Ruling Pine Ridge: Oglala Lakota Politics from the IRA to Wounded Knee

Incorporating previously overlooked materials, including tribal council records, oral histories, and reservation newspapers, Ruling Pine Ridge explores the political history of South Dakota's Oglala Lakota reservation during the mid-twentieth century. Akim D. Reinhardt examines the reservation's transition from the direct colonialism of the pre-1934 era to the indirect colonial policies of the controversial Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) and the advent of the tribal council governing system still in place today on Pine Ridge and on many other reservations. Reinhardt demonstrates how conflicting political values foregrounded by the new governing format led to an aggravation of social divisions on the reservation and eventually came to a head in 1973 with the occupation and siege of Wounded Knee. The siege is best understood, he claims, not as a political stunt of the American Indian Movement (AIM) but as a spontaneous, grassroots protest at least forty years in the making.

Author: Akim D. Reinhardt
Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
Published: 03/15/2009
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 0.90d
ISBN13: 9780896726567
ISBN10: 0896726568
BISAC Categories:
- History | Indigenous Peoples in the Americas
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | American | Native American Studies
- History | United States | State & Local | West (AK, CA, CO, HI, ID, MT

About the Author
Akim D. Reinhardt is an associate professor of History at Towson University in Maryland. His work has also appeared in American Indian Quarterly, the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, and La Pensee."