Highway 83 Articles

Originally Published, February 2011
The Nebraska Sand Hills Are Precious and Need to Be Protected from Oil Pipelines

By Stew Magnuson

Some 175 years ago, the migrants traveling on the Oregon Trail gazed north of the Platte River at the Sand Hills of Nebraska Territory and called them a wasteland.
Modern day travelers on Interstate 80 fly by at 75 miles per hour and know little of what lies beyond the flat river valley. Nebraska is derisively called a “flyover” state by those on the East and West Coast.
Many Americans today scorn the prairie, the Great Plains, the wide open spaces, as a flat, uninteresting places. Sadly, there are residents of the state who share this belief.
I keep all this in mind when I think about the ill-conceived plan to build the Keystone XL high-pressure oil pipeline through the beautiful and delicate Nebraska Sand Hills.
I wonder why any Nebraskan would want such a travesty to happen. Is it because they too, have contempt for their native land? Do they too believe that all that sits outside the city limits of Omaha and Lincoln is a “wasteland?”
The Keystone Pipeline’s expansion project, as proposed by TransCanada, will cut through what the naturalist Stephen R. Jones called “the last prairie,” the Sand Hills.
The Sand Hills were never the Great American Desert as those on the westbound trails thought. The Oregonians and Mormons were wrong.
The problem in the subsequent decades after the westward migration and the settlement of the state is that we never had a prairie version of John Muir, the naturalist who advocated to save Yosemite Valley in California and founded the Sierra Club. He devoted his life to saving trees. In the 19th Century, no one was concerned about saving grass. Today, a look on roadmaps reveals a few scattered, green patches of national grasslands from Oklahoma to North Dakota. But how many Nebraskans pack up the car with the kids and the tents and drive off for a vacation in one of these protected areas? The children would probably try to run away from home before embarking on such a trip. They have been taught that the only beautiful places on Earth have mountains—or roller-coasters and theme rides—and the only animals worth saving reside in forests.
This proposed pipeline shortcut constitutes a real threat to a land that is every bit as beautiful as the Black Hills, Yosemite or Yellowstone. The Sand Hills are a mysterious region that geologists have puzzled over for generations. The grasses turn green in the spring, and through the summer, change to subtle shades of tan during the dry months. A drive up Highway 83 from North Platte to Valentine in the late summer is as exhilarating as the Going-to-the-Sun road in Glacier National Park. It’s a different kind of beauty, but the beauty is there nonetheless. One simply has to look for it.
The dunes are, for the time being, protected by the thinnest layers of topsoil and short-grasses. As any West Nebraska rancher will confirm, it doesn’t take much to destroy this protective grass, and create a blowout of drifting sand. The thought of earthmovers, and semis loaded with steel running roughshod over this land is horrifying.
Underneath these complex and multi-faceted dunes of grass lies one of our nation’s greatest natural resources, the Ogallala Aquifer. This vast reservoir of water that would be under the proposed pipeline might be out of sight and out of mind for Omaha and Lincoln residents, but as William Ashworth said in his book, Ogallala Blue: Water and Life on the High Plains, chances are anyone who put on cotton underwear this morning, had cornflakes for breakfast, or a slice of toast, consumed water coming out of the aquifer.
The aquifer in the Sand Hills soaks up the precious ran like a sponge, where it seeps in the earth and then, through a process that is still little understood, comes up in springs to feed the river valleys. Introducing oil into this process could be a disaster.
Any pipeline will traverse at some point the Niobrara, one of the state’s most scenic rivers. The river valleys of the Great Plains are to be treasured as some of the highlights of any road trip. Imagine thick, acidic oil leaking into the Niobrara.
Are Nebraskans so unappreciative — or emotionally cut off from the land they call home — that they would sell it out for what amounts to some temp jobs for pipefitters?
No matter what the well-funded, oil-company propagandists say, this pipeline will leak somewhere, and it will spill oil onto this unique region. It happens to pipelines all the time. It’s very simple. Everything built by mankind eventually breaks. Will the first fissures come where the pipeline spans the Niobrara or Loup Rivers? It’s impossible to say.
The Sand Hills region is not a wasteland. There is nothing like them in our great nation. They need to be protected from those who think they can put a price on this priceless land.


Two Classic Books on the Damming of the Missouri Are Rereleased

View from a Washichu, Originally published March 19, 2010

By Stew Magnuson

Last year, while traveling down U.S. Highway 83 to research my next book, I spent a day at the Fort Berthold Reservation, N.D. At the Scout’s Cemetery No. 1, where those who served with Lt. Col. Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn are interred, I met an Arikara man and Vietnam vet, Don Dickens.
Retired from the tribal government, he spends his free time taking care of the lonely graveyard. The remains of veterans from several wars there were once buried in the bottomlands along the Missouri River, but they were relocated when the flood came.
This inundation was not a spring runoff, but a manmade disaster created by two U.S. agencies, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation.
Unlike most Native peoples, the Arikara, Mandan and Hidatsa had not been forced onto a reservation not of their choosing. They were sedentary peoples who had lived along the river for centuries. And then in the 1940s, Congress and the federal government, in response to devastating floods in downriver communities such as Omaha, pushed legislation through that created several projects to dam the Missouri and several of its tributaries. There’s little evidence that any of these bureaucrats and legislators gave a second thought to the Native American communities that resided along the bottomlands. None were consulted prior to the law being enacted. Despite the belated protests of the Three Affiliated tribes and other nations up and downstream, the projects continued.  
“It destroyed a way of life. Everybody farmed. Everybody had gardens and cattle. They ranched. They took it all away, and now they eat commodities. Everybody has developed diabetes and heart disease,” Dickens told me.
Coincidentally, a few months after I visited the reservation, two important books chronicling this sad chapter of U.S. history were rereleased.
Dammed Indians Revisited: The Continuing History of the Pick-Sloan Plan and the Missouri River Sioux by Michael L. Lawson (South Dakota Historical Press) and Coyote Warrior: One Man, Three Tribes and the Trial That Forged a Nation by Paul VanDevelder (Bison Books), are two important works that together give a compete picture of how the tribes received the raw end of a deal they never asked for.
Both books take different approaches to the storytelling. Lawson is a historian and VanDevelder is a journalist. Dammed Indians Revisited deals primarily with the plight of the Lakotas who lived in the bottomlands along the Standing Rocking and Cheyenne River Reservations. Coyote Warrior is the story of the Three Affiliated Tribes.
Of the two books, I relate to VanDevelder’s style the best. His story centers on the Cross family, who fought for justice for two generations. Martin Cross, a Hidatsa who married the daughter of Norwegian immigrants in the 1930s, was the first of his family to oppose the dam tooth and nail. Later, his son Raymond, an attorney specializing in federal Indian law, continued the fight to receive fair compensation for the tribes’ losses. This character driven approach to writing history makes the story come alive for the reader. The relatively “dry” historical facts are interspersed with the narrative of this fascinating and tenacious family.
Dammed Indians Revisited is a more traditional history book, written by a trained historian. But what an incredible piece of work this is. It includes the best blow-by-blow account of how the Pick-Sloan plan came to be. (Raymond Cross figures in this work as well).
Some regard this book as a “classic,” and I agree. Those who study the forcible removal of communities to make way for dams have been referring to it for years. First published in 1982, the new edition of this work is most welcome. It is almost a new book with several new chapters and detailed updates of events since 1980. New forewords from the author and former South Dakota Sen. George McGovern are included, along with the original written by Vine Deloria, Jr. Those who read the book in its first iteration, or libraries who have the first edition, will want to add this work to their collections.
The same can’t be said for Coyote Warrior, which first came out in 2004. Except for a new afterword by the author, there isn’t much new here.
However, these are not competing books, but complementary. They should be read together. And their near simultaneous re-releases should bring further attention to yet another sad chapter in the federal government’s callous mistreatment of Native peoples.
Quoted in the new afterward in Coyote Warrior, Raymond Cross perhaps said it best: “This story is the retelling of the oldest story we have. It’s story that goes back to the Greeks and before. It’s the story of the struggle for justice, the struggle for dignity, and it’s the story about the indomitability of the human spirit.”

