South Dakota voters are rejecting incumbent Earth haters

Doeden surpasses Johnson in latest KELOLAND/Emerson poll https://t.co/CY6cggFlBt

— KELOLAND News (@keloland) May 21, 2026

Earth hater Howdy Doody Dusty Johnson was reimbursed for private flights more than any member of Congress from 2019 until June 2025 so Toby Doeden has surpassed him in the gubernatorial primary.

In 2026, 70.5% of the state legislative incumbents running for election in South Dakota will face primary contests, a record high since 2010. In total, 55 incumbents face contested primaries across the South Dakota House and Senate. The average number of incumbents contested each election cycle since 2010 was 24. All 55 of the contested incumbents are Republicans. [Ballotpedia]

Feds boosting ethanol but North Dakota soils are shot, too

Aquifer sources are not considered high quality for irrigation because of their salinity levels but fossil water from limestone contains the minerals that made us human. In my home state of South Dakota some eight million acres are salt-impacted due to seawater intrusion, fertilizer and other soil amendments, irrigation with saline water and roadway deicer applications. Soils are worn out from decades of pesticides, poor farming practices and manufactured fertilizers. Shallow wells and waterways suffer impairment from nitrate pollution making water less available especially where aquifer levels are dwindling.

In North Dakota soil salinity affects at least 6 million acres or about 13% of the state's total land area impacting over 90% of local agricultural producers. Traditional deep-rooted prairie grasses and diverse small-grain rotations have largely been replaced by heavy corn and soybean rotations allowing the water table to rise and deposit more salt at the surface. Expanding white and brown saline patches force farmers into a loop of spending money on seeds that fail to emerge exposing the trade-off between short-term financial profitability and long-term soil health.

In January, Earth hater and former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum pulled the Bureau of Land Management leases from American Prairie. In February BLM and Forest Service bumped the Animal Unit Month or AUM lease to $1.69 from $1.35 for one cow and her calf, one horse, or five sheep or goats for a month, created an app that locates unused grazing allotments then threw bison off federal land and ended conservation rules.

Roads in northwest North Dakota are reporting extremely low visibility due to blowing dust and dirt. KELOLAND News also received photos from our viewers of dust storms in South Dakota. [Dust storms rage in North Dakota and South Dakota]

Learn more from North Dakota State University.

Most of them know not to use apostrophes in plurals https://t.co/6rx2oTZZTi

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) May 14, 2026

Hardly new, environmental racism part of lithium, rare earth mining

In 1951 after uranium was discovered in South Dakota's southern Black Hills more than 150 mines were ripped into the Earth where the Oglala Lakota once made their winter camp. Since then, radioactive tailings from those scars have been detected in Angostura Reservoir after a dam on the Cheyenne River broke in 1962. Beginning in 1958 Homestake Mining Company gouged uranium from New Mexico leaving piles of waste rock laden with selenium causing cancers and thyroid disease in its wake. 

In 2017 Rare Element Resources said its mine in the Wyoming Black Hills just upstream of the South Dakota border on ancestral Apsáalooke and Lakota lands at the headwaters of the Redwater River, a tributary of the Belle Fourche/Cheyenne, announced financial backing from General Atomics and applied for enough water for the mineral separation process despite widespread contamination in Crook County wells. 

In 2019 because the Trump Organization despises Native Americans uranium mining was fast-tracked in and around Indian Country where tribes already suffer from diseases and birth defects wrought by radioactive contamination and in northwestern South Dakota cleanup in the Cave Hills area went for decades without remediation. 

In South Dakota, British Columbia-based United Lithium staked some 500 claims on treaty lands, some on Bureau of Land Management ground near Pringle, where lithium bearing pegmatites are already being quarried for potassium feldspars and micas. Canada-based Clean Nuclear Energy Corporation wants to drill through the water-bearing Inyan Kara Group on School and Public Lands property in Fall River County. The project is less than a mile from Craven Canyon where pictographs and rock art of the Lakota, Cheyenne, Mandan, Hidatsa, Ponca, eastern Dakota, and other Native American cultures are protected on the Black Hills National Forest.

Exploiting the General Mining Law of 1872 Australia-based South32 Ltd. is ripping into Sobaipuri O’odham and Hohokam ancestral lands at Harshaw, Arizona with plans to extract zinc, manganese and nickel. In 2023 Trump appointees rejected a lawsuit that would have blocked mineral exploration in Arizona's Patagonia Mountains despite the resultant acid mine drainage that puts wildlife at risk where half of all migratory birds in North America move through the nearby avian sanctuaries at Sonoita Creek State Natural Area and Patagonia Lake. 

Australian miners like Jervois Global want to gouge ore containing cobalt from the homelands of the Nimíipuu or Nez Perce at a Superfund site near the Frank Church Wilderness in Idaho.

