Plenty Pine Ridge Hemp

Tom Cook, Native American Activist

We arrived at Tom Cook's home in nearby Chadron, NE, on Sunday morning, June 6. Tom, a Plenty Board member, is the sparkplug of an effort to regenerate the health and economy of Pine Ridge. Tom is a Mohawk Indian from the Akwesasne Reservation in New York, who went to Pine Ridge as a reporter for Akwesasne Notes (a well-respected Native paper with an international circulation) during the Wounded Knee Occupation in 1973.

There he met and married Loretta Afraid Of Bear, a full-blood Oglala Lakota woman, and has lived on or near Pine Ridge ever since. Tom's projects began in the early 1980s with a $500 grant from Plenty to begin a gardening project on the Reservation.

Today, Tom runs a program that employs 12 people, tills approximately 200 gardens and provides seeds, seedlings and know-how to the gardeners. His group, with support from Running Strong for Native American Youth, also does house renovations and other community service projects. Housing, jobs and fresh vegetables are three of the most needed resources at Pine Ridge. Loretta runs a program that markets beautiful Lakota fine arts and handicrafts, attending shows all over the United States.

The house we were to work on is being built for Earnest Afraid Of Bear, Loretta's father, age 74, the patriarch of the Afraid Of Bear Clan. Earnest currently lives with some of his children and grandchildren, 12 people in a one-family house. There is not enough room for everyone to sleep inside, so Earnest has been sleeping in a junk car outside. As Tom Cook says, "This didn't set well with me because the man is the patriarch of a very large family. This is typical of so many others who give up their own space in a house for the sake of a grandchild or relatives. There's a severe overcrowding in every house. And, particularly after this tornado event the last two days, there are many more now who would be homeless except that they have relatives who will take them in. People have this feeling to help each other out, especially when it's their own relatives, and because almost everyone can be considered a relative of everyone else, some way or other, no matter how distant, no one goes homeless on the Reservation.

From the very beginning, we could see that we had our work cut out for us. The house site is located about a quarter of a mile off the road, with no gravel driveway yet in place. It had been a rainy spring, and the prairie was a sea of mud, ("gumbo" in the local parlance) which clung tenaciously to our boots. All that was present was a five-year-old cement footer, out of square, invisible from the road, with a few recently-dug holes in the middle for piers. It took us the first day just to figure out logistics and get the rest of the holes dug.

For much of the time we were there, a tractor was the only vehicle that could reach the site from the road. Our crew consisted of three highly skilled builders and four versatile helpers, but we only had five working days in which to get up as much of the house as we could. The question was, how much could we get done? This depended partly on the weather. The Great Spirit was with us, and it only rained one day of our time there. By the middle of the week, we could drive our rented van out to the site, but on the last day, we were back to unloading lumber from the truck onto a trailer behind a tractor, hauling it to the site, and unloading it there again. Phones are few and far between on the Reservation, so ordering supplies generally meant a trip to Chadron, 20 miles away.

Another factor that makes this house special is the inclusion of hemp materials in its construction. Wild hemp grows abundantly in Nebraska, the Dakotas, and other parts of this country, left from the days when hemp was an important cultivated crop in the U.S. Tom's crew has been making adobe/hemp bricks, using a standard brick-making machine, local dirt, and hemp material, some of which had been ordered from Canada, and some of which had been gathered wild by friends in Nebraska.

Another key element was to be carbonized hemp panels. This process involves soaking hemp hurds--the woody inside stalk of the hemp plant-in a lime solution, adding a little sand and cement, and pouring panels that would harden quickly because of the cement, but continue hardening for six months as the chemical action of the lime on the hurds turned them into something like petrified wood. This process has been used in other settings, but at the time we were there, Tom's crew had not yet come up with a satisfactory prototype. After careful consultation with Tom, it was decided to go ahead and frame up a standard stud house, in the interest of getting Earnest and his family inside by October. The hemp bricks would then be used around the walls, and hemp material will also be used as insulation between the studs. Experimentation continues on the hemp panels, and if satisfactory panels are ready in time, they will be used for interior walls.

