Sicangu Oyate edging closer to trust status at Mato Paha

In ’97, I performed my first of six seasons as Mother Ginger in the Black Hills Dance Theater’s production of the Nutcracker. Vanessa Short Bull danced the Sugar Plum Fairy. On opening night, her dad brought her likely centenarian great grandmother backstage before the show to watch her warm up. The vision of three Sicangu generations attending a Tchiachovski ballet was all it took for me to understand how public media funds bridges.

The late Bob Barker was an enrolled member of the Sicangu Oyate. 

Today, with cooperation from Democratic former South Dakota State Senator and Sicangu citizen, Troy Heinert more bison are coming home to the Nations. 

Now it's time for the State of South Dakota to abandon Bear Butte State Park that it claimed through colonization and remand it to the tribes for governance so they can restore its name to Mato Paha and for the US Park Service to add the name Mahto Tipila to Devils Tower National Monument.

Meade County Commissioners oppose a renewed proposal from the Rosebud Sioux Tribe to place 38.14 acres of land at Bear Butte into a land trust status. Earlier this month the tribe submitted the request to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, stating that the land would “advance tribal economic development and the ability to be self-sufficient, assist tribal self-governance and self-determination, and restore the ancestral tribal land base by replacing tribal lands lost through the allotment system.” The application states that the Rosebud Sioux Tribe would use the land for youth activities, and both cultural and spiritual purposes. 

“Bear Butte has been and continues to be a profoundly important sacred site and is vital to the spiritual, ceremonial, and religious needs of the Sioux people,” the application states.   In 2016 the Rosebud Sioux Tribe issued a similar request, which Meade County Commissioners opposed.  

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, trust land qualifies as a reservation if it has been validly set apart for the use of Tribes. Therefore, once the land is put into trust status the Rosebud Sioux Tribe and the Bureau of Indian Affairs would be responsible for providing all services, and the county would no longer have jurisdiction over the property.

While the Rosebud Sioux Tribe application is for just over 38 acres, there are other Tribes that have even greater land holdings at Bear Butte. The Lower Brule Sioux Tribe owns 1,080 acres, and the Northern Cheyenne Agency owns 560 acres.  [Black Hills Pioneer]

Mato Standing High practically lived at our house in Spearditch from 1983 until he and my stepson graduated high school in 1994. As both my step kids did he got his Bachelors of Science at the University of Wyoming. A Bush Fellow and a member of the Sicangu Oyate, he is an attorney having received his Juris Doctor at University of Montana Law School. He has also taught at Black Hills State University, a leader in American Indian Studies. No doubt he has heard me expounding on the importance of preserving indigenous languages as i have been ranting about it for nearly forty years. My young nephews called him "My Toad." Mato is Lakota for bear. 

Learn more at the Christian Science Monitor.

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