PORCUPINE, N.D. — “When the Porcupine District Council meets, things
happen,” declared Mary Louise Defender-Wilson, Dakota/Hidatsa, at a recent
gathering of the group, which administers one of the Standing Rock Sioux
Reservation’s eight districts.

During the last few years, the four-member council and a three-member
planning commission, of which Defender-Wilson is a member, have purchased a
nearly 16,000-acre ranch that had passed out of Indian hands decades ago,
have positioned their buffalo and cattle programs for expansion, and are
building a gymnasium with a combination of foundation, local and federal
funds. Each is a profit center — generating sales or rental income — and
a way to create employment.

Going forward, the agenda includes expanding irrigated areas to produce
more alfalfa for sale and bidding on the linens contract for a tribal
casino hotel. “The point is developing jobs in the community,” explained
Council Chairman Darrel Iron Shield, Dakota.

“They’re working on us becoming self-sufficient,” said Arlene Murphy, a
Dakota elder and one of the district’s approximately 300 Native residents.
“I’ll always back them up.”

Self-sufficiency is key, said Vice Chairman Chastity Looking Horse, Lakota.
“Big changes to the world economy are coming,” she said, “and we need to be
prepared.”

Porcupine’s officials are a diverse group, ranging in age from the
31-year-old treasurer, Kim Lawrence, Lakota, who has nursing and business
degrees; to Defender-Wilson, a famed storyteller and author who’s 75.
Looking Horse and planning commission member Koreen Iron Shield, Dakota,
also have business degrees, and Iron Shield is community health
representative. Planning Commissioner Dennis Paint, Dakota/Lakota, has a
degree in environmental sciences.

The diversity means a range of viewpoints, and sometimes sparks fly. Iron
Shield, a soft-spoken man who votes on motions only in cases of ties,
continually works to unite the group. “It’s been a process of learning to
cooperate, to discuss things thoroughly, to offer opinions, but never to
hold a grudge,” he said.

In fact, the varied backgrounds have turned out to be an advantage because
the challenges Porcupine faces are complex. Long-term economic isolation
has meant, for example, that many elders are impoverished, having spent
their working lives in jobs that didn’t offer Social Security or pension
benefits. Housing that’s unsuited to the extreme weather of the Plains and
nutrition-poor commodity foods have created health problems. And pervasive
racism has resulted in such phenomena as teen suicides.

As a result, the district must complement economic ventures with social
projects that include wholesome meals in the community center, an elders
program with get-togethers ranging from bingo nights to quilting sessions
and a just-opened youth center supervised by Looking Horse in nearby
Selfridge (along with Porcupine, one of the district’s two villages).

“We’re building a community, not just a collection of people whose names
came up on a housing list,” said Defender-Wilson.

Stewardship of the natural world is another concern. This past spring,
Porcupine officials set aside an 85-acre botanical sanctuary for native
medicinal plants; and this fall, to prevent damage to the land, the group
will begin requiring hunters to stalk prey on foot, rather than via ATVs or
other vehicles. Defender-Wilson called the land “our major asset.”

Safeguarding and enhancing that asset — rolling mixed-grass prairie,
rock-faced bluffs and cottonwood groves — is not always easy. In 2004, to
make way for new housing in Porcupine village, the tribe plowed under 3,899
fruit trees the district had planted in 2000 and 2001. “They were on the
north and west side of town, so they were a windbreak as well as a food
source,” said Lawrence. The Standing Rock Housing Authority did not respond
to requests for a comment.

Unbowed, the district is developing a reforestation plan with the America
the Beautiful program. But then, Lakota/Dakota people have long practiced
overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles. The economy Porcupine
residents are developing is their people’s third in the last century and a
half.

Their buffalo economy of times past is, of course, legendary. However,
during the reservation era, when most buffalo had been exterminated, the
people moved into hamlets along the Missouri River and its tributaries —
diversifying their former lifeways by taking advantage of the rich
resources of the riparian areas. In the fertile, tree-sheltered swaths,
they hunted deer and small game, fished, planted gardens, gathered culinary
and healing plants, raised cattle and other farm animals and availed
themselves of driftwood and fallen timber for heating, cooking and
building.

Their new economy was a great success, said Paint. In today’s parlance, it
would be termed “sustainable,” since it fit perfectly with existing
resources. In his 1994 book, “Killing Custer,” the late Blackfeet author
James Welsh wrote that Sitting Bull, the 19th century leader who settled at
Standing Rock, became an accomplished farmer.

That livelihood continued until the mid-20th century, when dams built along
the Missouri by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers inundated the bottomlands.
Ostensibly constructed to produce hydroelectric power and control flooding,
the giant earthworks of the Pick-Sloan Project were also immense
pork-barrel schemes that helped give the Corps its reputation as “the most
lawless agency in American history” — as Harold Ickes, secretary of the
Interior under Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt, described it.

On seven Sioux reservations in Nebraska, South Dakota and North Dakota, the
closing of the dams’ gates created lakes that swept away thriving villages
and forced some 900 families onto the windswept prairie. Once
self-sufficient, they were suddenly destitute and homeless. “They expected
us to farm miles from water,” recalled Sioux elder Philip Lane in an
interview in 2000. Lane lived with his family on the Standing Rock and
Yankton reservations in the early 1900s. “In any case, the land is all
buffalo pasture. It was never meant to be broken up.”

Descendants of those families are still rebuilding. In repairing historical
problems and anticipating future ones, Porcupine District’s leadership
relies on values their ancestors held dear.

“We’re looking years down the road,” said Iron Shield. “What we’re building
will be carried on by future generations. It’s for the children.”