While Gov. Kristi Noem continues to fend off heavy scrutiny of her new book on the East Coast, her problems back home with the state’s Indian tribes persist.
The Sisseton-Wahpeton tribal council voted unanimously Tuesday, May 7 to ban Noem from coming onto the Lake Traverse Reservation, joining a spate of others that opted to do so earlier this year.
Tribal President J. Garret Renville said they heard overwhelming support for the proposal from constituents.
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“It came from our people, in response to the governor’s comments in the past,” Renville said, referring to remarks made about crime and drug problems on the state’s reservations. “This came directly from our membership, and as tribal leaders we honor the voice of our people.”
The Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate, which has roughly 14,800 residents, has typically disengaged from confrontations with Noem across her various brushes with the state’s Native American reservations. Renville characterized them as “progressive.”
When other reservations implemented roadblocks to ban travel through their territories during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sisseton-Wahpeton did not. And tribal leaders have not offered any official statements directly critical of the administration this year. Their more subtle approach has been no secret to Noem. Her Tribal Relations Secretary Dave Flute served as the tribe’s chairman prior to joining her office in 2019.
Renville said that he met with Noem in February to discuss remarks that she had made about the tribes and to talk about shared goals.
Tribal residents asked that Noem be banned
“This was definitely about the cartel comments and her having no real proof to back that up as it related to Sisseton,” Renville continued, emphasizing the immense pressure the council received from constituents to take action.
Noem is already banned from four other reservations — Rosebud Sioux, Oglala Sioux, Cheyenne River and Standing Rock.
The Lower Brule Sioux tribe voted down a measure that would have prevented Noem from coming onto its reservation, which is southeast of Fort Pierre.
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The governor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but has previously said the bans, which stem from Noem’s characterizations of reservations as hot spots for drug cartel activity, are counterproductive.
During the 2024 legislative session, Noem said that the Biden Administration’s failure to secure the U.S.-Mexico border has exacerbated the presence of deadly drugs such as fentanyl on the reservations. She has also accused tribal leadership of personally benefiting from cartel activity.
“Banishing Gov. Noem does nothing to solve the problem,” a spokeswoman in the Governor’s Office said last month, responding to a different tribal council’s ban. “She calls on all our tribal leaders to banish the cartels from tribal lands.”
Located largely in South Dakota with a portion in North Dakota, Sisseton-Wahpeton is encompassed in five counties in the northeastern part of the state.
Though her banishment is farther removed from the one directly prior — Rosebud banned her in early April — it’s the latest in a string of bad news stories for the governor, once viewed as a potential running mate to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Noem has appeared on more than a dozen national media programs to defend her book, “No Going Back,” from a series of anecdotes — including a fabrication first discovered by The Scout about a meeting she claimed to have with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.