Noem burns bridges with tribes as governor, uses ICE to fan flames for Trump

During most of her time as the Republican governor of South Dakota from 2019 to 2025, Kristi Noem was officially banned by nine Indigenous tribes, prohibiting her from travelling to nearly 12 per cent of the state’s territory.

In particular, Noem drew the ire of the government of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, who banned her permanently from visiting their home on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

The governor, Oglala Sioux leaders alleged, supported anti-protest legislation targeting Native Americans, set up illegal security checkpoints to stop Indigenous peoples from leaving their communities during the COVID-19 pandemic and claimed — with no evidence to back it up — that Mexican drug cartels were joining with a Native American gang called “Ghost Dancers” to commit murders on the reservation.

At the time, Oglala Sioux Tribal president Frank Star Comes Out accused the future secretary of the United States Department of Homeland Security of spreading falsehoods and stereotypes about his people while facilitating violence against them in order to gain favour with then-U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump (and, perhaps, her selection as his vice-presidential running mate).

“Our people are being used for her political gain,” Star Comes Out said at the time.

How little has changed.

Noem has dutifully followed Trump’s orders and is overseeing a massive deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents into Minneapolis, a city in the traditional homeland of the Sioux people and one of the largest urban Native American communities in the country.

ICE agents — there are approximately 3,000 in the Twin Cities now — have terrorized residents: killing a mother; shooting someone else in the leg; brutally arresting hundreds of “foreign-looking” people (the vast majority of whom are American citizens or are in the United States legally); and used chemical agents and explosives in standoffs with protesters.

Four Oglala Sioux citizens and one Anishinaabe man, all of whom were falsely accused of being illegal immigrants, have been detained.

Since ICE invaded, Native Americans in Minneapolis have written and posted videos on social media, saying that they have been racially profiled by agents, accused of being Hispanic.

In the case of the four homeless Sioux citizens, ICE arrested them while they were sleeping under a bridge.

When he learned of their detention, Star Comes Out contacted ICE officials and was told that he would have to sign an agreement committing his tribe’s local law enforcement to helping the agents in their “mission.”

“We will not enter an agreement that would authorize, or make it easier, for ICE or Homeland Security to come onto our tribal homeland to arrest or detain our tribal members,” he wrote in a letter addressed to Noem and the Trump administration.

A few days later, in an irony right out of a Hollywood film, Oglala Sioux officials announced that three of the men were sent to a detention centre built at nearby Fort Snelling, where 1,700 Sioux people were imprisoned in a concentration camp after the U.S. cavalry attacked the community during the U.S.-Sioux wars of 1862.

Meanwhile, in a public statement, officials from Noem’s DHS denied any Native Americans were being held in ICE detention centres.

There is no end in sight for the ICE occupation and its impact on Native Americans.

U.S. tribal leaders urge Native Americans in Minneapolis-St. Paul to carry their tribal identification. The Native American Rights Fund published a “Know your rights” pamphlet instructing Indigenous peoples to record interactions with ICE agents, refuse to allow agents into their homes without warrants and not to sign anything without first consulting an attorney.

There is also advice about what to do if ICE agents are “not aware that a Tribal ID is a legal form of identification in the United States.”

So much for the professionalism of Noem’s force.

I’ve written numerous times now about how Native Americans have been treated during the first year of Trump’s second term in the White House.

Wide-scale funding cuts, cancelled treaties and the withdrawal of birthright citizenship for Native Americans add up to attacks in ways not seen by Indigenous peoples since the 19th century.

Trump has also made trolling Indigenous peoples a regular part of his Truth Social online musings that drive the news cycle, by reinstating Columbus Day, refusing to proclaim Native American Heritage Month and threatening to return the NFL’s Washington Commanders to their previous “Redskins” name and logo.

Instructing Noem — who, as South Dakota’s governor, had already done her best to anger Native Americans in the upper Midwest — to send 3,000 ICE agents into a city with one of the largest Native American populations in the country, has only poured fuel on an already-raging dumpster fire of a relationship.

niigaan.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca