Nominee Kristi Noem Brings a Bad Backstory with Her State’s Tribes to Homeland Security
The South Dakota governor, whose killing of a wayward hunting dog cost her the nomination as Trump’s VP, is banned from all her state’s reservations — for good reason.
The dog shooting came to light when Noem told the bloody tale proudly in her campaign autobiography No Going Back [“What John Muir Could Teach Kristi Noem About Dealing with Bad Dogs”]. At least this cringe-worthy incident did in fact happen. The book also boasts that she met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and turned down a requested meeting with French president Emmanuel Macron. Neither occurred.
Dog killing and a lack of truthfulness, however, aren’t what drove South Dakota’s nine tribes to tell Noem to stay away. It’s her lack of respect for tribal sovereignty and her willingness to malign tribal leaders and citizens for her own political benefit.
Even before the banning, Noem was held in low repute among Native South Dakotans. She supported both the hated Keystone XL pipeline and severe penalties for those who protested against it, fired off indignant letters to then-President Trump about tribal checkpoints during the Covid-19 pandemic, and advocated for dropping Native American history from social studies educational standards.
Things only got worse this past January when Noem addressed a joint session of the state legislature. She alleged that Mexican drug cartels were active on the Pine Ridge Reservation and “a gang called the the Ghost Dancers are [sic] affiliated with these cartels.” Gangs like the Ghost Dancers “poison our people and traffic women and children into sex slavery,” she warned, and must be stopped. She was, of course, echoing then-candidate Trump’s slur on migrants as “poisoning the blood of our nation.”
Oglala Sioux Tribal Treasurer Cora White Horse did corroborate the existence of the Ghost Dancers. But, she made clear, they’re not a cartel gang but “a collective of motorcyclists who attend memorials.” That clarification didn’t stop Noem from continuing to claim the connection to the cartels, though.
Things got worse in March when she appeared uninvited and unannounced at the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe’s quarterly Pe’ Sla meeting in Rapid City, doubled-down on claims of cartels running amok on the reservations, and alleged that tribal leaders were on the drug money take.
Then Noem headed to Texas, where she had sent units of the South Dakota National Guard to help their Texas counterparts close gaps in the border wall. Although South Dakota is more than 1,100 miles from the closest point on the southern border, Noem was clear on why her state wanted to pitch in:
“Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’s radical open border policies have failed the American people and turned even South Dakota into a border state. The cartels’ criminal activity has made all of our communities dangerous, especially tribal reservations where I have no jurisdiction."
In effect, Noem was laying the rising drug problem in South Dakota at the feet of the state’s tribes.
Angered by her blaming, all nine tribes — Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, Yankton Sioux, Standing Rock Sioux, Crow Creek Sioux, Rosebud, Cheyenne River Sioux, Oglala Sioux, Lower Brule Sioux, and Flandreau Santee Sioux — voted to bar Noem from their reservations. As a result she cannot enter some 20% of South Dakota’s land area.
“We do not have cartels on the reservations,” Crow Creek Sioux Tribe Chairman [https://www.crowcreeksiouxtribe.org/] Peter Lengkeek made clear following his tribe’s vote to ban Noem:
“We have cartel products, like guns and drugs. But they pass over state highways getting to the reservation. So, putting us all together like that and saying that all tribes are involved in this really shows the ignorance of the governor’s office.”
Not that Noem cared. She was passed over for JD Vance in the contest for the GOP vice presidential nomination, far more because of her dog killing and self-serving fictions about Kim Jon Un and Emmanuel Macron than the tribes’ opposition. But her posturing about spreading migrant poison, claiming long-distance border-state status, and naming the tribes as the implicit enemy within positioned her well for appointment as Homeland Security secretary under the xenophobic Trump.
When he tapped her for the post, Noem eagerly cast herself as a well-qualified veteran in the struggle:
“This border crisis has impacted us here in South Dakota, too. It has driven up crime in communities across the country as drugs and human trafficking have increased because of the willful inaction by the current administration. In South Dakota, this has hurt us the most on our tribal reservations…. Everything that I do will be focused on making America SAFE again, and that will make South Dakota safer, as well.”
As of this post, the nine South Dakota tribes remain unimpressed, and Noem is still banned. When she trades Pierre for Washington, DC, she’ll be celebrating remaking herself in the image of the authoritarian wannabe she’ll be working for.
No CAST OUT OF EDEN next week
Some folks still call the holiday Thanksgiving, even though it didn’t begin in the generous and harmonious way the standard story portrays. If you’d like to know more about the untold, even genocidal reality behind Thanksgiving, check out this excellent article from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.
Cast out of Eden featured on NPR affiliate
This past Tuesday, Chris Cherniak of “This Green Earth” on Park City, Utah’s KPCW interviewed me about the book. You can listen here (19:40).