Advocates for underrepresented college students continue to assess the fallout from last week’s U.S. Supreme Court decision dealing with affirmative action. That includes voices within the Native American higher education community. In a major ruling, the court’s conservative majority largely overturned decades of precedent that prompted colleges and universities to consider a prospective student’s race in trying to maintain diverse campuses. Cheryl Crazy Bull, president of the American Indian College Fund, said Natives technically aren’t considered a race because of their tribal citizenship. But she said while it was limited, Indigenous students did benefit from affirmative action.
When President Trump came to Mt. Rushmore on the eve July 4th, 2020 and gave a fiery speech blasting what he called the “left wing cultural revolution,” tribal members in the state who briefly blocked the roads in protest got little attention. They were chanting “Land back!” — referring to the Black Hills, the tribal lands where the monument stands which were in effect stolen by the US government more than 170 years ago — but were pushed away by police in riot gear. Now a new film, “Lakota Nation vs. United States,” directed by Jesse Short Bull and Laura Tomaselli and executive produced by actor and activist Mark Ruffalo, among others, shines a light on why those demonstrators were so angry. it also reveals how the Lakota refuses to touch a $2 billion trust fund, the proceeds of an award in 1980 by the Supreme Court which recognized how their land had been stolen.
Those are your headlines at this hour. I’m Colette Keith in the KIPI News center.
