Darkest Night : Pine Ridge to Bombing Range

Episode 4

Jun 5

KILI Radio premieres on April 13 and April 20, 2022

Episode 4 of our series picks up after the Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887 which, along with the 1883 Code of Indian Offenses, dramatically marks the U.S. federal government’s new policy of forced assimilation against its indigenous people. Part 1 of the episode begins with the 1889 establishment of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, a much-diminished version of the Great Sioux Reservation established under the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. The next segment starts our discussion of the worst “mass shooting” in American history - the Wounded Knee Massacre of December 29th, 1890. Referring to the Massacre, the well-known Black Elk said, “I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.” After an extended montage of participants’ stories, we hear archival testimony from survivor Wasu Maza(“Iron Hail”), otherwise known as Dewey Beard. This part ends with a lengthy section on boarding schools, the first of which forcefully established the assimilationist philosophy of “Kill the Indian, save the man.”

Part 2 starts with a discussion of the 1883 Code of Indian Offenses that was introduced in Episode 3. Clinton writes, “[It] was not an early criminal code for Indian Reservations…but, rather, the clearest evidence of a deliberate federal policy of ethnocide - the deliberate extermination of another culture.” We then move on to the issue of land, namely some of the ways that Lakota territory continued to be whittled away after the creation of the Pine Ridge Reservation in its current form. The next segment turns to the so-called “Indian New Deal” which was a response to the 1928 Meriam Report that made clear that the U.S. government’s approach to its indigenous people - namely allotment and assimilation - was failing. The resulting Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 and its impact until the present-day is discussed. Lastly, this part ends with a look at a geographical area known to most Lakota simply as “The Bombing Range,” a 341,726 acre portion of the Reservation that was seized by the Department of the Army during World War II.