Pierre, S.D. ? A story of unresolved grief and injustice lies behind six enormous dams on the upper Missouri River and the large lakes created when the dams were built.

Now, the saga of American Indian lands lost, homes destroyed and an entire village swallowed by the water is drawing to a close, ending a bitter piece of history on the northern Great Plains.

The story centers on Indian tribes whose homelands along the river disappeared when waters spread far and wide behind the Missouri dams in the 1950s and 1960s. The Indian lands that were submerged – an estimated 550 square miles – were taken from the tribes by the government through a condemnation process without adequate compensation.

Four decades after the last dam was finished, a bill redressing this wrong was signed by President Bush on Friday. It provides nearly $28 million to the Yankton Sioux of southeast South Dakota and the Santee Sioux of northeast Nebraska for damage done when the Missouri’s waters covered almost 4,000 acres of their land. Congress approved the legislation before Thanksgiving.

Obtaining reimbursement for the lost Indian lands has stretched out for a decade and involves five separate acts of Congress and payments of about $625 million to nine tribes. The new law will settle all outstanding Indian claims against the government over the Missouri River dams.

“While we cannot recover the valuable lands that are now under water, we can provide compensation that the tribes deserve,” Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., said.

Haunting memories

The formal act of Congress won’t put to rest memories that haunt Ramona O’Connor, 66, a member of the Yankton Sioux. Her tribe lost almost 3,000 acres of land along the Missouri when the Fort Randall dam closed in 1952, inundating a portion of the tribe’s reservation.

Among the areas lost was the village of White Swan, the hometown O’Connor shared with her father and mother, two siblings, grandparents, four uncles and numerous cousins. O’Connor has not gone back to the site where her village vanished below the river waters.

“I can’t go through that. I just can’t deal with the grief, I guess,” said the social worker, who lives 15 miles from where she grew up.

The people of White Swan, one of four main settlements on the reservation, were fortunate before the flooding, according to Michael Lawson, a historian who has written extensively about the tribes who lost their land to the Missouri dams.

The rich bottomland along the river was good for corn, hay and alfalfa. Potatoes, carrots, peas and watermelon thrived in gardens. Along the river, groves of trees provided a reliable source of lumber. The river supplied all the fresh water the 20 families who lived in the village needed.

Hunting was easy. Deer, pheasants, beavers, rabbits and coyotes were plentiful along the Missouri’s shores. Many herbs and roots that grew only in the area were used in sacred ceremonies and healing practices.

“We never went to the store to buy things. We had everything we needed,” said O’Connor, who spent her childhood fishing and playing in the river.

Changes with Pick-Sloan

But in Washington, the government had other plans for lands along the river, where Sioux tribes had been confined after the Indian wars of the 19th century.

Driven by a desire to control the Missouri’s floods and inspired by opportunities to provide irrigation, generate hydropower and eventually employ veterans returning home from World War II, Congress in 1944 approved legislation known as the Pick-Sloan Plan.

The plan called for five major dams on the river. The first of the main Missouri dams, which came before the Pick-Sloan Plan, was built in 1937, during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl years. The Fort Peck Dam drove 289 families on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in Montana from their homes and submerged 155,000 acres of the reservation.

Control of the vast, $30 billion project fell to the Army Corps of Engineers, which had virtually no experience in dealing with American Indians and possessed little understanding of the treaties that set forth Indians’ legal rights. The corps used condemnation as the fastest, most effective way to get Indian lands needed to construct the dams.

Many other non-Indian residents also lost property along the Missouri because of the dams. But American Indians were disproportionately affected, experts agree.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs declined to mount legal challenges on the tribes’ behalf, nor were tribes represented in these transactions by private lawyers, which they could not afford, historian Lawson noted.

‘Get off our land’

The Pick-Sloan Plan contained no language protecting tribal interests; the Bureau of Indian Affairs did not even tell tribes of the damages that would accompany the dam-building project until 1949, several years after condemnations had begun.

A few years earlier, a corps official had come to Armand Hopkins’ home in White Swan. He surveyed the land and told the family of six they were to be evicted.

“Get off our land,” Hopkins’ grandfather told the man. They were one of the families who stayed in the village until the very end, until the water began climbing up the shore toward their home.

“Our house and everything in it went. We never got anything out of it,” said Hopkins, 60, a retired construction worker and bar owner. “We didn’t have no pickup to take things away. Back then, no one had no money, not much of anything.

“Nobody wanted to leave. And still, everybody who lived there has a great sadness in their hearts.”

Resettled in makeshift towns on the prairie, White Swan families fell on hard times, according to Lawson’s research. Instead of living off the land, they had to find jobs, which were scarce. While some families received minimal compensation, it came years late and did not cover the costs of resettlement and building new communities.

“Our entire way of life collapsed,” said Robert Cournoyer, vice chairman of the 8,000-member Yankton Sioux tribe.

Compensation issues

Displaced Yankton Sioux families received an average $5,605 payment for their lost homes and lands, according to a 1960 study by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, far less than other tribes or non-Indian residents represented by private lawyers. The tribe was not compensated for natural resources that were destroyed, including nearly all of the reservation’s timber.

The Yankton Sioux’s portion of the government’s new compensation settlement will be $23 million; the Santee Sioux, who lost about 600 acres, are to receive $4.7 million. Both tribes intend to use the funds for schools, social services, job training and economic development, tribal leaders said.

Meanwhile, other issues remain unresolved between the tribes and the government. The corps had promised to move Yankton Sioux gravesites to higher ground before the Fort Randall dam was finished. But surveys of existing burial sites were poorly funded and incomplete, and some graves were left behind.

In the last several years, low lake levels and construction projects along the eroding shoreline have exposed Indian burial grounds that never were moved, provoking deep anger and a lawsuit by the Yankton Sioux.

The corps is drafting a plan to protect sacred and historically important Indian sites along the upper Missouri, with input from 27 Indian tribes, said Larry Janis, cultural resources program manager in the Omaha office.