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Newsbrief:
South
Dakota
Lakota
Successfully
Harvest
Hemp
Crop
8/9/02
For the past three years, Pine Ridge Indian Reservation resident Alex White Plume and family members have planted industrial hemp crops on the windy South Dakota plains near Manderson. Last year and the year before, federal drug agents confiscated their crops before they could be harvested, but not this year. Learning from the feds, White Plume and friends moved early, harvesting most of their 3.5 acre crop on the night of July 30. "They weren't that tall, but they were done pollinating," White Plume told the Rapid City Journal. "So we took it out, we cut it, and it's dried." And soon the evidence will be long gone. The crop has already been sold to Madison Hemp and Flax Company of Lexington, Kentucky and will be picked up on August 14, when a public thanksgiving and symbolic harvesting of a small hemp plot will occur. Madison Hemp had joined with the Kentucky Hemp Growers Association to ship a truckload full of hemp to the Pine Ridge after the feds confiscated White Plume's crop in 2000. While federal law currently prohibits hemp cultivation, the Oglala Sioux (Lakota) Tribal Council voted in 1998 to legalize it. The tribe argues that it is a sovereign nation with the ability to apply its own laws on its own land. Whether from fatigue or because White Plume outfoxed them, this year the feds have failed to mount a counteroffensive, and a hemp crop has been harvested in the US. Or at least in the Lakota Nation.
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