The Black Hills Are Not for Sale

I'm guessing that this incident took place in 1982, which means I was thirty-years old, a teacher for eight years, and in my fifth year at John F. Kennedy High School in the Bronx. The voice of Assistant Principal Irv Goldberg came over the PA, asking all Native American students to report immediately to his office. Kennedy was known as a multinational school. We had African American students, African Caribbean students, and African students. We had Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Ecuadorans. We had Chinese, Koreans, and Vietnamese. We had Italians, Albanians, Irish, and Russians. Lots of Jewish Americans. Our students spoke forty languages. We had a Korean club and a Korean Christian Club. But we were not known for Native Americans. And in any case, why would Irv suddenly need the Native American kids in his office in the middle of the day.

My curiosity overcame me. Despite the fact that I was in the front of my classroom, actively teaching a class, I stuck my head out the door, spotted my colleague Kenny Kaplan, and asked him to cover me while I went downstairs to see what this was about. Irv seemed to know why I was there when I walked in. He explained that our annual ethnic survey -- a federal requirement -- had revealed the presence of five Native American teens. Now the Department of Education and the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington wanted to know how we were supporting them. Irv was convinced that they didn't exist. He was convinced that they had appeared on the survey because some teachers made a mistake on the forms or added them in as another way of showing how they resented doing this paper work.

I wasn't so sure. In those days Kennedy had six thousand students. That is not a typo. I worked in a high school with six thousand students. When you get to those numbers even tiny percentages show up as actual living teenagers. Moreover, it it easy to see the ethnicities you expect to see. Ask Native people who move to New York how they become invisible, becoming Latinos or Asians in the eyes of the people in the street. They see what they expect. We once had a student teacher from New Jersey who complained of discomfort being the only white person in the classroom. Somehow he missed the five, tall, blonde Irish boys in the back row. He saw what he expected. Moreover, I had already been surprised a few years before to discover that a girl who I thought of as African American was also a White Mountain Apache.

So Irv and I waited: he to phone Washington and say it was a mistake, me to see what would happen next. Over the next few minutes the indigenous students of Kennedy arrived; not five of them, seventeen.

What did Mr. Goldberg want? they asked.

I wondered how he would answer this.

Irv started explaining about the Black Hills. If you are under sixty-years old now you may not have heard about United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, 448 U.S. 371 (1980).  It has now been almost forty years since that decision and it is not much remembered outside of South Dakota, but it was a semi big deal back then. The Supreme Court ruled that Congress had illegally seized the Black Hills from the Lakota tribes a hundred years before, in blatant violation of the terms of their treaty. The Black Hills are a natural wonder of water and trees in the arid plains with the added bonus of the Homestake Gold Mine which produced 43 million ounces of gold, or $57 billion dollars. They are holy ground for the Lakota (and the Cheyenne and Arapaho and others) for reasons I will not explore here. The Supreme Court valued the land at $17 million at the time of its seizure. They calculated the interest for 100 years at 5% and awarded over $100 million to the plaintiffs... who promptly refused to accept the money, saying "The Black Hills are not for sale." 

So Assistant Principal Goldberg took down the name and tribal affiliation of every student in his office. I remember Mohawks and Senecas, Navajos and Apaches, two Lakota, one Cherokee, but my memory may be shaky. He explained that they needed to register their own votes on this question: land or money. They took this very seriously. Nobody questioned why the opinion of a Mohawk from New York was required about a land case in South Dakota. One by one they said: our land is not for sale. The sole exception was an 11th-grade girl, the Cherokee. Irv said thanks and they left.

He and I began discussing the significance of what we had just seen and heard but we didn't get far because we were disturbed by angry teenagers in the hall. "How could you do that?" "What did your grandparents teach you?" We waited quietly, trying to hear.

A few moments later they all came back in, looking somber. The Cherokee girl asked if she could change her vote. Irv said he hadn't phoned it in yet. She told him the land was more important than the money.

It is two generations later, now, and I hear that there are young Lakota who are reconsidering this question. The value of the award passed a billion dollars in 2011. The Lakota are far from the major metropolitan areas and haven't cashed in on the casino boom. Their reservations are among the poorest places in America.  But every time I think about the Black Hills I remember those teens in the Bronx - also among the poorest places in America - who said "Our land is not for sale."