                         



Creating Jobs on Pine Ridge, Rosebud the Old Fashioned Way
From: View from a Washichu, Originally published Sept. 2009

MISSION, S.D. – Southbound on U.S. Route 83, heading into Mission on the Rosebud Reservation, one of the first businesses encountered is the bright, new Turtle Creek Crossing Supermarket.
Stepping inside, one find wide aisles, a wonderful selection of fresh fruit, bilingual signs in English and Lakota, and friendly staff.
I asked one of the cashiers how the word pizza was translated into the Lakota language.
“Bread you add things to,” she informed me.
The new supermarket is tribally owned, which was a source of pride for the cashier. “I’m an owner,” she said.
This was the most time I had spent on the Rosebud Reservation. Most of my experience is on Pine Ridge. Driving through Mission, the contrast in terms of business activity between the two communities is jarring. Turtle Creek Crossing is not alone in the grocery business. There are at least two others in town as well as a Wells Fargo bank, three motels (including the one at the casino), a hardware store and a handful of gas stations/convenience stores. Heading south one finds the Soldier Woman Art and Gift Gallery -- one of those shops where you pretty much want to buy everything you lay your eyes on. Also new to the business community is a Subway sandwich franchise.
The town of Pine Ridge has no bank, one grocery store and no motels.
These observations had me thinking about entrepreneurship, economic activity and jobs in these two communities.
I’m going to set aside the white versus Indian-owned business debate in this week’s column. Also, I’ll ignore the idea of whether a tribal government should be in the business of business. Tribes crossed that line with casinos years ago.
I will only say that if the Rosebud government wants to go head to head with the established grocery stores in town, they had better run it like a business. I was in there on a Sunday morning. There were about five customers in the entire supermarket, and three cashiers standing around doing virtually nothing. I was back Monday morning. Same situation. You don’t see cashiers at Walmart looking bored out of their minds. And you can bet competing groceries down the road in the center of town aren’t paying folks to do nothing.
At Turtle Creek, I bought a package of Tanka Bites, made by Native American Natural Foods of Kyle, S.D. This is a Pine Ridge produced pemmican product made of buffalo jerky and cranberries. I try to buy some whenever I’m in the area. And not just to support a Native business. I buy the bars because they’re delicious and nutritious. I consumed the whole bag before I reached the first stop sign in town.
When I do talks about my book, The Death of Raymond Yellow Thunder, in Nebraska towns far from Pine Ridge, I’m often asked what I think should be done to end poverty on Pine Ridge.
Wow! As if a white, journalist from Omaha had the answer to that conundrum. I don’t have a silver bullet answer. And I don’t think anyone does. But one observation I have is that folks should take a look around at the surrounding communities. How do people make money and create jobs in the surrounding white counties of Nebraska and South Dakota? The same way they have done since they showed up in the 1880s.
Agriculture and small businesses.
Pine Ridge in the 1960s and 1970s tried to bring in manufacturing. I believe there was a fishhook factory and an electronics factory. President Clinton when visiting Pine Ridge in 1999 talked about bringing in 21st  Century jobs.
How about some 19th Century jobs? The Tanka Bar folks are on the right path. They have a great item to sell, great marketing and an agriculturally based product.
Another example: I have a cousin by marriage who lives in a tiny town in Nebraska of 299 people. She now has a growing business selling jellies and syrups made from chokecherries and wild plums. Her Heavenly Creations products are being sold all over Nebraska and on the Internet.
Chokecherries and wild plums were once an essential part of the Lakota diet. They thrive on the prairie. There’s a big fat business idea waiting for a Lakota entrepreneur to attempt. Someone needs to steal this idea and get out there and start planting some trees.
Not everyone is an entrepreneur, though. A good head for business is a skill that must be learned.
That’s why I was heartened when I went into the new Subway sandwich franchise at Mission. I was greeted and served by a group of enthusiastic and friendly teenagers.
An afterschool job is something we have gotten away from in the white, middle and upper-class culture. Kids nowadays are expected to study and do extracurricular school activities. And that’s too bad. This is an important experience for any young person no matter their background. These Rosebud teenagers are going to learn work skills, how to interact with customers, and every two weeks, take home a paycheck and see the good that comes from that.
So for now, I don’t think it matters that this is a white-owned business. Maybe one of those kids is going to say “Hey! I’m doing all the work. And this guy is making all the money. I’m going to go to college, get a business degree, come back to Mission and open up a Quiznos!”
Or a chokecherry jam business. I’ll be the first customer.

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