9410504 Demallie This Dissertation Improvement research is an ethnographic and ethnohistorical analysis of the effects of one piece of federal Indian policy--The Dawes Act--on Lakota Sioux identity. It examines the local social categories of "fullblood," and "white" in a South Dakota county that seceded from Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1912. This study explores the linkages between the creation and maintenance of such local social categories and federal Indian policies. Additionally, this is the first study to pay special attention to the settlement of the area by both Lakotas, who were relegated to the area through the reservation system, and non-Indians who homesteaded the area when it was opened to non-Indian settlement. This study employs traditional anthropological methods of participant-observation and the recording of life histories from consultants in all three social categories who are as old as or older than the county itself. Coupled with the anthropological data, the examination of historical and ethnohistorical documents written in both English and Lakota languages will illuminate ongoing processes involved in the maintenance of social categories in Bennett County.
