Darkest Night : Pine Ridge to Bombing Range (Part 2)

Episode 4 Part 2 starts with a discussion of the 1883 Code of Indian Offenses that was introduced in Episode 3. Clinton writes, “[It] was not an early criminal code for Indian Reservations…but, rather, the clearest evidence of a deliberate federal policy of ethnocide - the deliberate extermination of another culture.”

We then move on to the issue of land, namely some of the ways that Lakota territory continued to be whittled away after the creation of the Pine Ridge Reservation in its current form. The next segment turns to the so-called “Indian New Deal” which was a response to the 1928 Meriam Report that made clear that the U.S. government’s approach to its indigenous people - namely allotment and assimilation - was failing. The resulting Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 and its impact until the present-day is discussed.

Lastly, this part ends with a look at a geographical area known to most Lakota simply as “The Bombing Range,” a 341,726 acre portion of the Reservation that was seized by the Department of the Army during World War II.