Whiteclay Still Vexes Lakota 10 Years After Riot
Oglala Sioux still buy Nebraska beer; 1999 homicides still unsolved.
May 18, 2009
An invisible state line is hardly a barrier to epidemic. Members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe in South Dakota have known that reality since the late 1800s, when they were confined to a barren remnant of their beloved prairies and white traders began flooding their dispirited settlements with alcohol from just across the Nebraska line.
This June marks the 10th anniversary of the confrontation that awoke many modern Nebraskans to the ongoing firewater poisoning from inside their state's borders. It took a protest march and riot following the still-unsolved deaths of two Lakota men to call attention to the phenomenon of Whiteclay, Nebraska – the home of fewer than two dozen people, but the source of millions of cans of beer sold each year to Indians who drive or walk from the officially dry Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
Black Elk, Hard Heart Deaths Are Still Unsolved
Wilson Black Elk Jr., 40, and Ronald Hard Heart, 39, had made the two-mile journey from Pine Ridge village to Whiteclay. Their bodies were found June 8, 1999, in a nearby field, apparent homicide victims. Frustration over a lack of leads and the unending scourge of alcoholism prompted tribal members, reinforced by American Indian Movement veterans, to retrace the two men's steps to Whiteclay on Saturday, June 26, 1999.
What began as a solemn march (attended by this writer) ended with violence directed at Whiteclay liquor stores and declarations that the Lakota had “restored” the alcohol outlet to their reservation.
“Restored”? What did that mean? The Lakota weren't referring that day to the influx of federal troops and white settlement that ended their ancestors' nomadic ways. They spoke instead of an 1882 federal order that extended their reservation across the Nebraska line into a 50-square-mile buffer zone, including present-day Whiteclay. President Theodore Roosevelt rescinded the order in 1904, leaving Pine Ridge with a one-square-mile finger in Nebraska – just touching Whiteclay to its west.
Whiteclay Beer Sales Remain in the Millions
A month of tense weekend showdowns between Indians and Nebraska authorities followed the June 1999 riot. Inevitably, tensions eased. And Lakota legal challenges aimed at restoring the larger buffer zone, as one might have predicted, fell short.
Though Whiteclay has never been quite out of the public eye, neither have things changed much. A liquor outlet in the village lost its Nebraska license – temporarily. An effort to cross-deputize Oglala Sioux tribal police so they could patrol Whiteclay fizzled. And the alcohol sales continue, though at a slightly slower rate in recent years.
Attempts to pursue the theory that Whiteclay still belongs to the reservation amounted to a dead end. Authorities have argued that restoration of the 1882 buffer zone, in any event, would move the unofficial Pine Ridge liquor outlets south – down some 20 miles of winding roads – to the towns along U.S. Highway 20, leaving an increase in drunken-driving accidents and deaths in its wake.
Thus, more than 125 years after opening for business and a decade after the deaths of Black Elk and Hard Heart, Whiteclay remains at the center of the firewater epidemic that still plagues the people of Red Cloud and Crazy Horse.
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