History Through Listeners' Eyes - Wyoming Public Media's Traveling Photo Exhibit
Speaker Series - From Bison to Beeves:
Cattle Ranching on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation 1868-1920
By Dr. Jeffrey Means, UW History Department Chair
At the Alice Hardie Stevens Center in Laramie, Wyoming
March 11th at 2:00 pm - Refreshments will be served.
This project is funded in part by a Wyoming State Parks and
Cultural Resources Semiquincentennial grant.
Biography: Jeff Means, an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, is the Chair of the History Department and an Associate Professor of History at the University of Wyoming. His field of study is Native American History. He served in the United States Marine Corps from 1987-1991, and then went back to school, receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma in 2007. His primary area of interest is Oglala Lakota history in the 18th and 19th century. Jeff has won numerous academic awards, including the first Power-Tanner Graduate Student Fellowship in American Indian Studies in 2003, and the first NCAIS Faculty Fellowship at the Newberry Library in 2010, and the Burlingame-Toole Award from the Montana Historical Society for the best Graduate student article for 2003. He has also received research grants and awards from universities and historical societies alike. His most recent publication is, “Oglala Paths, Oglala Choices: Identity and Economics on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, 1877-1920,” in the Annals of Wyoming, in Fall 2023. He recently submitted an article, “The Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890: Settler Colonialism and the Appropriation of Grief,” to the Western Historical Quarterly for a special issue on Wounded Knee. He is currently working on his first book, From Buffalo to Beeves: Settler Colonialism and the Evolution of Oglala Lakota Culture, 1750-1920.
From Bison to Beeves: Cattle Ranching on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, 1868-1920
Summary
From Bison to Beeves examines the evolution of the Oglala Lakota’s political economy during a liminal transition period after contact with Europeans. Beginning with the signing of the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868, it examines the Lakota attempt to replace bison with cattle during the early reservation decades of the 19th and early 20th centuries. I argue that the Oglala actively and innovatively moved to enhance and protect their way of life to meet the diverse challenges each period presented. This presentation reveals that from 1868 to 1920 the Oglala actively sought to maintain control of their political economy, and culture, until outside forces disenfranchised the tribe politically and economically from their land. After reservation confinement the Oglala sought to continue their culture unchanged. Wars, a shrinking reservation and bison population, and assimilationist policies designed to eliminate Lakota culture made this impossible. First, the U.S. took the Black Hills in 1877, then broke up the Great Sioux Reservation in 1889. Once confined to Pine Ridge Indian Reservation the Oglala turned to nomadic pastoralism as its new economic strategy. Assimilation efforts, such as the Dawes Act of 1887, ended this dream. Soon the reservation was divided up into allotments. Once tribesmen received their allotments the “surplus” lands were leased to off-reservation cattle interests. It took Allotment Agent Bates over 15 years to allot all the Oglala. During this time the Oglala continued to pursue their vision of a communally owned reservation land base populated with Oglala owned cattle. Despite resistance to both allotment and leasing, by 1920 fully two-thirds of reservation land supported off-reservation cattle herds.
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