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Book Review
| Edward Charles Valandra, Not Without Our Consent: Lakota Resistance to Termination, 1950–59, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Pp. 255. $35.00 (ISBN 0-252-02944-5).
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| American Indian tribes are separate sovereigns, pre-existing our federal system of government. As unique political entities, tribes possess inherent attributes of sovereignty, exercising control over their lands and regulating their internal social relations, separate and apart from state authority. Edward Valandra's powerful work exposes the unrelenting hostility of the state of South Dakota toward the sovereign status of the Lakota people and the state's overt opposition to both their continued existence as a separate nation within the state's territorial boundaries and to their powers of self-government. |
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Valandra begins his fascinating account of the state's unremitting efforts to impose its laws in Lakota territory in the 1950s, during the termination era of the federal government's Indian policy, and intertwines the state's political and legal motivations with larger national concerns stemming from the Cold War era and the myriad problems emerging from the segregation of black people in the South. As Valandra adeptly explains, the federal government's Indian termination policy was premised on two improbably related goals—reducing the size of the federal government after World War II and integrating black people into white communities. |
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The budgetary goal was ill-conceived and dreadfully implemented. In the years following their confinement onto reservations and the subsequent loss of additional power and lands through the federal government's allotment policy, Indian people became desperately poor and demoralized and entirely dependent on the federal government for all means of subsistence. Termination of the trust relationship was a means to relieve the federal government of its financial obligations to Indian people and to "free" them from federal domination and dependency. Once terminated, tribes would be integrated into the Euroamerican community and subject to state authority as any other citizen. |
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The more complex goal of integration evolved around two prevalent socio-economic issues, one of ending the destructive consequences of racial segregation of black people, and another of scorning any political ideology related to Communism. The benefits of integration for black people meant equal treatment under the law. Termination of the federal-tribal trust relationship with tribes fit nicely into this goal by erasing the legal and political lines dividing Indian people from their white neighbors. Moreover, integration through termination would liberate tribes from their communal way of life. For Indian people integration meant assimilation and acculturation into American society—the antipathy of self-determination. In effect, termination wrought radical changes to tribes whose recognition was withdrawn and lands converted into private ownership, and who became subject to state authority when state laws were extended onto their reservations. |
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Valandra does a fine job of laying out these policy rationales as the main premise of his work: the resistance of the Lakota to the state's terminationist policies, which Valandra describes as "Euroamerican ethnicide" and the "final Euroamerican solution to the Indian Problem." These strident words, no doubt derived from Valandra's own experience as a Lakota and his tenure as a political leader of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, tilt the tone of the book at times to one of marked colonial extremism. One distinction to be noted is his use of the word "termination" as a prerogative of the state government. Only the federal government has authority to alter tribal status. While South Dakota has no such authority, it could have acquired jurisdiction over tribal lands under federal law, thereby altering its own legal relationship to the Lakota people and territory, had it only followed the requisite measures under state law. |
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Herein lies Valandra's best efforts. He carefully and thoroughly chronicles the state's misdeeds and ill-motives at all levels of government in its continuously foiled attempts to acquire authority over Lakota lands, revealing an appalling history of avarice, self-dealing, and racism. Valandra methodically illustrates not only how the state repeatedly failed in the courts and legislature, but more importantly, why it failed on legal, economic, and moral bases. For one, the state persisted on advancing a constrained interpretation of the state constitution that clearly disclaimed jurisdiction over Indian lands. For another, it stubbornly insisted on asserting its laws on tribal lands without bearing any financial responsibility for the consequences of such actions. Ultimately, the state fell short because it fundamentally failed to appreciate the strength of the Lakota's sovereignty, their tenacious ties to their lands, and their ability to mobilize politically to defend their legal rights. Most grievous was the state's continual unwillingness to engage in any meaningful dialogue with the Lakota. |
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Not Without Our Consent is great historical sociology and an important contribution to the historical-legal scholarship in the field of American Indian history. The real value of Valandra's work of recovering and digesting data from the past is its ability to inform the present and future actions of policymakers of all three sovereigns, lest they repeat the same costly and painful mistakes of the past. |
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| Patrice H. Kunesh
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| University of South Dakota |
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