Elizabeth Cook-Lynn: Changes comes reluctantly on the Northern Plains

Friday, May 31, 2019  

It is not easy to change the dynamics of centuries!! Yet, this is why we write history, to scrutinize and analyze what happens because, we are told,   to know history is supposed to change everything.

Thinking about the helplessness often felt when trying to change the realities of an Indian-White   community  like ours as I was assisting in organizing a 20th century art/history project  called First Nations Sculpture Garden, Inc.,  a couple of years ago, (W. Blvd., Rapid City, South Dakota).  I realized that change comes reluctantly.

IT HAPPENED AGAIN just recently as an annual commemoration was upon us, Memorial Day, 2019.  The consequences of war, racial conflict, power, greed, a wounded governing policy tells us, unfortunately, no one really tells the whole story. 

Sometimes it all seems so benign. On Memorial Day the historic home of Dr. Valentine Trant McGillycuddy was opened to the city public following the struggle of the Pennington County Historical Society to restore the place to its “original glory.”  The event was touted in the local media as a grand occasion. The setting for this story is huge, a place where white-man invaders a couple of centuries ago stole “everything that is” from Indigenous peoples called The Sioux Nation. 

 The now-restored McGillicuddy house was built in 1887 (two years before South Dakota Statehood).  The builder and owner died in 1939 and is thought of as a major historic figure, a successful businessman, Indian Agent and Dean of the School of Mines.  

His biographers say he was called “Wasicu Wakan” (holy white man) by his implacable enemy, Chief Red Cloud of Pine Ridge. For those who know the Lakota language spoken by the chieftain, Wasicus a derogatory name describing a vulgar mistrust worthy person, “a fat taker.” If it is true that Red Cloud really gave him that title, traditional speakers wonder what nuance the old chief was signaling.   (The accurate transcription for “white man” is wichasa ska.”)   

About history, and the telling of it, the politics and war of McGillicuddy’s time is serious business. We should not depend upon nuance, but neither should we kid ourselves.  Life was not pleasant during this takeover time.  

When McGillicuddy came to the Territory, Indians were not allowed in the cities of the west, often arrested, jailed and treated with contempt. Neither were the positions of importance that McGillicuddy took on the reserved lands treated with respect.

Agents, assigned as police informants by the US government, were unwelcome. Lakota feared McGillicuddy both as a US government agent as well as a surgeon. They had their own ways, and their own medical professionals, trained for thousands of years to care for the people. This reality meant that the relationship so carefully nurtured by later historians saying that McGillicuddy was a “friend of Crazy Horse,” and spoke his language, denies the unrest and danger ahead. Crazy Horse was assassinated during McGillicuddy’s tenure.

The agent held many positions, but is often described by contemporary native historians as “the commander of a concentration camp.” He traveled with the many military expeditions, especially the 1876 expedition led by the notorious Indian killer and hater, General W. Crook. McGillicuddy’s first wife was the daughter of a “trader” at Pine Ridge, most of those historical figures known as notorious thieves.  

McGillicuddy served the expeditions of the military forces and was one of the dozens of agents throughout the west often thought of by Indians as significant cogs in a despised colonial regime.  He illegally mapped the region after the Treaty of Fort Laramie was signed in 1868, (when that was supposedly against treaty law), and he worked tirelessly with census takers as well as those who would come later to initiate The Dawes Act, one of the historical thefts of millions of acres of Indian land legalized through the perfidy of an all-white US Congress. He assisted in making appointments with the War Department, and was a resolute collaborator of the occupying army, not a “friend of the Indian” as he is often described by biased historians.  

This essay, a brief historical reflection, is meant to be an essential conversation long ignored by our community   because historical figures, both Indian and White often serve as wingmen for the alibis of history, and it does no good to engage in staying quiet in order to put ourselves out there for some kind of purity tests. Our lives as Indians and Whites in the Northern Plains reflect a rugged, unjust history of enforced death to tribal life, and the subsequent colonization of a struggling sovereign indigenous nation. 

Contact Elizabeth Cook-Lynn at ecooklynn@gmail.com

Copyright permission Native Sun News Today