Cante Heart, He Sapa Otipi executive director, sits at her desk in the center's current location on Jackson Boulevard in Rapid City. (Photo by Matt Gade, ICT/Rapid City Journal)
Organizers of a Native community center in the works since 2015 push forward
A long-awaited Indigenous community center may be one step closer to coming to fruition. Next month, He Sapa Otipi organizers will present their plan for a new community center to the Rapid City Council for approval.
Nearly every major city has an Indigenous community center and plenty of smaller cities have a center, including Sioux Falls, S.D., and Lincoln, Nebraska. These community centers provide a place for the community to gather for funerals, ceremonies, artmaking, dancing, music and more.
Rapid City lacks a central locale for the Indigenous community to gather and hold events like this. Many smaller centers scattered throughout the city provide for specific needs. According to He Sapa Otipi, there are citizens from more than 60 different Native Nations living in the Rapid City area. The census notes that roughly 15 percent of Rapid City’s population is Native, including mixed-race individuals.
While there are women’s groups, sobriety support groups and youth centers, there’s not one large unified center for the community to gather.
“For years we haven’t had a place of our own to gather and create a sense of belonging and community,” said Cante Heart, Sicangu Lakota and the He Sapa Otipi executive director.
Heart said the He Sapa Otipi Center has been in the works since 2015 when a man allegedly spilled beer and shouted racial slurs at a group of Lakota children from Pine Ridge at a hockey game. The incident brought community members together to plan solutions for a safer future for children and initiatives to heal the community.
“We believe that it’s up to us as the new generation to create new relationships. There never really was a great relationship between Natives and non-Natives in Rapid City, and Rapid City is our homelands, we’ve been there for thousands of years,” Heart said. “It’s important for us to create these new relationships and build long-lasting connections to make a change and start trusting each other. The non-Natives in our community don’t really know us.”
Since the initial planning process in 2015 began, several of the elders who were central to the project have moved on. Heart said their passing was not only a reason to push harder to accomplish their dreams but also a reason why the community so badly needs a gathering place.
“We need a place for wakes and funerals when we lose a loved one. We want to remove the stress of having to find a place for our loved ones to be sent on their journey,” Heart said.
The He Sapa Otipi Center would be located on a four-acre plot of land donated to the organization by the NDN Collective. The land is behind the north Rapid City Dollar General. This area of land will also be used for the Oceti Sakowin Community Academy and NDN Collective’s new housing campaign. All of these buildings will be close to each other, creating a community within a community.
The center would include a gymnasium, a commercial kitchen, office spaces for the local Indigenous organizations to rent, a fitness center and more. Currently, planning is in phase 1, the planning and design phase.
In January 2022, He Sapa Otipi was awarded a $9 million grant from the Rapid City Vision Makers fund. Funding was contingent on having property lined up for the facility. At the time, He Sapa Otipi had planned on building the center on a parcel of former boarding school land meant for the Native community in a 1948 act.
The act stated that ownership of the former Rapid City Indian Boarding School lands could be given to a select list of organizations – the city of Rapid City for municipal purposes, the local school district for education, the National Guard, churches or “needy Indians.”
The land went to all organizations but the “needy Indians.”
In 2017, a group of Native researchers questioned the 1948 deeds and found that any unused land could be given to the U.S. Department of the Interior through a “reversion clause.”
The clause outlined what could be done if the land was no longer being used by the select causes outlined by Congress. Three parcels that had previously been given to the city and Rapid City Area Schools were eligible to be reverted to federal land.
In 2017, the Bureau of Indian Affairs supported the research and urged for the parcels to be used to rectify the boarding school’s history.
The He Sapa Otipi project was meant to be part of that solution, but placing land within federal trust takes a long time and He Sapa Otipi couldn’t wait anymore, so it decided to move the center to north Rapid City on land donated by the NDN Collective.
“We’ve been waiting long enough so we just kind of started taking things into our own hands because we can’t depend on the city either,” Heart said. “We’ve just got to do things ourselves.”
Instead, the land meant for both He Sapa Otipi and the Remembering the Children Rapid City Indian Boarding School memorial will go solely to the memorial.
In January, He Sapa Otipi will meet with the city council to discuss the center’s location and work on removing the funding contingency.
To be built He Sapa Otipi needs to raise $21 million, Heart said. Once the Vision Maker fund money is acquired the center will be almost halfway to its goal.
Heart said the organization is hopeful the center will be up and running in four years. Organizers are planning on finalizing design drafts for the building before asking for donations.
Currently, He Sapa Otipi is asking for community input on what the public would want out of the center. The community survey is available at hesapaotipi.org.
“We invite everyone to give their input and look for us at LNI (Lakota Nation Invitational). We’ll have a booth set up with the survey and are planning more community vision events in the future,” Heart said.
Dateline:
RAPID CITY, S.D.
