So, in 2018, the Wind River Food Sovereignty Project began to address more broadly the food insecurity and high rates of diet-related disease in the community. With help from the Nature Conservancy, Wind Cave National Park in occupied South Dakota contributed to the reintroduction of bison to the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho on the Wind River Reservation sending fifty to Wyoming in 2021. Today the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative is part of a program that teaches members traditional methods of drying meat and even modern canning techniques.
Jason and Sarah Lucas say they felt their god leading them to start a ministry on the Wind River Reservation so they moved their family to Wyoming to birth what they call "Foundations For Nations."
On Sunday, as the Northern Arapaho Sundance ceremony was in its final day, Foundations For Nations Pastor Sarah Lucas stood before her congregation on the Wind River Reservation and suggested Native people should turn away from their traditional ways, calling them a false “idol.” As the video began circulating on social media on Wednesday, several hundred Native community members moved swiftly to protest, to demand that Foundations For Nations leave the reservation. The Lucas family fled, citing death threats. The church’s related food shelf closed its doors. But the backlash has continued, with calls for the tribes to invoke the “bad man” clause in their treaty with the U.S. government, which empowers the tribes to ban people from reservation land. [Sermon faces backlash]The Bad Man Clause has been applied in other actions.
The "bad man" legal argument was successfully used by Lavetta Elk, another Oglala Sioux, in a lawsuit alleging that a U.S. Army recruiter had violated the "bad man" clause when he sexually molested her while transporting her to a military recruiting appointment. Elk recently won a $650,000 settlement that left intact a federal judge's ruling that said the treaty language requires the government to reimburse Sioux tribe members who are injured by "any wrong" done by "bad men among the whites, or among other people subject to the authority of the United States."Tribal nations are recognized by the federal government as political sovereigns, not a racial group. Ahead of the 2023 White House Tribal Nations Summit and as part of the Cobell settlement the Interior Department's Land Buy-Back Program for Tribal Nations, some three million acres in fifteen states are being returned to Tribal trust ownership. So, a plan by the US Bureau of Reclamation to remand some 60,000 acres on the Wind River Reservation to the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Tribes is long overdue.
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