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Key Words: Black Hills, Coolidge, diplomacy, Lakota, Pine Ridge
On the morning of August 17, 1927, a caravan of sleek dark automobiles bumped along a dusty gravel road in South Dakota's rural southwestern corner. One carried the famously stoic President Calvin Coolidge, who just fifteen days earlier had declared from his temporary office in Rapid City that "I do not choose to run for president in nineteen twentyeight." The move stunned the nation and surprised even his wife, Grace, who had accompanied Coolidge to the Black Hills along with their adult son, John. Questions about this decision's bearing on national politics abounded.1 But on that hot August day, few members of Coolidge's entourage probably concerned themselves with the coming election or the microscopic fractures that had already begun to weaken the roaring economy that had so far blessed their administration. For the second time in as many weeks, Coolidge would make history as he crossed a series of significant cultural and political thresholds. When his motorcade arrived at its destination on the Pine Ridge Reservation, it would be the first time in the nation's history that a sitting American president had made an official visit to Indian Country.2
The summer of 1927 straddled two eras in the histories of federal Indian policy and local struggles over Native politics in South Dakota. American Indians across the nation had good reason to wonder whether Coolidge would help improve their situation. In 1924 he had signed the Indian Citizenship Act, which naturalized Native peoples across the country. Two years later his secretary of the Interior, Hubert Work, commissioned a nationwide study of Native communities and Indian policy. Published in 1928, this "Meriam Report" provided a blueprint for what would later become the Indian New Deal. It abolished the destructive policy of allotment, which had ravaged Indian Country and cultures nationwide since the late nineteenth century. By breaking up reser- vations into small individually owned parcels and selling the remainder to non-Indians, allotment slowly dispossessed Native peoples of more than eighty million acres of their land. The Indian New Deal also made initial moves against the long-term project of assimilation, which aimed to stamp out American Indians' cultural, economic, and political systems by empowering tribes to reclaim some...