WASHINGTON —
“No wonder those four great Americans seem so sad as they look down from Mount Rushmore,” Denver Post columnist Roscoe Fleming in 1962. “For they see incongruous and continuing racism.”
In South Dakota at that time, it wasn’t unusual to see restaurant and shop signs reading, “No Indians Allowed.”
Today, the signs have come down, but VOA has heard from dozens of Native Americans in South Dakota who say that racism permeates their lives and is especially prevalent in the state’s second-largest city, Rapid City.
It was there, as VOA earlier , that Gateway Grand Hotel owner Connie Uhre in March announced she would no longer allow Native Americans on the property after a shooting took place there; later, she turned away two members of the Indian-led, nonprofit NDN Collective who tried to book a room at her hotel.
Sunny Red Bear, NDN Collective director of racial equity, is one of the two denied services. , the name a shortening of “Indian,” is an indigenous-led organization in Rapid City that works to empower Native peoples.
“Rapid City, like many places in the U.S., has a long history of racism that many white people are committed to upholding on both a systemic and interpersonal level, whether they know it or not,” she said. “People in positions of power here in Rapid City, by not stating that systemic racism exists in Rapid City, continue to minimize the lived experiences of Native people and people of color here in the community.”
Janet Davies, the daughter of a Lakota mother and a white father, described growing up in a city where she said she was constantly shamed.
“When I was in seventh grade, there was a school dance,” she said. “And this nice boy asked me to go with him. But then later on he said to me, ‘I can't go with you because I found out you have Indian blood. You’re a sq---w.’”
She used an ethnic and sexual slur for Indigenous women.
In April, during a stay in a Rapid City hospital, Oglala Lakota rights advocate Hermus Bettelyoun posted on Facebook, “I now have a room to myself here. My [white] roommate found out my skin wasn’t the right color tint for him. He asked the doctor if they could move me because he didn’t want to ‘breath the same air’ as [me].”
Native American residents of the city complain of being tailed like thieves in local businesses, being turned down for jobs and enduring taunts to “go back to the reservation.”
“I've talked to multiple mothers and fathers whose children are experiencing racism in schools by getting their hair cut by other students, by being called “Prairie N-word,” Red Bear said.
Many expressed conviction that the state government is racist.
In April, South Dakota Governor Kristie Noem signed an executive order banning the teaching of critical race theory in the state’s primary school system. CRT is an academic theory that states racism isn’t just the product of individual bias or prejudice but is embedded in the nation’s legal systems and policies.
“I think her message to us is that we don't matter and that the Native experience in South Dakota doesn't matter,” South Dakota Democratic State Sen. Troy Heinert, a Sicangu Lakota citizen from the Rosebud Reservation, told in April.
Red Bear said she views the move as a continuation of historic assimilation policies.
“The lack of education and the lack of conversations around the history of what has happened to Indigenous people are perpetuating crazy, harmful … stereotypes,” Red Bear said.
“I'm fifth-generation Rapid City,” said J.B., who asked VOA to withhold his name out of fear of repercussion. “Up until the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis, I was just another white guy. But when that killing happened, that triggered something in my head. I can tell you Rapid City is on the front lines of a lot of racism right now. It’s called Racist City for a reason.”
Rapid City Mayor Steve Allender admits there is a huge divide between “some of the Native American population here and non-native citizens.”
“If you look back in history and even currently, racism is in all of the continents,” he told VOA. “There's nothing different or special about Rapid City when it comes to the flaws of humanity.”
“What I think must be pointed out,” he continued, “is that in Rapid City, this takes center stage in the news cycle, whereas there are other parts of the country where this type of stuff [goes on] and the reaction is nowhere near this.”
South Dakota has a history of “tumultuous race relations” dating back to early white settlement, according to a by the South Dakota advisory committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.