The Life and Example of Colorado AIM elder Regina Brave

“Get the Hell Off”: The Indigenous Fight to Stop a Uranium Mine in the Black Hills

Mother Jones magazine, April/May 2020

Regina Brave remembers the moment the first viral picture of her was taken. It was 1973, and 32-year-old Brave had taken up arms in a standoff between federal marshals and militant Indigenous activists in Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Brave had been assigned to guard a bunker on the front lines and was holding a rifle when a reporter leaped from a car to snap her photo. She remembers thinking that an image of an armed woman would never make the papers—“It was a man’s world,” she says—but the bespectacled Brave, in a peacoat with hair pulled back, was on front pages across the country the following Sunday.

Brave had grown up on Pine Ridge, where the standoff emerged from a challenge to the tribal chair, whose alleged offenses included scheming to accept federal money for Paha Sapa, also known as the Black Hills. Brave’s great-grandfather Ohitika had helped negotiate the 1868 treaty preserving Lakota stewardship of the hills, but after white settlers found gold there, the lands were wrested away. Ohitika fought alongside his son, Brave’s grandfather, in an unsuccessful battle to save the Black Hills. Half a century later, the US government agreed to pay $17.5 million in belated compensation.

Traditional Lakota of Brave’s generation believed that the chair’s bid to accept a settlement was sacrilege, and pressed their leaders not to accept the money, despite the tribe’s financial destitution. The 71-day Wounded Knee occupation ended with two Natives dead and one federal marshal paralyzed. The chair remained in power for another three years, but the money remained untouched; no tribal council has yet accepted it, demanding instead, under the rallying cry “The Black Hills are not for sale,” that the land be returned. (The fund is now worth more than $1 billion.) The incident at Wounded Knee—on the same site where the US Army massacred several hundred mostly unarmed Lakota nearly a century earlier—helped launch the American Indian Movement, and Brave’s career as a Native rights activist.

Regina Brave sits with her rifle at ready on steps of building in Wounded Knee, South Dakota, March 2, 1973.

Jim Mone/AP

Now 79, Brave lives in a one-story house in a small town on Pine Ridge. Out front she parks the blue 2008 Grand Caravan she bought with her prize money from the ACLU’s highest honor, the Roger N. Baldwin Medal of Liberty, which she received in recognition of her leadership during the Standing Rock protest. After camping through a brutal winter, Brave was one of the last people arrested in the demonstration against the Dakota Access pipeline when police cleared their camp in early 2017. A photo of “Grandma Regina,” bundled in a blanket and wearing bright pink gloves, being led away by two police officers, was shared online as a symbol of Indigenous resistance.

Today, Brave and other Lakota elders are staring down yet another encroachment on their historic lands: a 10,600-acre uranium mine proposed to be built in the Black Hills. The Dewey-Burdock mine would suck up as much as 8,500 gallons of groundwater per minute from the Inyan Kara aquifer to extract as much as 10 million pounds of ore in total. Lakota say the project violates both the 1868 US-Lakota treaty and federal environmental laws by failing to take into account the sacred nature of the site. If the mine is built, they say, burial grounds would be destroyed and the region’s waters permanently tainted.

A legal win for the Lakota would represent an unprecedented victory for a tribe over corporations such as Power­tech, the Canadian-owned firm behind Dewey-­Burdock, that have plundered the resource-rich hills. And it could set precedents forcing federal regulators to protect Indigenous sites and take tribes’ claims more seriously. The fight puts the Lakota on a collision course with the Trump administration, which has close ties to energy companies and is doubling down on nuclear power while fast-tracking new permits and slashing environmental protections—even using the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to further roll back regulations. All of this makes Black Hills mineral deposits more attractive than they’ve been in decades.

For Brave, the Dewey-Burdock mine is just the latest battle in a long war to stop settlers’ affronts to Lakota lands and sovereignty. “They’re taking so much from [the earth] and not giving anything back,” Brave tells me, a hand-rolled cigarette dangling from her fingers. “I’m thinking we should say to them, ‘Get the hell off. Your rent is over.’”

The Lakota call Paha Sapa “the heart of everything that is.” Tribal origin stories say there was a Great Race between all the two-legged and four-legged creatures to determine who would eat whom. In one telling, the animals raced around the cedar-covered hills, and the magpie narrowly defeated the buffalo, establishing not only the dominance of the two-leggeds, but their responsibility to care for all living beings. Another tale says the Lakota emerged from a cave in the Black Hills following catastrophic floods. Lakota spiritual practices still center on the region.

Their people belong to a confederacy of tribes called Oceti Sakowin, the Seven Council Fires. Historically, the alliance’s range spanned parts of what’s now Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. Today, most of the 20,000 residents of the Pine Ridge Reservation, in the southwest corner of South Dakota, hail from the Oglala band of Lakota and are represented by the Oglala Sioux Tribe. (“Sioux” is an old French misnomer for Oceti Sakowin.)

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In October, Brave spoke at Magpie Buffalo Organizing’s inaugural “No Uranium in Treaty Territory” summit, which offered a crash course on tribal sovereignty. The activists are closely tracking the various Keystone XL permits, which the Rosebud Sioux Tribe is challenging in court as a treaty vio­lation. As the threat of both uranium and gold mining looms, there’s talk of occupying land in the Black Hills, as the American Indian Movement did in 1981.

For most of her life, Brave hadn’t understood why her grandfather made her memorize the treaty. It didn’t stop the Black Hills gold rush in the 19th century or the uranium boom in the 20th. Nobody knows how many sacred sites were destroyed—but now there’s a chance to protect those that remain.

Brave’s grandfather said the Lakota would one day need to return to the caves in the Black Hills where they rode out the last great flood. That’s “the reason that we really try to treat it as a sacred area,” she says. “We have to go back to it when the time comes.”

“I always imagine a rope with all these different knowledges on the string that brings it down through the generations. And I see ’em as broken—a lot of strings are broken coming down,” Brave says. “They fenced us in as prisoners of war, but now we’re talking treaty. I’d like to see how they’ll handle that.” 

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