Original article: Indian's 'field of dreams' runs afoul of drug laws By Gwen Florio Denver Post National Writer Sunday, April 07, 2002 - MANDERSON, S.D. - Twice, Alex White Plume planted his crop. Twice, despite the unforgiving conditions here on the edge of the Badlands, it grew green and lush and tall. And twice, before he could harvest it, federal agents swooped in with guns and weed whackers, confiscating his plants and toting them away in U-Hauls. White Plume grows hemp, marijuana's milder cousin, but still too closely related for comfort for the Drug Enforcement Administration. Plant again, they've told White Plume, and they'll be back with their lawn trimmers. White Plume shrugs. What the federal government sees as a drug war, he sees as a turf war - Indian reservations are sovereign nations - not to mention as part of his own war on poverty. White Plume is 50 years old. His guide business catering mostly to foreign tourists has tanked since Sept. 11. And his income as a part-time college instructor, one of the few jobs available in a place where only two in 10 adults work, doesn't pay the bills. Come warm weather, he's planting. A reminder that his crop is illegal in the U.S. brings another shrug, and a reminder of his own. "This," said White Plume, "is not part of the United States." This is the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, 7,000 square miles of canyon-cut prairie and pine and cedar forests between the Black Hills and Badlands National Park in southwestern South Dakota. The roughly 18,000 enrolled Oglala Lakota Indians who live here today are descendants of the people who were pushed out of the Black Hills and harassed unmercifully after gold was discovered there. In 1890, Army soldiers killed between 150 and 300 Lakota men, women and children at Wounded Knee, about 10 miles south of White Plume's home. The dazed survivors found themselves living in a place with little game or tillable land. Life has improved little since. Unemployment runs as high as 80 percent on the reservation, mainly because there's almost nowhere to work. Tribal offices, schools and the local hospital are the biggest employers. Beyond that, options are limited - several convenience stores, a couple of fast-food restaurants, a few small businesses. "The poverty is even more devastating than the inner city," said South Dakota state Sen. Ron Volesky, a Democrat and member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, who is running for governor this year and who supports legislation that would allow all farmers in South Dakota to grow hemp. "At least, in the city, you're a cab ride away from something better. But when you're in Pine Ridge, there's nowhere to go." Past job-creation projects - a hotel, a fish-lure factory, a meatpacking plant, an electronics firm - collapsed. "Pine Ridge represents one of the worst cases of economic failure in the history of the world," said Tribal President John Yellow Bird Steele, who blames what he calls "inherent federal neglect" by a faraway government whose attitude, as he sees it, has alternated maddeningly between paternalism and indifference. "The government owes the reservation a Marshall Plan," he said, referring to the program to rebuild Europe's economy after the devastation of World War II. Steele, who said that creating jobs has been one of the major issues in every campaign in his quarter-century in tribal politics, strongly supports private enterprise as opposed to tribal-run businesses. Enter White Plume, with a 50-pound bag of hemp seeds and a promise from a Kentucky hemp cooperative to buy his first harvest. "I was going to be the first Indian millionaire," White Plume said wryly. That was before the feds arrived. After the first crop was confiscated, White Plume said, he sold some of his 70 horses to cover the financial loss. Last summer, after the DEA chopped down his second planting, he sold more horses, some traditional dance clothing and a pickup. If they come back this year, he said, he's going to stand and fight. Not with guns - although the federal agents who traveled here packed heat along with their weed whackers. But with a lawsuit. "To sue is really the American way," said White Plume. "Even though I'm not really a full-fledged American." The federal government recognizes reservations as "domestic dependent nations." In practical terms, that means they're sort of sovereign - witness their ability to run gambling casinos on reservations within states where gaming is illegal - and sort of not. White Plume's hemp is a good example of the latter. Although the tribal council in November authorized the production of industrial hemp (as have several states), the federal Drug Enforcement Administration bans it. In October, the DEA proposed outlawing hemp food products such as candy bars and potato chips made with hemp oil on the basis that they contain THC, the hallucinogenic ingredient in marijuana. But the amount of THC found in hemp is far lower than in marijuana. "Smoke industrial hemp, and all you're going to get is a headache," said Eric Steenstra, president of VoteHemp, a nonprofit advocacy group. A research facility in Hawaii is the only place in the United States where industrial hemp grows legally, he said. It's grown elsewhere around the world, however, including in Canada. In January, a Canadian hemp grower announced intent to sue the U.S. government, claiming the proposed ban on hemp products violates provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Separate arguments against the ban on hemp food products, filed by the Hemp Industries Association and seven hemp food companies in the United States and Canada, will be heard Monday in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. A far more informal event is occurring this weekend in Sturgis, S.D. The second annual Hemp Hoedown was held to benefit White Plume's efforts and those of the South Dakota Industrial Hemp Council. The government is unlikely to relent on its regulations. The U.S. Attorney's Office in Rapid City, S.D., declined to comment about White Plume's case. John Walters, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, has said that he views the push to legalize industrial hemp as a way to weaken marijuana laws. "You cannot pretend there is not a broader issue of legalization behind this," he said. Meanwhile, the weather is warming and the field bordering Wounded Knee Creek is thawing. Soon, White Plume will plow the ground, and then he and his extended family will slowly walk the furrows, dropping hemp seeds into the damp earth. They will say Lakota planting prayers. "I have such a beautiful place here," White Plume said, casting his gaze over the field, where meadowlarks sounded the first notes of spring. "This is my field of dreams." But for the past two years, he said, the dream has been interrupted. "Our ceremonies have always been incomplete. We've said the planting prayers, but never the harvest prayers." This year, vowed White Plume, his family will complete the ceremony. "Before, I have always had to stand by helplessly" as the DEA destroyed his crop. "I felt like our grandfathers at Wounded Knee, watching helplessly while our people were killed. I do not want to be helpless anymore."