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The hogs of Rosebud.

Article Excerpt
ON THE ROSEBUD RESERVATION, they don't call them braids, they call them "pig tails," and the intercom at the tribal council offices belts out "Suey, suey, suey" when it's lunch time.

There were a good number of jokes about the Sicangu Lakota and their Kuukuus, their hog farm, but they do not seem so relevant any more.

The U.S. Supreme Court refused in February 2003 to get involved in the Rosebud Sioux Tribe's dispute with the Bell Farm's proposal for the third largest hog farm in the world. In a remarkable spring of justice for Native people, the Supreme Court declined to review an April 2002 appellate court decision overturning a South Dakota federal judge's order that allowed the hog farm to be expanded and operated.

An appeals panel had determined that Bell Farms, a North Dakota company that operates some of the largest industrial hog farms in the country, was without legal standing to get the 1999 federal judge's order that protected its operations.

The district court has now dismissed with prejudice the case Bell Farms had filed to protect its hogs and facilities. The hogs, it seems, will be heading out.

After four years of legal tangles, and years of struggle, the Lakota, thanks to the work of Concerned Rosebud Area Citizens (CRAC), have won, though some legal disputes remain. Closing the farm will require one heck of a clean up, when 48,000 hogs and all of their poop (the first phase of the operation) will have to be moved off the Rosebud Reservation in what is one of the first such industrial farm plant closures in history.

THE PROMISE OF WATER

The wind blows endlessly on the Rosebud. The faces of the elders, Crazy Horse, Hollow Horn Bull all look up from their resting places and see their people, the Sicangu Lakota, the Burnt Thigh people, are still there.

That is in spite of everything. The assassination of Crazy Horse on September 5, 1877 by the U.S. military accelerated the federal policies to crush the Oglala, Sicangu Minneconju, Yanktonai, Santee and other bands of Lakota and Dakota. The buffalo were obliterated, and the Black Hills...