(bright upbeat music) - This is a production of South Dakota Public Broadcasting.

(fading instrumental music) The history and the culture of the town of Sisseton is deeply intertwined with that of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate.

A reservation was established for these two bands of Santee Dakota people with the Lake Traverse Treaty in 1867, under the leadership of Dakota, chief Gabriel Renville, the Sisseton and Wahpeton largely avoided the hostilities of the 1862 Dakota uprising.

They even negotiated for the release of non-combatant hostages.

Renville, capitalized on his rapport with the leaders of military and in Washington, he secured a new triangle-shape reservation near his people's Homeland in Minnesota.

The land was fertile and Renville, and his people drove to succeed as farmers.

But in 1887, the Dawes Act allotted reservation lands into family plots.

That created what was considered excess lands.

And those lands were open to settlers.

The Sisseton-Wahpeton Reservation opened in 1892.

That spring, a land grant was made for the town site of Sisseton.

It was located near the center of that triangle shaped reservation.

And by fall, 50 buildings had sprung up, including two hotels, several stores, and a blacksmith shop.

In 1893, a branch of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway extended to the new town of Sisseton.

Around the turn of the century, the population had grown to over a thousand and Sisseton had a large flower mill, seven elevators, three newspapers, and an opera house.

Over 100 years later, Sisseton has a nearly even mix of citizens of native American and European American heritage, as well as other ethnicities too.

Artists and artisans abound here, there are paintings by the great Paul War Cloud at several locations.

Tribal Headquarters is a few miles south at Agency Village.

While here in Sisseton, the Stavig House Museum documents the story of industrious Norwegian immigrant families, Welcome to "Dakota Life" and greetings from Sisseton.

(bright instrumental music) Support provided by Dacotah Bank in Sisseton, a community bank with decisions made close to the people they serve.

Go with trust, go with people, go with Dacotah Bank.

And by the Sisseton Promotion Board.

Sisseton is rich in both native American culture and immigrant history.

Sisseton, where art history and nature thrive.

The Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate Wacipi is held annually on the 4th of July weekend.

It's the oldest Powwow in the United States.

In fact, it was initiated by Gabriel Renville himself.

The first celebration of life featured horse races and a long game of lacrosse.

In addition to the contemporary ceremonies and dancing contests, the Powwow is also known for its annual moccasin tournament.

The game of moccasin is played by a range of native American tribes.

The Dakota version of the game is said to have originated long ago in a time of famine.

You see, there were two hunting parties that found elk in a disputed territory.

To keep the peace, they devised a game that involved chance and slight of hand.

All the moccasins were lined up with one hiding and arrowhead inside.

Players took turns striking the moccasin they thought contained the arrowhead with their bow.

Legend has it that the first winning team became the stewards of that elk herd.

Chief Renville, was an outspoken advocate to maintain traditional culture.

Playing moccasin is just one of the many threads that together form the tapestry that is Wacipi along with sewing bee work onto garments, to building a drum or rehearsing a Prairie chicken dance.

Now coming up, we're gonna put all of our thimbles on and join a local quilters club.

Then we're going to tour a ranch that the Bien family is using to preserve wetlands.

But first, the tradition of the Dakota flute.

Brian Akipa, studied at the University of South Dakota.

And while there, he was equated with a mallard head flute, and that flute completely changed the direction of his life.

(flute music) - [Larry] Even at a young age, Brian Akipa has been an artist.

- When I really got interested was probably about fifth or sixth grade.

And I started drawing these bubblegum card.

They had rat rods on there and different type of creatures, everyone liked them.

And so I started selling my drawings right in school there.

- [Larry] With this art showing potential, Akipa would meet South Dakota legend, Oscar Howe.

- When I was in about sixth grade, my aunt Blossom, she had a program there, a Dakota Language Program, and somehow I was there and she introduced me to Oscar Howe, when I was about in a sixth grade.

And again, when I was in about 11th grade, I got to be an illustrator for one of her programs, Dakota Language Programs, and I met Oscar Howe, again.

- [Larry] While studying under Howe at USD, Brian would see something that caught his eye on Oscar How's desk, and it would change his life.

- He had a mallard flute, a mallard-head flute on his desk really similar to this.

So I ended up asking him if I could study and draw that flute.

And he said, "Yeah."

So I spent a lot of time with it and drawing it and looking at it from every angle, and insight, and everything you think of.

And I sketched it, and measured it.

And finally, I thought it looked like I could make one.

(flute music) - [Larry] Now all that was left to do, learn how to play.

- People didn't really like me hearing that at first.

So I did, they kinda didn't want me to hear tooting around.

I don't think it was really did sound too good.

And so over time, just practicing, and knowing more, and having more confidence and learning from David Marks and Norman Blue learning that, and be able to play.

I just slowly got better and better.

