Stew Magnuson - The Death of Raymond Yellow Thunder

John R. Wunder, Series Editor

EDITORIAL BOARD

Durwood Ball
Peter Boag
Pekka Hmlinen
Jorge Iber
Todd M. Kerstetter
Clara Sue Kidwell
Patricia Nelson Limerick
Victoria Smith
Donald E. Worster

ALSO IN PLAINS HISTORIES

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From Syria to Seminole:
Memoir of a High Plains Merchant,
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Railwayman's Son:
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Rights in the Balance:
Free Press, Fair Trial, and the Nebraska Press Association v. Stuart,
by Mark R. Scherer

Ruling Pine Ridge:
Oglala Lakota Politics from the IRA to Wounded Knee,
by Akim D. Reinhardt

Copyright 2008 by Stew Magnuson

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including electronic storage and retrieval systems, except by explicit prior written permission of the publisher. Brief passages excerpted for review and critical purposes are excepted.

This book is typeset in Monotype Bodoni. The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997).

Designed by Lindsay Starr

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Magnuson, Stew.
The death of Raymond Yellow Thunder : and other true stories of the Nebraska-Pine Ridge border towns / Stew Magnuson ; foreword by Pekka Hamalainen.
p. cm.(Plains histories)
Summary: A nonfiction account of the Oglala of Pine Ridge, South Dakota, and the white settler towns of Sheridan County, Nebraska. Explores the repercussions of Raymond Yellow Thunder's death at the hands of four white men in 1972 and the struggle of American Indian Movement Nebraska Coordinator Bob Yellow Bird SteeleProvided by publisher.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-0-89672-718-2 (pbk : alk. paper)
1. Oglala IndiansSouth DakotaPine RidgeHistory20th century. 2. Ethnic conflictSouth DakotaPine RidgeHistory20th century. 3. Ethnic conflictNebraskaSheridan CountyHistory20th century. 4. BorderlandsSouth DakotaPine RidgeHistory20th century. 5. BorderlandsNebraskaSheridan CountyHistory20th century. 6. Pine Ridge (S.D.)Ethnic relations. 7. Sheridan County (Neb.)Ethnic relations. I. Title.
E99.O3M34 2008
978.004'975244dc22 2008014712

Page ii photo by John Vachon of Whiteclay, Nebraska, in November 1940. (Courtesy of Library of Congress.)

First paperback printing, 2010

Printed in the United States of America
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 / 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY PRESS
Box 41037, Lubbock, Texas 79409-1037 USA
800.832.4042 |

ISBN 978-0-89672-760-1 (electronic)

For my mother, Julie Strnad, and stepdad Charley

I hope that all your children and our children will treat each other like brothersand also our children of the futureas if we were children of one family.

CHIEF RED CLOUD
of the Oglalas to citizens of Nebraska, Independence Day, 1889

Whiteclay, Nebraska

Map of Pine Ridge area and Sheridan County

For most Americans, border towns represent the storied urban places that dot the desert landscapes where the United States becomes Mexico. The associations may be positive at first, but soon darker images interfere. The U.S.-Mexico border towns of American imagination are a netherworld of narcotraficantes, primal racial violence, and corrupt, callous state authorities; they are scarred places where the legacy of conquest takes on concrete form in the vast income gap that segregates the North from the South. These border towns impart mixed emotions of fear, frustration, anger, and shame, but they may not be North America's most troubled border communities. The border towns that edge Indian reservations in places like Arizona or Nebraska are plagued by many of the same problems that haunt Tijuana or Matamoros. But while U.S-Mexico border towns figure prominently in popular culture, their reservation counterparts rarely enter the picture. Although quintessential American places, they are largely forgotten.

In his book, Stew Magnuson recovers the deep, loaded, often disturbing history of these shadowy border towns by taking us into Sheridan County, Nebraska, where a host of white settlements serve, largely as alcohol depots, the Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation in South Dakota. Told through layered stories that move back and forth in time and across the physical and mental borders separating Native and white communities, The Death of Raymond Yellow Thunder is not conventional academic history. It is instead about the peopledrunks and petty criminals, Indian militants and exasperated state officials, journalists and shopkeepers, men, women, and childrenwho occupy these peculiar American places and whose lives and histories have become irrevocably entwined. Magnuson's mission is to reveal the full spectrum of human experience in the border towns' charged cross-cultural spaces, and in that he succeeds beautifully.

The cumulative effect of the numerous individual stories Magnuson tells us is devastating: they evoke a deep sense of sadness over the destitution, exploitation, fraud, racial hatred, sheer boredom, and alcohol-fueled aggression that permeate the lives of these border peoples. The book's broken temporal composition compellingly underlines its author's notion that violence in the NebraskaPine Ridge border towns is historically conditioned and structural: the past, and peoples' inability to let go of the past, fuels an endless cycle of violence between Indians and whites even as the social space between the two groups grows narrower. Although the topic is controversial and veiled by distorting layers of historical memory, Magnuson's approach is remarkably balanced. His sympathies certainly lie with the Lakotas, but he resists the all too common scholarly tendency to demonize the whites and absolve the Indians as innocent victims or freedom fighters. In these stories all the protagonists are multifaceted, flawed, and profoundly human; whether Indians or whites, they all struggleand repeatedly failto come to terms with each other's presence in their lives.

But there is more to the book; like all good stories, The Death of Raymond Yellow Thunder spins against the way it drives. Even as the peoples of Sheridan County despise, scorn, exploit, assault, and kill one another, their lives, like objects slipping out of control, become more and more inseparable. Indians and whites coexist and, against all odds, somehow get along, sharing space they really don't want to share. This countercurrent is the source of the many unexpected stories Magnuson brings forthlike that of a policeman who cares for a town drunk, an Indian, by regularly locking him up on freezing nights. I read