Sundance landmark to be razed

Steve and Jinx Hilty moved to Sundance, Wyoming after growing up in Cleveland and they opened their restaurant in 1987 when I was working for Twin City Fruit in Deadwood. 

Their daughter Callie told an interested party on Faceberg Messenger Thursday morning that after closing in August, 2020 they sold the building that housed Higbee's Café just months ago and retired. Steve had run the kitchen and Jinx ran the dining room and wrote the checks. Callie and her brother Alec worked there, too. 

The building was a turn of the century mercantile then an auto parts store before it was Higbees’ dining room. The Hiltys lived in that attached two story on the left in the photo until the kids were older. 

The late Herb Haist was the General Commissioner for the City of Sundance in the mid-1980s before being hired as the Deadwood City Planner and he introduced me to the family.

The Sundance Times is reporting the buildings will be demolished after serving the community, tourists and the Sturgis Rally for over a hundred years.

FSST mum on off-reservation land purchase

The Isanti Dakota Oyate or Flandreau Santee Sioux Nation has taken steps to resume their cannabis initiative and has purchased a parcel in the heart of the commercial district in Sioux Falls. 

Recall that in 2015 President Tony Reider and officials of the Flandreau Santee Sioux Nation advanced an adults-only cannabis initiative after an Iowa casino on the border cut into the tribe's gaming business but destroyed their crop after threats from South Dakota's former attorney general.

Tribal Attorney General Seth Pearman is declining to divulge the Nation's intention for the property.

A 1986 amendment to federal law allows tribes to acquire off-reservation land to serve the needs of its people so the Oglala Lakota Oyate bought property on I-90 just outside Badlands National Park. In March of last year that Nation voted overwhelmingly to legalize cannabis. 

Despite Montana Republicans messing with the wills of voters the Apsáalooke Nation will wean itself from coal and move forward on building a cannabis industry.

Minnesota's House of Representatives has voted to legalize cannabis for all adults and that bill will likely die at the hands of the Republican Senate. Nebraska's unicameral has killed even a basic therapeutic application. 

South Dakota's Republican governor believes white people in the state are too stupid to grow or regulate the herb, industrial or otherwise. Nevertheless several South Dakota communities are pondering zoning ordinances in anticipation of decisions by the state's Supreme Court and by a governor who would simply jury rig a mechanism that allows pharmacies to dispense edibles and topicals but no flower or smoking.

Feds scramble to repair damage, reverse ecocide caused by border wall disaster

Etched into the rhyolite on Signal Hill in Saguaro National Park about 800 years ago by the ancestors of the modern-day Tohono O'odham are their petroglyphs and rock art which are probably directions to water sources and hunting. Their Nation straddles the US/Mexico border.

Yvette Herrell is a member of the Cherokee Nation and the Republican New Mexico Representative from District 2 but her support for Herr Trump's border wall has strained the ties to her Indigenous heritage. Now, efforts to undo the damage to jaguar and ocelot habitats have begun in earnest while courts sort the fraudsters.

Environmental activists and tribal leaders say some of the damage is permanent, from the blasted mountains to the millions of gallons of water that can’t be put back in the ground. But they believe other effects of the wall can be reversed and they want the Biden administration to go further than stopping construction. [Arizona Republic]

Even North Dakota-based Fisher Sand and Gravel conspired with Trump and his henchman, Steve Bannon to defraud the United States. Fisher Industries is a major campaign contributor to Earth hating Republicans and is being investigated for substandard work on the US/Mexico border.

While not under federal control or part of any repair, a privately funded border wall built separately directly on the Rio Grande riverbank by federal border wall contractor Fisher Sand and Gravel is the subject of ongoing litigation between the U.S. government and the company, with a hearing held on May 5 in U.S. District Court in the southern district of Texas related to its construction. [Engineering News Record]

Just north of the border long-time environmental activist, Ted Turner has teamed up with the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the State of New Mexico to foster a pair of endangered Mexican gray wolves and their pups on his 243 square mile ranch near the Gila National Forest.

Learn more about the recovery of the rarest subspecies of gray wolves linked here. Plan to save jaguars linked here.

ip photo: Saquaro National Park near Marana, Arizona.

A young juvenile jaguar was recently spotted on video south of the new border wall – indicating its range may be expanding — and raising hopes for the species' recovery. In order for jaguars to fully thrive, the border wall must come down. https://t.co/eqb7cTjrkZ

— Center for Bio Div (@CenterForBioDiv) April 20, 2021

Lawrence County bear at risk to Republicans

If history is any guide, locals will just kill the offending bear like they do with moose, elk, cougars and their kittens. 

$20 says the black bears, wolves, and moose sighted in the Black Hills are migrating from the Bighorn Mountains in Wyoming down the Tongue River across the Powder to the Pumpkin Buttes where the Cheyenne and Belle Fourche Rivers begin, go up Beaver Creek near Newcastle into upper Castle Creek and down Rapid Creek to the Black Fox/Rochford area or north across Minnesota Ridge on the upper Limestone into Lawrence County. 

So, if there are moose, wolves and bears in the Black Hills why doesn't it automatically make them candidates for endangered species protection?

Because Republicans are evil.

Hate at Aberdeen Central hardly anything new

Right to life? Not if you're non-white or nonconforming in South Dakota. 

It's impossible not to notice that the white people who influence the South Dakota Republican Party continue to brainwash their own kids into cancelling culture, selling tyranny and preaching exclusivity to the voting populace. 

In 1888 L. Frank Baum of Oz fame began editing the South Dakota newspaper The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer where he advocated for the extermination of American Indians.

In 2017 a South Dakota school board voted unanimously to cancel homecoming activities that would have featured a football game between the Sturgis Scoopers and the Pine Ridge Thorpes after a car bearing hate speech and a symbol painted on it that some said resembled a swastika was smashed by Sturgis students. 

In April 2019 sleepy Vermillion became ground zero for Donald Trump's war on America in South Dakota by hosting Charlie Kirk. 

West River is home to the most rabid of the extreme white wing of the Republican Party and just last month the Faith High School Rodeo Club tried to hold a “Slave/Branding Auction.”

While incidents like the one at Aberdeen Central are hardly uncommon in South Dakota white nationalist incitements have intensified because of Trump's history of sexual violence, hateful lies and propaganda. South Dakota's Republican governor spins the hate wheel every day because  Republican is not just another word for earth hater; it's another word for Nazi.

But Charlie Kirk might be right about one thing. At a time when gender fluidity is more common than foot fungus fake journalists like those who curate the Dakota War College and Dakota 'Free Press' can even call themselves brain surgeons if they want to.

Learn more at the Aberdeen News.