This article is part of ICT’s recognition of Black History Month.
Shirley Sneve
ICT
Lynn “Smokey” Hart was the only African-American/Native person growing up in Chancellor, South Dakota, about a half-hour west of Sioux Falls near the Minnesota border.
In fact, he’d hadn’t seen another Black person until he journeyed to the Washington, D.C., area as a 10-year old.
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“That was the first time I’d ever seen Black people,” he said. “I started counting Black people going up Pennsylvania Avenue, and I … got to about 200, and I quit.
“I call myself a flake of pepper in a salt shaker.”
His multicultural heritage has followed him throughout his life. He worked as a ranch hand and became well-known on the rodeo circuit, riding bulls with the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association, the All Indian Rodeo Cowboys Association and the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo. He became a rodeo clown after getting injured.
Now 65, he’s been inducted into the Hall of Fame for the National Multicultural Western Heritage Museum, formerly the National Cowboys of Color Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, in 2021 and he designed the national logo for the Native American Women Warriors organization.
He is an activist for human and civil rights in South Dakota, where he helped win designation of two legal holidays in the state – the second Monday in October as Native Americans Day and the third Monday in January as Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
“I have tried to tell everybody – education creates reconciliation, because if I don’t know about you and you don’t know about me, how are we ever going to get along in the first place?” he told ICT. “We need to come together once again, not apart, and sit down and listen to each other.”
‘Anybody can do that’
Hart’s mother was a citizen of the Yankton Nakota Nation, and she met his African-American father at Ellsworth Air Force Base in Rapid City, South Dakota.
He was born Dec. 11, 1960, but was taken into foster care as an infant by a German woman in South Dakota. His foster family didn’t make much of his race in the small farming community where he lived for his first decade. He fit in just like everybody else.
When his foster mother died, he was placed in another foster home in Maryland, then adopted by the Hart family in Washington, D.C. They soon moved to Watertown, South Dakota.
He said he felt like a chameleon, since he got along well with everybody. His outgoing personality set him up for an interesting journey to his current home – operating a ranch on the Flandreau Santee Dakota reservation just north of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He married Helen Gilbert, an enrolled member of that tribe, 16 years ago.
His rodeo career had its beginnings in a bar in Yuma, Arizona.
“I was in the Marine Corps stationed in Yuma, Arizona, and I went to a bar one night, and there are these cowboys standing in the corner,” Hart said.
He found out they were bull riders.
“I said, ‘Anybody can do that,’” he said. “Being raised in Chancellor there was this old bull I used to ride all the time. His name was Ferdinand. They used to put me on this bull, and I’d ride around as a little kid, when I was six or seven. The next thing I knew, they got me a bull rope and hat and all this stuff, and stuck me on my first bull down in Tucson, Arizona, and I rode him.”
It didn’t end well.
“The bull stepped on me and broke my ribs, and punctured my lung,” he said. “They taught me how to ride it, but they never taught me how to get off.”
He went on to the bull riding circuit, and played York during the Lewis and Clark Expedition bicentennial.
“I loved that journey, because it was a reconciliation between Lewis and Clark and the American Indians, all the tribes that they met,” Hart said.
He also toured with the all-Black rodeo association, the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo, named for the groundbreaking bulldogger.
Awards and recognition
Hart took his first steps into politics in 1990.
Then-South Dakota Gov. George Mickelson declared 1990 as the Year of Reconciliation following the state’s centennial in 1989, but Hart worked to take the state one level higher in its reconciliation efforts. He worked with state Rep. Pat Kane, who introduced a bill to recognize the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.
Kane’s bill didn’t seem to have a chance. Yet Hart went to the Legislature to talk about it. Hart sat at a table in the old version of room 412 and told a difficult truth to the line of lawmakers on the House State Affairs Committee.
Some cowboys on the rodeo circuit, he said, wouldn’t come to South Dakota because they considered the state racist.
That’s when some Republicans came up with a different idea. They introduced HB 1308 with the prime sponsor being the House Republican leader, state Rep. Jerry Lammers of Madison.
His bill designated the second Monday of October as Native Americans’ Day and established the third Monday of January as Martin Luther King Jr. Day – both official holidays for South Dakota. The bill passed.
King’s widow later honored Hart for his courage. On Jan. 13, 1992, Coretta Scott King, music legend Stevie Wonder and then-FBI Director William Sessions presented Hart with the National Making of King Holiday Award in Washington, D.C.
Pete Catches Sr., an Oglala Lakota medicine man, also received the award.
“ A lot of people don’t know his story, that he and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were best friends,” Hart said. “Pete adopted him as his brother.”
Looking ahead
Hart continues to be involved in politics at the tribal, state and national levels, and he looks to the words and actions of Martin Luther King Jr. for inspiration.
“I want to be helpful,” he said. “Dr. King spoke so eloquently about being one. You’re rich, you’re poor – no, let’s just help each other out. And then that’s where we’re at right now. That’s what I want to do, is help.”
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