South Dakota governor cuts her own course as she challenges tribes
(CNN)South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem's standoff with the leaders of two Native American tribes over their coronavirus checkpoints is escalating as they battle over sovereignty and the governor's ability to control restrictions on state and federal highways.
The Republican governor who never enacted a stay-at-home order in her state despite a huge outbreak at a Sioux Falls meatpacking plant threatened to sue the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and the Oglala Sioux Tribe in two letters Friday, arguing that their efforts to prevent the spread of the virus through roadway checkpoints was interfering with traffic. She ordered the tribes to dismantle them within 48 hours, a deadline which has now passed.
The standoff is just the latest controversy that the 48-year-old former congresswoman has ignited in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Hewing closely to the Trump administration's philosophy that the nation's top priority is reviving the economy while ensuring the continuity of the food supply chain, Noem denied requests from local officials to issue county-wide shelter-in-place orders near the Smithfield Foods meatpacking plant, which has now been linked tothe cases of more than 1,000 people, including employees and their contacts.
Like Trump, Noem also championed the unproven anti-malarial drug known as hydroxychloroquine, going so far as to announce that South Dakota would conduct the nation's first statewide trial for the drug to test its effectiveness against the virus.
'All we're doing is trying to save people's lives'
In this latest clash, Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Chairman Harold Frazier told CNN's Sara Sidner Sunday that he cannot understand Noem's rationale for blocking checkpoints that are his tribe's best tool to prevent the virus from infecting the 12,000 people who live on the reservation.
"All we're doing is trying to save people's lives," Frazier said during an interview near one of the checkpoints Sunday. He noted that the tribe only has eight hospital beds and that the closest hospital with an intensive care unit is three hours away.
"All we have is prevention," he said. "Because if we ever get the virus spread throughout our reservation, we don't have the resources, the medical resources, to try to address it."
Nationally, the virus has devastated some Native American communities, in part because of the scarcity of medical personnel and resources on their lands. The leaders of both the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe and the Oglala Sioux Tribe have maintained strict stay-at-home orders and curfews, while Noem recently told Fox News that South Dakota is "on the way back to normal."
In a Facebook Live Saturday, Oglala Sioux Tribe President Julian Bear Runner described Noem's checkpoint ultimatum as a "threat the sovereign interest of the Oglala people" that does not reflect the will of the people of South Dakota.
"Gov. Noem miscalculates our level of dedication to protect our most vulnerable people from crony capitalism thrust to force us to open our economy as they chose to do," Bear Runner said. "There is no way to place a value on what we have to lose if we let them insult us this way… Right now, they are trying to divide us, as they always have."
In her Friday letters, Noem argued the tribes must "immediately cease interfering or regulating traffic"on US and State Highways and remove all travel checkpoints."
She argued that the tribal checkpoints do not comply with an April 8 memo from the US Department of the Interior that directs Native American tribes to consult and coordinate with state, federal officials or private landowners to reach agreement on temporary closures or restrictions on non-tribal roads.
Maggie Seidel, Noem's senior adviser and policy director, stressed in a Sunday memo to reporters that "tribes are well within their rights to manage the flow of traffic on tribal roads, and the state has no objection to that."
"The key here is that tribes are letting tribal members come and go as they please – the same is not true for non-tribal members," Seidel said, an assertion disputed by the tribes.
Moar:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/11/politics/kristi-noem-south-dakota-tribes/index.html
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I wonder if those two tribal leaders are involved with child trafficking or something.
Last night, my friend said cnn was going around the checkpoints.