South Dakota, come getcha girl. She has lost her damn mind.
Connie Uhre, a hotel owner in Rapid City, South Dakota, turned to Facebook Sunday to unleash a racist rant following a shooting at her hotel early that morning. As a result, she threatened to ban Native Americans from the hotel, stating she can’t tell “who is a bad Native or a good Native.” Now her son, Nick, a manager at the hotel, is trying to clean up Mama Karen’s s**t storm.
Uhre owns the Grand Gateway Hotel, which sits in a region that is home to the Lakota Nation. And as you might imagine, they’re not too thrilled about her colonizer tone.
In a statement sent to Daily Kos, Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Chairman Harold C. Frazier says he wants an apology for his people.
“When those wagons first began their way to break treaties and settle on our territory, we were classified as lesser beings and genocide was justified as such. The words uttered by this person are a reminder to my people that this is still the case. ‘No Indians allowed,’” Frazier writes.
In addition to threatening to ban Indigenous people from her hotel, Uhre blames the mayor and the police department for the city having “gone to hell,” since it began working with a nonprofit organization and has received MacArthur Foundation grants, which she calls “dark money.”
Uhre then lit the fire and offered a discount for ranchers and non-Native travelers.
"We're not just trying to reduce the jail population, we're trying to do so in a way that is a better outcome for the offender and the community," State's Attorney Mark Vargo told the Rapid City Journal in February 2020. "So it truly is about both safety and justice, and we've proven that we're moving in that direction."
The shooting at Grand Gateway Sunday left a man “with serious, life-threatening injuries,” Rapid City Police said.
Quincy Bear Robe, 19, was arrested on multiple charges, per the Rapid City Journal.
Tim Giago, a Lakota elder and the publisher of The Native Sun News in Rapid City, told The Daily Beast that many Natives stay at the Grand Gateway Hotel when they come to Rapid City.
“I saw [the post] and I thought, ‘That’s kind of a stupid thing to put out there in the internet.’ That place has had Native American customers for the last 50 years or however long it’s been there,” Giago told The Daily Beast. “It’s one of the places a lot of the Native Americans stay when they come up for the basketball tournaments or conventions.”
The Rapid City Journal reports that Uhre's son, Nick, like his mother, blamed the MacArthur grants for what he alleges is an increase in crime rates. He also implied that Mayor Steve Allender, Sheriff Kevin Thom, Deputy Sheriff Brian Mueller, State's Attorney Mark Vargo, and City Attorney Joel Landeen are at fault for the supposed downturn of the city.
Frazier statement emphasizes that when Dallas Quick Bear was shot and killed in a bar in February, the Lakota did not “condemn a whole race of people,” adding: “Statements like this show your feelings about all Indians.”
Remi Bald Eagle, the intergovernmental affairs coordinator with the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, told Daily Kos that since the civil rights movement, the outward aggression toward the Lakota people has been suppressed. But up until then—and even in the 1980s—many establishments in South Dakota refused to allow Native Americans into their businesses. “And this is not a healed wound,” he says. “It’s something that still exists in the memory of the majority of us today.”
Bald Eagle says that there’s been a long-standing history of “vetting of customers” in Rapid City, and he’s aware of issues between the owner of the Grand Gateway Hotel and tribal members.
He says that due to rapid gentrification from people moving in from places such as Colorado, and because of the rhetoric from the state of South Dakota in general, “Rapid City and the state is attracting people with the same mindset that existed in South Dakota prior to the Civil Rights movement, and it’s being encouraged by governments in the state as a whole.”
Bald Eagle adds: “We’re starting to see a resurgence in the way that we’re being treated. It seems like that [Uhre’s Facebook post] is a physical manifestation of the inability of the local governance in Rapid City to address the social problems. It’s why Native people call South Dakota the ‘Mississippi of the west.’”
Bald Eagle is likely referring to Republican Gov. Kristi Noem, who on Monday signed an anti-critical race theory, anti-education bill into law just after signing an anti-trans bill into law.
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