INDIANS: Uprising

In the annals of the Sioux Indian nation, few men equaled the leadership of Sitting Bull, and he—along with the Sioux glory—has been dead for 69 years. But last week a new leader was writing a fresh chapter in the dusty pages of Who’s Sioux. He is college-trained Anthony Rivers, 40, a slender, hatchet-faced Indian, who is aggressively helping his long impoverished people into a new era of self-respect. His method is one that might have made even fierce old Sitting Bull stand and cheer: the Sioux are going into business in a big way and taking the land back from the white people—and they are doing it legally and peacefully.

For years, the hapless 3,300 Indian residents of the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation lived in hovels along the river bottoms of the Missouri, Moreau and Cheyenne in South Dakota, while white cattlemen grazed their beef herds on 900,000 acres that they leased from the Indians for as little as 10 ¢an acre (top rental today: 33¢). When the Federal Government was building the Oahe Dam on the Missouri River in 1954, the U.S. set aside about $10.5 million for rehabilitation and reimbursement to the people on the flooded land. The Tribal Council, first under Chairman Frank Ducheneaux, and since last year under Chairman Rivers, then began canceling the white ranchers’ leases, turning over 4,200 acres and 100 head of cattle apiece to willing Indian families on a rent and loan basis.

By last week Rivers and his people had reclaimed about 600,000 acres on their own, and drawing on their new-found sense of purpose, had taken over a multimillion-dollar school-dormitory-hospital-apartment complex (built with U.S. funds), as well as a healthy scattering of small businesses. The retreating white ranchers are bitter, and some are downright skeptical that the Indians can make a living on a really businesslike basis. But the whites began to feel like Custer when the tribe bought up (for $100,000) the local telephone company that serves the little towns of Eagle Butte. Dupree and Isabel, went to work wiring up a $145,000 modernization program for the system.