(flute music) - [Larry] In his practice, led to recording a couple of albums, which got Akipa a Grammy nomination, multiple native American music awards, an invite to perform with the South Dakota symphony and even one award that required a call from South Dakota Senator, John Thune.

- He said, I wanna congratulate you, you're a National Heritage Fellow, the National Endowment for the Arts has selected you and for the Fellow.

So he was the first one to tell me about that.

And so they give you this medallion.

So that was a big award.

(flute music) - [Larry] Through his success with music, Akipa never gave up his passion for art, deciding to master new craft in digital art, hoping this new trend would be the future of native American art.

- [Akipa] And when I heard about digital art, I said, that's it, that's where it's going.

But I have to try it, I have to learn it.

And so even Oscar Howe really influenced me to go out and seek, and learn how to do digital art.

He says, he doesn't know exactly what the future for native art is, but he says, he knows it'll be strong because he laid a foundation, not only him, but he has other contemporaries and other friends that he had during his lifetime that laid down a good path for the upcoming native artist.

He says, he doesn't know what it'll be, but he said, "It'll be strong 'cause you have a good path to follow."

(flute music) - Art and performance from both white and native communities are celebrated here in Sisseton from the impressive performing art center, adjacent to the high school, to the art square drive.

Now, this includes public sculptures, distinctive architecture, and a walking gallery of photographs, paintings, pros, and murals.

Most of which you can see without ever getting out of your car.

The history of Norwegian immigrants is on display at the Stavig House.

The house was built by local Scandinavian craftsmen for Andrew and Mary Stavig in 1916, there are elements of the queen Anne and arts and craft styles.

Andrew Stavig, established the Stavig Brothers Mercantile and that thrived in downtown Sisseton for 100 years.

Matilda Stavig, donated the house and it became a museum in 1996.

The museum is home to the Stavig letters collection.

It's correspondence between Lars of Sisseton and his brother Knut who remained in Norway, their letters document a period of rapid technological change, a World War and the great depression.

It's the perspective of a traditional Norwegian fisherman and his brother, some 4,000 miles away in South Dakota.

The collection has even been turned into a video documentary.

A few blocks away, the quilting group at Grace Lutheran Church tell their own story through thousands of quilts they've put together over nearly 50 years.

- They started quilting according to the records, I've been able to find in 1974 and then they may be made 50, 60 quilts a year.

The most we've made is over 500 in one year.

- [Larry] Take that times nearly 50 years of Monday mornings and the Grace Lutheran sewers have made over 15,000 quilts.

Estelle Pearson has been part of the stewardship program since her late husband was pastor here.

- Most of our quilts go to Lutheran world relief and they're shipped to St. Paul warehouse.

Some of them do go to global health ministries in Minneapolis and then local people take them up there.

And the global health ones go directly to a mission field where the Lutheran World Relief can go anywhere in the world that there's a need.

- [Larry] It's a factory like process.

And it starts with finding all of the material that's needed.

- It's donations mostly, they turn in fabric like jeans or cotton clothing, curtains, blankets, sheets, pillowcase, whatever, anything that can be put in a quilt that is cotton or that kind of fabric.

- [Larry] The group primarily makes quilts that are 60 by 80 inches in a series of stations that include some homework.

- They tear apart jeans, and then it goes to the markers and then to the cutters.

And then someone takes the pieces home and sews the quilt top, then the quilt tops come back.

We match 'em with a back and a filler and then they go to the tying table, and then eventually they go to the sewing machine, and then they're folded up and they're in the closet ready to ship.

- [Larry] Quilting takes place at dozens of Lutheran churches all around the state.

But this group has innovated through the years with standard patterns for quilt blocks, cone thread holders for the sewing machines, even homemade wood risers that put the tables at a more comfortable height.

Plus, they make quilts for each high school senior.

A 90-year old Mona Greseth has her grandson in mind as she's incorporated her love for making baby quilts.

- Well, I'm thinking of a grandson who recently saw that I had made a lion king quilt and of course, that's his favorite movie.

And so he hugged it, "Can I have it?"

Well, I gave it to him and I still see it on his bed at home.

- [Larry] A couple of times a year, the quilt inventory is packed and shipped.

Lavonne Johnson helps coordinate that for Lutheran churches throughout Northeast, South Dakota, and says once in a while, they hear stories about their gifts.

- There was a lady one time, she cut her quilt in half, 'cause she had two children, but they maybe got one quilt.

Or for them two, if they have a guest, it is like a custom, they sit on your quilt, that quilt is used many, many different ways.

- Part of it is the need, but it's also that they know that someone else loves them, and cares for them, and wants to help them.

That's sort of the ministry behind quilt making.

- [Larry] But what they know when they meet each week is how much they appreciate their time together.

- We look forward to Mondays and you can see, we enjoy the, what should I say, half-hour coffee break (laughs).

- The quilters of Grace Lutheran Church are leaving a legacy of a generous community, helping people in need at home and throughout the world.

The legacy of the Santee Dakota Heritage is embodied by the four larger than life Dakota drummers atop the Song to the Great Spirit Building at Sisseton Wahpeton College.

Local artists, Victor Reynolds work with architect, Dean Marske to design the drummers.

There are paintings by Paul War Cloud at the Tribal Headquarters building nearby.

And by other local artists who make traditional bead work with porcupine quills.

Sisseton's Nicollet Tower rises 75 feet above the landscape.

It gives an expansive view into three states.

The tower was built as a tribute to Joseph Nicollet, a French cartographer who explored and mapped this area for the U.S. topographical core in the 1830s.

The Interpretive Center nearby holds a mural of Nicollet's meeting with Chief Juan Tom II.

His people live just east of here near Lake Traverses.

That band eventually settled at the Spirit Lake Reservation in North Dakota.

Well, you can't see it from the tower, but you can on the map, it's the continental divide.

It runs through this part of Roberts County.

And that means the water from Big Stone Lake flows south to the Gulf of Mexico.

While the water from Lake Traverse north onto Hudson Bay.

Sisseton is located near the center of the Lake Traverse Indian Reservation, approximately 12,000 members of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate live on that reservation, which covers most of Roberts County and stretches into six more counties, including two in North Dakota.

Tribal history is preserved in the stories and artifacts that are passed down from one generation to the next.

A branch of the tribal government is working to archive those stories and artifacts.

And as SDB's Brian Gevik learned on a recent visit to the reservation and understanding of the tribe's past may be the key to understanding the tribe today.

- This is the Sisseton Wahpeton Tribal Administration Building.

And this is where our current archives and historic preservation office, our house.

This building also includes like our tribal court.

- [Larry] Tamara St. John is the historian, archivist, and curator of collections for the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate.

She learned about the history of her tribe and culture mostly from her elders and not so much in school.

- Most of us have grown up in an education system that talks about history, American history.

History began when Columbus arrived and for us it's our own history.

We tell our own history now.

- [Larry] When the Dakota were pushed out of Minnesota and relocated to the Lake Traverse Reservation in Dakota territory, they found evidence of earlier native occupation in the form of burial mounds.

They knew that they were among relatives.

- These are the resting places of our ancestors.

Now, anthropology will often identify those places as being like mound builder or Oneota mounds and some of those things.

But for us, we know them to be places where the Dakota held them to be sacred and continue to bury into them.

- [Larry] Archeological digs done at the end of the 19th century, unearthed metal buttons and even rough caskets that could only have come from relatively recent burials.

Many artifacts were removed from the mounds and shipped off to museum.

- Sisseton Wahpeton since the early 1990s has been involved in bringing back thousands and thousands of the remains of our relatives that were taken from the burial mounds here.

- [Larry] Tamara St. John believes that understanding what happened to native peoples in the past is vital to understanding why things are the way they are for them in the present.

- The things that we've gone through, the fact that we have survived so much is really important because it results in the sort of devastation and the social issues, and things that you see today.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

- [Larry] St. John has been a Republican member of South Dakota's House of Representatives since 2019 and serves the four Northeastern counties that include the Lake Traverse Reservation.

- So as a legislator, I often am sitting in a committee room and we're looking at data, whether that is the suicide rate, or poverty rate or whatever it might be.

We look at those things and how those things impact our finances, but we don't look at how things became that way.

And I think that's an important point.

So there are times when I've had people in this very room and sharing history and one real well known individual had asked me, "Tamara, "what do you want me to take away from here?"

And I had told him, I want you to understand that when you look at us and when you look at those sort of things like the social hills and things that you hear so often about that you are witnessing, what is the devastation of us and what's happening now is our recovery.

We have survived in a really amazing way, and here we are.

- [Larry] St. John and others would like to see a new museum that could attract more visitors coming to the reservation.

- It's a way to share our history and to expose others to some of the beautiful things that I think it is to be Dakota and not just rely on others to share our stories.

- This part of the state is dominated by the Coteau des Prairies.

It's the Eastern South Dakota landscape that gently rises as you travel north.

It was essentially formed by two lobes of a glacier, which trenched out the land on either side of the plateau.

The Coteau rolls gently at times, other times more steeply, but it seems to go on forever.

As matter of fact, Peter George Catlan wrote, "For many miles, we had the Coteau in view "in the distance before us.

"It looked like a blue cloud settling down on the horizon."

Well, in all, the Coteau is 20,000 square miles of an Emerald plateau studded by thousands of lakes and wetlands.

And those waters support many waterfowl and shore birds.

The Prairie here, teams with diverse species of native grasses, sedges and wildflowers.

In some places Catlin night deposits have been qued for hundreds of years to make Pipestone.

Just north of Sisseton, there's a patch of trees on the Coteau known as Sica Hollow.

It's now a state park.

And a little further north on the border with North Dakota, Sioux Quartzite boundary markers stand like silent sentinels.

They're holdovers from the 1890 expedition to mark the boundary between North and South Dakota.

This is the country that drew Neil Bien to homestead.

His family has been here ever since.

And the Bien family in nearby Bevelin, take pride in their efforts to conserve the natural heritage of this landscape.

They do that at their family ranch, and they also appreciate their strategies for sustainable stewardship on the Coteau.

- [Lura] Even though cattle have called the Bien Ranch home for more than 130 years, third generation rancher, Neil Bien is the first to tell you his primary focus is not cattle.

- Grassland to us is everything, it's everything.

It's our livelihood, it's the source for our livestock.

Without the grass it would be no reason for us to be ranchers or taking care of it.

- [Lura] Neil is not the first in his family to think this way.

For the most part, the family have left the native Prairie Bien since his grandfather only stage his homestead claim on this Prairie Coteau land in 1888.

- [Bien] That's why I give my ancestors a lot of credit.

We're proud of our ancestry, our roots, but we're also grateful for the land that those roots are embedded in yet today.

- [Lura] Through the years, the family have relied on cattle to help maintain grassland health.

- So if you're gonna have the soil protected and recycle the nutrients, there is only one way that I know, and that's through livestock and mainly cattle.

And cattle are unique.

They don't have any teeth on the top of their like we do.

And so when they eat grass, if they ate these grass, they literally tear the grass.

And unbelievable to most people that stimulates the grass to grow more and to have more photosynthesis take place.

And that's what keeps the cycle between photosynthesis and respiration happening.

- [Lura] With more than 200 native grass species thriving on the Bien Ranch, cattle are quite content grazing the native Prairie, imitating migrating buffalo herds of the past.

The family rotates the cattle herd through multiple pastures each year.

The Biens are intentional about the rotation.

They change up the time of year each pasture is grazed and choose not to graze some pastures.

- Grass is like people to some extent, it needs a rest and a time to reinvigorate.

- [Lura] Native grasslands are not the only natural feature the family decided not to disturb.

They also left their wetlands alone.

- Wetlands have several functions and of course, wildlife, which I'm interested in, but they also reduce downstream flooding because they store water.

They recharge aquifer and they also trap nutrients instead of running off down the river or into the lake.

And then you get a big algal bloom.

They stay up here where the water belongs.

- [Lura] Nate Bien said, Tom Wickstrom is not joking when he talks about wetlands attracting wildlife.

- Lots of wildlife, that's probably one of the things that my grandpa and I are the most proud of almost even, probably almost equivalent with the cow herd, having the deer, and the birds, and the ducks, geese, everything that you have.

And we have some of the most turkeys around in the area here.

People notice that too, and I can sit on the porch at my house, drink a cup of coffee in the morning and just watch three or four doughs walk around and kinda eat some grass in the morning and stuff.

And that's also a big part of the decisions and the management that goes into how we manage this place.

- [Lura] Nate Bien is Neil's grandson.

After graduating from South Dakota State University last spring, he returned to the family ranch and plans to carry on his grandpa's conservation legacy.

leaving resources like grasslands and wetlands be just like mother nature intended is not typical explains Pete Bauman, SDSU Extension Natural Resources, field specialist.

- That's unique about Neil and the ranch and the family is in a lot of conservation stories, we tell those stories about how something went wrong or a choice was made.

And then there's a generation or two or a span of time where that mistake maybe is being fixed.

A lot of conservation stories center around replacing wetlands, replacing the Prairie that was lost, restoring grasslands.

There's not a big piece of that story here on the ranch because they never made those decisions to begin with.

They conserved, they practiced the slow and I think patient art of learning with nature.

- [Lura] In 2022, the Bien family were recognized for their conservation efforts with the Leopold Conservation Award.

- The town of Sisseton grew out of the opening of Sisseton Wahpeton Reservation.

The Reservation itself, it's an arrangement one by peacemaker Gabriel Renville during a time of turmoil.

relations among peoples here have a complex history, but there is shared pride in distinct cultures on display all throughout the area.

But there have been catalysts for cooperation, whether it's Brian Akipa, performing with the South Dakota symphony, or Victor Reynolds, his collaboration with Dean Marske at the Song of the Great Spirit building.

Gabriel Renville, utilized your all American farming practices on his reservation.

And the Bien family, incorporate indigenous ethics of land stewardship at their ranch.

There is some evidence of a collaborative history and future.

This is a uniquely diverse little town nestled in the shadow of the Prairie Cotoue.

You can revisit our stories about Sisseton and all of the other communities we visit at sdpb.org/dakotalife.

Thanks for coming along.

I'm Larry Rohrer, for all of us at SDPB, thanks for watching.

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