid City was the superintendent of the Rapid City Area Schools and the mayor of Rapid City. [Native Sun News Today]

After the 1972 Flood that wiped out Teepee Town and killed some 238 people, mostly poor American Indians, the feds gave Rapid City rent supports to house those displaced by the disaster but currently the Rapid City Police Department is staffed by white supremacists and bigots. A former police chief now Mayor Steve Allender has been accused of managing "a bunch of racists." Now he's saying it costs Rapid City some $15 million every year to address homelessness.

Today, the State of South Dakota still seizes about 750 American Indian kids every year reaping at least a billion federal dollars since the Indian Child Welfare Act was passed.