2/6/21

Distillery in Kadoka hopes to feed on tribal misery


Republican former State Senator Stan Adelstein's ancestors owned a store in Kadoka, adjacent to the Pine Ridge Reservation; now he’s vested in numerous mining interests from gold to gravel on stolen treaty lands. The State of South Dakota still seizes about 750 American Indian kids every year reaping over a billion federal dollars since the Indian Child Welfare Act was passed by Congress.

On April 30, 2017 the liquor stores closed and Whiteclay, Nebraska hasn’t sold a drop of alcohol since but bootlegging remains problematic on the Oglala Lakota Nation.
Badlands Distillery LLC is currently in the processing of adding an additional building to its main headquarters in Kadoka. Originally planned over three years ago, the building officially began construction in November of 2020 as a way of having a bigger outreach. The business started a few years ago when good friends, Mark Eschenbacher and Jim Herber, combined their distilling skills and general love of South Dakota to make Badlands Distillery LLC. Jim Herber is a descendant of a prohibition bootlegger and is one of six distilleries in the state. Herber’s family had operated illegal stills during the prohibition years in the early 1930’s along Sears Creek in the Weta Basin, near present-day Badlands National Park.
Read more here.

No comments: