Standing Bear’s Great-Grandson : New Warrior Offers Hope in Fight Over Sioux Lands

Sam Eaglestaff, 57, born in poverty on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation in central South Dakota and retired now among his destitute people, has had a dalliance the last few months with an unaccustomed emotion.

Hope.

For as long as Eaglestaff--and most of the 54,000 Indians on the eight Sioux reservations in the Dakotas, Nebraska and Montana--can remember, the tribe has struggled fitfully to win compensation for the seizure of its sacred lands in the Black Hills by the U.S. government in the latter half of the 1800s.

Federal courts have condemned the duplicity by which America abrogated its treaties with the tribe. “A more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be f1869966948ruled a century after Sitting Bull’s warriors battled Col. George A. Custer’s troops to defend land the Sioux regard as their spiritual mother.

But the Indians have rejected the remedies proposed by the government. After 60 years of litigation--one of the longest legal wrangles in U.S. history--the Supreme Court in 1980 affirmed the claims court’s order of a cash payment of $17.1 million plus simple interest dating from 1877, when Congress grabbed the Black Hills by setting aside the Ft. Laramie Treaty of 1868.

The money, now totaling about $200 million, sits in a Treasury account--a pittance, the Indians reason, for 7.3 million acres from which non-Indian miners over the last 100 years have extracted mineral deposits conservatively valued at $18 billion. And the settlement offer made no provision for returning even a portion of the land.

“We’ve been going along for 110 years, and we always hear about the Black Hills,” said Eaglestaff, whose father helped press the Sioux claim for compensation in the 1930s and ‘40s. “But the only ones who got rich off the Black Hills were the lawyers, and we’re still poor.”

Yet with a suddenness unfamiliar to a people whose grievances center on century-old treaty violations, Eaglestaff today finds his discouragement lifting. Like a growing number of the Sioux, he has come this summer and fall to believe he may be closer than ever to sharing the wealth long hidden in the mountains and plains his ancestors roamed.

Standing Bear Descendant

The hope stems from the arrival on the reservations of an Irvine, Calif., businessman of Sioux heritage and infinite self-confidence. Philip J. Stevens--great-grandson of the Sioux warrior Standing Bear; former director of the Air Force’s Minuteman 3 missile program; founder, president and chairman of Ultrasystems Inc., an engineering firm he sold this month for $89.1 million in order to pursue his Indian commitments full time--has been winning a rapt following among the Sioux by vowing to collect $3.1 billion in restitution from the federal government through a campaign of publicity, negotiation and moral suasion.

“We believe in this,” said Joe American Horse, tribal chairman of the Oglala Sioux’s Pine Ridge Reservation. With nearly 20,000 residents, the Oglala reservation is by far the largest Sioux settlement. And the Oglala are the most independent of the eight tribes: last month, their elected council became the first Sioux tribal government to formally endorse Stevens’ program.

“It’s for the people who are having a hard time right now,” American Horse said, “and for the kids who are going to grow up.” He and other Sioux living on reservations were interviewed by phone.

The heightened expectations, though, have stirred sharp divisions in the Sioux leadership, which for a decade before Stevens’ arrival had focused its efforts on winning the return of tribal lands, and rankled non-Indian leaders dead set against any settlement with the Sioux in excess of the court-ordered cash judgment.

Stevens’ opponents charge that his intervention contributed last month to the abrupt sidetracking in Congress of a bill that would have returned 1.3 million acres of undeveloped federal lands in the Black Hills to the Sioux. Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.), the bill’s sponsor, and Sen. Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.), who effectively holds veto power over the legislation, say Stevens’ campaign is an obstacle to settling the Sioux claims.

‘Out in Left Field’

“I think Mr. Stevens is out in left field somewhere if he really believes that what he is proposing is being realistically considered, even among Indian people,” Daschle said last week.

Across the Sioux reservations, however, Stevens’ influence is proving strong enough to expose deep clefts. Tribal elders, unhappy with the land-oriented focus of elected tribal leaders, have rallied to Stevens’ support. Historic resentment of the powerful Oglala, the tribe quickest to offer land in exchange for food when Congress sought to starve concessions from the Sioux in 1877, has galvanized opposition to Stevens and his Oglala supporters among the elected leaders of the other seven tribes.

At a deeper level, Stevens’ proposal has prompted the Sioux once again to balance the spiritual significance of the Black Hills against their value as an economic bargaining chip.

“It’s real simple,” said Alex Lunderman, chairman of the 11,700-member Rosebud Sioux Reservation, where unemployment exceeds 80%. “We say the hills are sacred. However, with his proposal, we’re asking for more money. Are they really sacred if we’re asking for more money?”

Stevens’ proposal incorporates the land provisions of the Bradley legislation. The Sioux would receive title to federal lands scattered through western South Dakota--specifically excluding Mt. Rushmore, Ellsworth Air Force Base and parts of Rapid City. As under Bradley’s proposal, most of the federal parklands returned to the Indians would be designated a “Sioux Park.” For five years, they would be jointly operated by the Sioux and the U.S. Park Service. Afterward, they would fall under independent Sioux control, though Congress would continue to pay for their operation and they would remain open to non-Indian visitors.

Wants Much More

But while Bradley’s bill provides only the cash settlement dictated by the 1980 Supreme Court ruling, Stevens wants much more for 7.3 million acres of Black Hills land that the United States, in an 1868 treaty, guaranteed would be held for the Sioux’s “absolute and undisturbed use” for all time.

As 110 years’ rent for the 1.3-million acres that would be returned, Stevens demands 11 cents per acre per year, with interest compounded at 5%--a sum of $2.76 billion. For the 6 million acres that would be retained by their current owners, excluding Mt. Rushmore and the Air Force base, he asks a continuing rental of $1 per acre per month--an annual payment of $71.4 million. For gold and silver extracted from the Black Hills over the last century, he seeks an additional $310 million in royalties.

The funds would be placed in an endowment. Stevens based his figures in part on the expectation that the $3.1-billion settlement could be conservatively invested to generate $300 million per year for projects to improve living conditions and create jobs on the reservations.

“This is a plan that will enable the Sioux people to no longer be confronted with the poverty the U.S. government has subjected them to,” Stevens explained during an interview in the richly paneled board room of Ultrasystems’ headquarters in Irvine. “They’re not asking a penny more than that and should not receive a penny less than that.”

Stevens says he was spurred to action by a visit just over a year ago to the ramshackle Pine Ridge Reservation, where the unemployment rate and the portion of the population living below the poverty line both hover near 50%. Since then, the East Los Angeles native has been stumping Sioux country, asking the Indians to name him their chief negotiator with the Interior Department on terms of a settlement.

‘Remove This Blight’

Stevens envisions a vast publicity effort to win non-Indian support for the plan: marches of Indian war veterans in Washington, petition campaigns on college campuses and at supermarkets, televised spectacles celebrating the role of the Indian in American society.

“I think the people of America will say, if we can get the message to America of this injustice, ‘Let us adjust our budget if necessary to pay this debt once and for all, and let us remove this blight once and for all from the history books of America,’ ” he insists.

While Stevens tells the Indians that his business savvy and government contacts uniquely qualify him to be their spokesman, established Sioux leaders complain that his plan is unrealistic and can lead only to humiliating defeat and a new wave of despondency.

The chairmen of the seven tribes other than the Oglala voted in late October to urge their reservations to oppose Stevens’ proposal when it comes up for a vote in tribal meetings over the next few months. They asked the Oglala’s elective tribal council, in the meantime, to rescind its endorsement of the plan.

“We strongly suggested to him that his proposal was naive, that it was politically unfeasible,” said Gerald Clifford, executive director of the Black Hills Steering Committee, which has coordinated the Sioux’s until-now unified lobbying for legislation returning land to the tribe.

Clifford fears that the Sioux would surrender the moral upper hand in the debate over the future of the Black Hills by making money the centerpiece of their demands.

‘Turned Focus to Money’

“It’s been the spiritual issue--the relationship between the Lakota and the sacred land--that has carried the Sioux over the many years we’ve continued to fight over this,” said Clifford, using the Indian name for the tribe. “Up till now, we’ve been able to sustain this effort to have the land returned and have not focused on money. The unfortunate part of Mr. Stevens coming here is that he’s turned the focus to money.”

Stevens was given the same message last month on Capitol Hill. Key staff members told him there was no chance that a $3-billion claim could garner legislators’ support in a deficit-wracked era. Daschle obtained a statement from Sen. Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs, granting him the power to freeze action on the Bradley bill. The fervor generated by Stevens’ audacious plan, he said, prompted the move.

Stevens was “doing a real injustice to many Indian people who felt, with all this new-found excitement and attention, that maybe there was some realistic hope we were going to pass a Bradley bill,” Daschle explained. “It just isn’t going to happen.”

Bradley, who says Inouye has promised the committee will undertake a study of issues related to the Black Hills dispute, agrees that Stevens’ activities have set back the settlement debate.167772161 “The relevance of what we’re trying to do is, on one hand, to right a wrong, and on the other to focus on the restorative quality of the land. . . , to focus on the relevance of Native American cultures to a contemporary life full of fast movement, speed and pressure,” Bradley said last week. “It seems to me that’s lost if the focus is on the money.”

‘Civil War’ Foreseen

In non-Indian South Dakota, talk of a land settlement--not to mention a huge cash pay-out--is so inflammatory that Daschle, a liberal not given to heated rhetoric, speaks of “civil war” breaking out if federal lands in the state are handed back to the Sioux.

“A lot of people look at it this way: We bought that land years ago, we’ve paid for it a couple of times and we own it,” said Joseph Cash, a white South Dakota native who directs the Institute of Indian Studies at the University of South Dakota.

“South Dakota is very fond of the Black Hills--it’s so different from the rest of the state--and there’s a general feeling that the Indians will, to put it bluntly, trash it,” Cash added. “There’s fear they will encroach on private property, and that they will screw up the tourist trade, which brings a lot of money into this state. And, one must say, there’s a certain amount of flat-out prejudice.”

Whites, said Cash, “think Stevens is another nut from the Coast sticking his nose in where it doesn’t belong and stirring up the Indian people with visions that are basically unrealistic.”

Yet while Stevens has occasionally stumbled in his campaign for Indian backing, he is quickly gathering grass-roots support, according to Tim Giago, publisher of the Lakota Times, an award-winning weekly newspaper that circulates on the Sioux reservations.

Has Strong Backing

Giago expects Stevens’ plan to prevail in an upcoming vote on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation, which with nearly 12,000 residents is the second largest of the Sioux settlements. American Horse, the Oglala chairman, says Stevens also has strong backing on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North and South Dakota, the third-largest Sioux settlement with 8,600 residents.

“It’s the poor people that are supporting Stevens,” said Eaglestaff, who is organizing backing for the Californian’s plan on the 5,200-resident Cheyenne River reservation.

He told of one old woman who stood to speak on behalf of the $3-billion proposal during a recent meeting.

“She said, ‘I don’t have nothing all these years, and I just have a very short time to live, and I’d like to see something out of this,’ ” Eaglestaff recounted. “That’s why they’re supporting Stevens.”