South Dakota tribe bans governor from reservation over US border comments
A South Dakota tribe has banned the state’s Republican governor, Kristi Noem, from one of the US’s largest reservations after she spoke this week about wanting to send razor wire and security personnel to Texas to help deter immigration at the southern border with Mexico.
The Oglala Sioux tribe president said Noem’s ban from the Pine Ridge reservation resulted from the fact that many arriving at the US border with Mexico are Indigenous people from places like El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico, who come “in search of jobs and a better life”.
Noem had also said drug cartels were infiltrating the state’s reservations shortly before the ban was announced.
“Due to the safety of the Oyate, effective immediately, you are hereby Banished from the homelands of the Oglala Sioux Tribe!” Star Comes Out said in a Friday statement addressed to Noem. “Oyate” is a word for people or nation.
Star Comes Out accused Noem of trying to use the border issue to help get Donald Trump a second presidency and boost her chances of becoming his running mate.
He said those at border “don’t need to be put in cages, separated from their children like during the Trump Administration, or be cut up by razor wire furnished by, of all places, South Dakota”.
Star Comes Out also addressed Noem’s remarks in the speech to lawmakers on Wednesday in which she said a gang calling itself the Ghost Dancers was murdering people on the Pine Ridge reservation and was affiliated with border-crossing cartels that use South Dakota reservations to spread drugs throughout the midwest.
Star Comes Out said he took deep offense at her reference, saying it “was used with blatant disrespect and is insulting to our Oyate”. He said the Ghost Dance is one of the Oglala Sioux’s “most sacred ceremonies”.
He added that the tribe was a sovereign nation and does not belong to the state of South Dakota.
Noem responded on Saturday in a statement, saying, “It is unfortunate that President (Star) Comes Out chose to bring politics into a discussion regarding the effects of our federal government’s failure to enforce federal laws at the southern border and on tribal lands. My focus continues to be on working together to solve those problems.
“As I told bipartisan Native American legislators earlier this week, ‘I am not the one with a stiff arm, here. You can’t build relationships if you don’t spend time together,’” she added. “I stand ready to work with any of our state’s Native American tribes to build such a relationship.”
In November, Star Comes Out declared a state of emergency on the Pine Ridge reservation due to increasing crime. A judge ruled last year that the federal government has a treaty duty to support law enforcement on the reservation, but he declined to rule on the funding level the tribe sought.
Noem has deployed national guard troops to the Mexican border three times, as have some other Republican governors.
In 2021 she drew criticism for accepting a $1m donation from a Republican donor to help cover the cost of a two-month deployment of 48 troops there.