Landowners turn to tribal history in fight against pipeline

Sioux historians and farmers chart remnants of historic Native American homesteads, burial grounds

South Dakota landowners doubling as property-rights advocates share a common enemy with historical preservationists: a pipeline.

Moody County farmers are teaming up with an eastern South Dakota Indian tribe in hopes of stopping a pipeline slated to cut through their pastures.

Historians from the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe and Egan-area landowners along the Big Sioux River this week surveyed parcels of land near Navigator CO2's proposed pipeline route, hunting for remnants of burial sites and lodging formations still visible in the area.

The Dakota Scout joined Egan-area farmers Roger Van Dyke, Clayton Rentschler and Rick Luze Monday for an exploration just south of the town of 240.

Nearly 100 plots of land on the banks of the Big Sioux River between Lake Benton and Dell Rapids once belonged to American Indians, who were granted plots in the area as part of the Homestead Act of 1862.

The highest concentration of Indian-owned plots was in the Egan area — from the land where the city park now sits to the fields that surround Luze and VanDyke's homes south and east of town, respectively.

“So my dad wasn't kidding,” VanDyke said after FSST historian Sara Childers showed him land ownership records from the late 1800s before the team took a side-by-side utility task vehicle to sites previously discovered by Rentschler.

But that was just the first of the journey's revelations for VanDyke, who spent his youth riding horses and recreating in the nearby river bend where Navigator plans to route its pipeline. During the hunt for relics and remnants of yesteryear, Childers and the tribe's historical preservation officer, Garrie Kills A Hundred, noted rock formations and now sunken circles that VanDyke had been aware of but never before paid much mind to.

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