Trina Lone Hill wasn’t surprised that mining companies had found lithium in South Dakota’s Black Hills. Gold and uranium had drawn drillers to the Lakota Sioux tribe’s hallowed ground in these western highlands years ago. Now, with this new mineral powering the global green-energy transition, the tribe’s historic preservation officer had one thought: “Here we go again.” 

Indigenous communities are hard hit: Roughly one in 10 proposed mines sits within 10 miles of a tribal reservation, even though reservations comprise 2 percent of U.S. land overall. “All those minerals … are right in our sacred sites,” Lone Hill said. The pattern of sidelining tribal voices and dispossession, she added, “has always been oppressive.” In Nevada, ground zero for America’s lithium rush, Western Shoshone members, much like their Sioux counterparts, have maintained that they never ceded their ancestral land. [How the Rush to Mine the Metal of the Future Echoes America’s Colonial Past]

Learn more from the South Dakota Democratic Party.

Larson inducted into SD Hall of Fame funded in part by Earth hater adversary Schieffer

Citing discovery on Indian trust ground a Republican politically motivated acting US Attorney for the District of South Dakota named Kevin Schieffer upended local control and seized a thunder lizard named Sue in 1992 from Pete Larson and the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research in Hill City. 

A team led by Larson unearthed and restored another Tyrannosaurus named Stan and created replicas of what some call the world's second-finest T. rex fossil. Stan's fossilized bones were found by amateur paleontologist Stan Sacrison in the Hell Creek Formation near Buffalo, South Dakota in 1987. After a public feud and lawsuit the first Stan was awarded to Pete's brother, Neal who then teamed up with geologist Walter W. Stein Bill. 

In 2013 then-Governor Denny Daugaard appointed the disgraced Schieffer to the South Dakota Board of Regents. 

In 2019 a replica of Stan was moved from the lobby of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science to Farmington to make room for Albuquerque's new Bisti Beast exhibit. The original Stan sold for nearly $32 million in 2020 to an anonymous buyer and today is in a museum in Abu Dhabi. 

In 2022, auction house Christie's withdrew a T-rex skeleton from an event after experts, including Larson, noticed just 79 original bones and over 200 cast from Stan in the fossil known as Shen which was excavated from a portion of the Hell Creek Formation in McCone County, Montana.

Pete Larson has since co-authored and published findings from a study of the effects the Chicxulub asteroid impact had on Laramidia after the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction and on the Hell Creek Formation near Tanis, North Dakota.

Today, Schieffer is a lifetime contributor to the South Dakota Hall of Fame into which Pete Larson has been inducted.

"A Visionary in Paleontology:" Operating from Hill City, SD, for over 50 years, Peter Larson heads Black Hills Institute, the world’s largest private fossil company. Internationally known for work with T. rex specimens Sue and Stan, he has authored over 80 scientific articles, shaped federal fossil collection policy, and built a collaborative community spanning business, academia, and government. Peter believes discovery is richer when done together. [press release]

Montana loses attempt to block Native voting

In an effort to reverse voter apathy in Indian Country the Montana Democratic Party became the first state party to formally include Indigenous as equitable partners. Montana is home to 12 Indigenous languages three of which are at risk of going extinct after Donald Trump weaponized a novel coronavirus strain killing many Assiniboine, Gros Ventre and Montana Salish elders. 

President Joe Biden restored the White House Tribal Nations Summit after Herr Trump declared war on Indian Country and undercounted Indigenous Americans because Earth hating Republicans want citizens to believe democracy isn’t for everybody. 

American Civil Liberties Union of Montana, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Native American Rights Fund sued to reverse another attempt to restrict Indigenous people from voting.

A Montana district court has blocked a new state law that would have reduced Election Day voter registration hours, ruling that the measure likely violates the constitutional right to vote and disproportionately harms Indigenous voters living in rural reservation communities. The law, passed during the 2025 Montana Legislative session, would have eliminated the final eight hours of Election Day voter registration access across the state. Civil rights organizations argued that the state failed to justify the restrictions imposed by the legislation. [Montana Court Blocks Law Limiting Indigenous Voters’ Access to Election Day Registration]

Indian Country has won victory after victory by relying on protections in the Voting Rights Act. The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Callais weakens the safeguards guaranteed under Section 2 of the VRA, undercutting a critical tool for defending voting rights. Learn more: buff.ly/oyhcHej

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— Native American Rights Fund (@nativerights.bsky.social) May 6, 2026 at 3:05 PM

The SAVE Act is drawing criticism from Native American civic groups concerning its impact on Native voting rights. The bill would require proof of citizenship documents to register to vote, raising questions about whether Tribal IDs can be used. #VotingRights #NativeVote @fdnv.bsky.social

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— Public News Service (@publicnewsservice.bsky.social) February 19, 2026 at 12:00 PM