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Nebraska
Press Series 1
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"They Treated Us Just Like Indians:"
The Worlds of Bennett County, South Dakota
Paula L. Wagoner, Cloth: 2002,
xvi, 156, CIP.LC 2002017963 ISBN : 0-8032-4800-8
Studies in the Anthropology of North American
Indians Series
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On a typical day in Bennett County,
South Dakota, farmers and ranchers work their fields
and tend animals, merchants order inventory and stock
shelves, teachers plan and teach classes, health workers
aid the infirm in the county hospital or clinic, and
women make quilts and heirlooms for their families or
the county fair. Life is usually unhurried, with time
for chatting with neighbors and catching up on gossip.
But Bennett County is far from typical.
Nearly a century ago the county was
carved out of Pine Ridge Reservation and opened to white
settlers. Today Bennett County sits awkwardly between
the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Sioux Reservations, with
nearly one-third of its land classified as "Indian
Country" and the rest considered by many Pine Ridge
Lakotas to still belong to the reservation. The county
is home to a dynamic population, divided by the residents
into three groups—"whites," "fullbloods,"
and "mixedbloods." Tensions between the three
groups lurk amid the quiet harmony of Bennett County's
everyday rural life and emerge in moments of community
crisis.
In a moving account, anthropologist
Paula L. Wagoner tells the story of Bennett County,
using snapshots of community events and crises, past
and present, to reveal the complexity of race relations
and identities there. A homecoming weekend at Bennett
County High School becomes a flashpoint for controversy
because of the differences of meaning ascribed by the
county's three identity groups to the school's team
name—the Warriors. At another time, the shooting
of a Lakota man by a local non-Indian rancher and the
volatile wake that follows demonstrate the impulse to
racialize disputes that lies just beneath the surface
of everyday life.
Yet such very real problems of identity
have not completely overwhelmed Bennett County. Wagoner
also shows that despite their differences, residents
have managed to find common ground as a region of "diverse
insiders" who share an economic dependency on federal
funds, distrust outsiders, and, above all, deeply love
their land.
Paula L. Wagoner is an assistant professor
of anthropology at Juniata College.
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