EPICS Lakota: Promoting Food Sovereignty on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation

EPICS Team Lakota was started as a way for students to help promote food sovereignty and combat loss of cultural knowledge as felt by the residents of Pine Ridge Reservation, which is located in one of the poorest counties in the United States and is a food desert. In partnership with EPICS students at Oglala Lakota College (OLC) and South Dakota School of Mines (SDSM), students at Purdue came up with the idea of putting up a greenhouse on the Rapid City Campus of OLC. This greenhouse was meant not as a direct solution to food scarcity, but as a blueprint to be implemented across the reservation in the future. The greenhouse will be a resource for students, teachers, residents, and community elders to come together and preserve the knowledge of culturally significant plants and herbs, as well as a place to learn how to grow the fresh produce that is so hard to find on the reservation. Students at all schools worked together to figure out the optimal size and construction of the greenhouse, and also worked with residents to determine what should be grown and how to meet the needs of each plant. Consideration was given to the sustainability of the project as this was important to the Lakota stakeholders, including ways to lighten the load on any water and electric utilities. The greenhouse was also designed to be ADA accessible, so that community elders and all who needed such accommodations would have no trouble taking part. Throughout the project, students kept in contact with each other and the affected community. This continuous communication both aided and impeded the progress of the project. Care was taken at each point in the project to make sure that the final deliverable was the most effective it could be. This paper will explore the successes of the project and how the students addressed concerns as they arose.

Engaging Acrimony: Performing Lakota Basketball in South Dakota

The Oglala Lakota basketball teams of Pine Ridge Indian Reservation are one of the most competitive programs in the state of South Dakota. They are, however, competing for state honors in one of the most racist climates in the country. My ethnographic study looks at how the Lakota navigate these perilous waters. Using Turner’s view of performance; and Scott’s theories of cultural resistance, I have characterized Lakota basketball as ‘engaged acrimony.’ Teams representing subaltern communities may use sport to carve out spheres of resistance that force those socially more power communities to grudgingly acknowledge the momentary reversal of the social order. Additionally, in these symbolic victories the Lakota craft narratives of victory that fuel cultural pride and further their resolve to withstand the racist climate they live in.

Indigenous cryptocurrency: Affective capitalism and rhetorics of sovereignty

Financial technologies embody and shape notions of social, as well as financial, worth. New digital ‘alt-finance’ systems, including the blockchain technology underlying Bitcoin and similar ‘cryptocurrencies,’ are no exception: technology, rhetoric, imagined users and non-users, and a long history of sociotechnical, political, and cultural relations are all elements in a dynamic assemblage with wide-ranging consequences. This paper examines the rise and fall of one alt-finance system: MazaCoin, a Bitcoin variant intended to benefit the Oglala Lakota of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The story of MazaCoin is one of an attempt to unite two apparently divergent sociotechnical assemblages: (1) a libertarian, elite technology of cryptocurrency, and (2) a richly traditional indigenous community with a deep desire for cultural survivance, bound up in a precarious economy left behind in the wake of more than a century of genocide.

Moving beyond Evidence: Participatory Online Documentary Practice within the Poetic Framework of Cowbird

The growth of user contribution as a form of interaction within online documentary projects is causing a shift in the way screen-based documentary is conceived. Viewers become participants, taking on greater agency in forming the experience of the work as they engage by contributing personal responses to the exploration of a subject. Rather than being fixed works with definite beginnings and endings, these online collaborative documentaries operate as portals, encouraging communities to gather around themes, events or areas of interest. While the diversity of contributions promises rich conceptual renderings, a significant challenge lies in the question of how to create a coherent media entity out of aggregated content that may be contradictory, complex and constantly changing. The online storytelling platform Cowbird establishes a social media space that engages a range of aesthetic, structural and organisational techniques to facilitate the sequenciation of diverse sources into multi-vocal chronicles of experience. Cowbird initiatives, such as the Pine Ridge Community Storytelling Project, where individual accounts of life on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota were published as a mosaic collection alongside a feature article about the reservation in National Geographic magazine, suggest alternative modes of exchange between old and new media. This article examines the visual, structural and interaction design of Cowbird to explore how this complex and changeful format works to stimulate poetic and affective webs of connection. It is my contention that the system of multilinear engagement employed on Cowbird enables an emergent approach to documentary that can accommodate a nuanced and shifting range of individual responses.

A Sampling of Community-Based Housing Efforts at Pine Ridge Indian Reservation

Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is in need of several thousand houses to alleviate overcrowding and improve living conditions. The United States government has failed to provide appropriate or sufficient housing and other individuals and organizations that have attempted to build homes for the Lakota have met with widely varying results. This paper documents community-based housing activities of fifteen Pine Ridge residents who attempted to implement a variety of construction techniques. The biggest challenges were obtaining and paying for resources and finding competent, reliable labor. The interviewees used local and salvaged materials extensively and worked within the local, informal economy to meet these challenges and address their dissatisfaction with government cluster housing. Findings suggest that local, community-based construction may provide a successful and culturally sustainable strategy for residential construction because it equips builders with a means to earn a living, develops construction skills, establishes a sense of ownership, and provides appropriate housing that enriches lives and builds pride.