Nov 05, 2005 - 02:01:47 CST
TULSA, Okla. - The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has a message for looters who scour stretches of the Missouri River looking for artifacts and burial items and human remains: You're being watched.In fact, the tribe's program that monitors historic villages and sites along the river on the Standing Rock Reservation has been so effective that Harvard University honored the tribe this week as one of Indian Country's best examples of tribal governance.
Tim Mentz led the Lakota to create the Tribal Monitors Program, a monitoring system that ensures the tribe's authority to manage, protect and preserve tribal property. The tribe's program also extends and protects sacred sites both on and off the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, which straddles North Dakota and South Dakota.
"We started the process of looking at how we monitor these areas when you start having inadvertent discoveries in relation to NAGPRA," said Mentz, a tribal historic preservation officer for the Standing Rock Sioux. NAGPRA, or the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, is the 1990 federal law that established a process for museums and federal agencies to return certain cultural items to Indians.
The Standing Rock program was one of 14 tribal government initiatives singled out this week by Honoring Nations, a program administered by the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
Of the 14 programs awarded honors, seven were given high honor recognition and $10,000 cash prizes during an awards presentation at the National Congress of American Indians in Tulsa.
The Honoring Nations program recognizes tribes that adhere to self-governance principles, a belief that tribes "hold the key to positive social, political, cultural and economic prosperity."
"We have to become self-sufficient," said Oren Lyons, chairman of the Honoring Nations advisory board. "We can't depend on anyone anymore."
Lyons told the awards-presentation audience that tribes have a history of responsibility to Indians that includes looking seven generations ahead.
Harvard's Honoring Nations Program has recognized the best of tribal governance for five years.
As for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's monitoring program, most of the looted grave items and human remains belonged to the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation of North Dakota, whose ancestors once lived further south.
"It was a serious concern for the tribe," said Mentz.
Now the tribe's monitoring program catches trespassers on a daily basis.
"We have really good vantage points along the river," said Loretta Stone, who patrols a 120-mile stretch of Missouri River. "We can sit on top of a hill and we can see five, six, seven sites. We can see these people from a mile, two miles away."
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