This "hemp house" is a project of the Slim Buttes Land Use Association, initiated by Tom Cook and his neighbors in the Slim Buttes Community on the Reservation. Their plan is to grow industrial hemp for use as building material, fiber and food. Hemp could be an answer to many of the needs of the Reservation. It is easy to grow, requires little fertilizer and no pesticides, and already thrives in the wild in this otherwise harsh agricultural environment.

Tom is especially interested in a process that presses oil out of hemp seeds and uses the remaining flour in a variety of food applications. Last year the Lakota Tribal Council voted to allow industrial hemp to be grown at Pine Ridge. The next step, according to Tom, is for the Lakota Tribe to institute its own Department of Agriculture, which will set standards for the regulation of the crop, and then to apply to the U.S. DEA for a permit to grow hemp. Two states-North Dakota and Hawaii-have already approved similar plans, and are applying to the DEA for permits, and while we were at Pine Ridge we learned that a third state, Minnesota, had just taken similar action.

On the second day, Tuesday, the crew got the piers poured, mixing concrete by hand on a sheet of plywood salvaged from the tornado wreckage, since the portable generator had quit. Block was laid, and short knee walls built around the foundation. Wednesday was a crucial day. It dawned sunny and bright, and our entire crew was joined by about six of Tom's crew, local young Oglala men. Working together, we got the entire floor system built, the floor decked, and three major first story walls up.

That night back at camp, Earnest, his son Mike, and Vic, a medicine man from Colorado, gave a sweat for our crew. An altar was set up, a sacred pipe and drum and other items arranged, rocks were set in a fire to heat, and some drumming and speaking occurred. Then, at full darkness, which was close to 10:00 PM at this time of year, we entered the sweat lodge.

It was a traditional Lakota sweat, and much of the praying and singing was in the Lakota tongue, but we offered our prayers in English, and we were evidently all saying much the same things, praying for peace, brotherhood and sisterhood, and for the saving of all the creatures on Earth. The sweat ended at about midnight, and Tom and others departed for home in Chadron.
On the way home, they came upon a tragedy. Some of Tom's workers had been out partying, and on the way home, one of them had driven off the road and the truck had flipped, killing the passenger. Tom and the others happened by just after the accident occurred, and went to get help. The crew was in shock. Loretta had been out of town on a selling trip, and had just returned home, so Tom's first words to her were to tell her about the accident. On top of that, Tom's uncle Julius, patriarch of the Cook family, died the same night at Akwesasne, so Tom had to integrate both passings.

We found out about the accident as we were working the next morning. We had just begun to get to know the young man who had died. Alcohol, as well as the soft shoulder of a newly-graveled road, had played a part in the accident. Neal said he'd been told that almost every family on the Reservation has lost at least one family member to alcohol-related traffic accidents.

As I looked out over the creek bottom marked by cottonwood trees, to the grassy slopes and the bluffs beyond, I felt the sadness not only of the victim and the driver, but of all the death and destruction that had been visited upon this ground in the last two hundred years. All the people who had died, Indian and white, and the millions of buffalo which had been needlessly slaughtered, seemed somehow present in spirit, crying out, expressing their profound sadness and suffering, and perhaps praying for something positive to come out of this incident. It was obvious what our crew had to do-get back to work. That day we got the rest of the walls up on the first story, the ceiling joists, and the second story decking. Tom's Indian crew mostly stayed away; they were still in shock from the accident.

Thursday night it rained all night. We had been sleeping in a large tipi, 28 ft in diameter, with seven cots set up for us. Fortunately Tom showed us how to maintain a fire in the tipi without smoking ourselves out, so we were cozy, roasting potatoes in the coals and playing music. Friday morning dawned gray and drizzly. We wondered if we could even get in to the site, let alone get anything done. We knew we had to give it a shot.

Only the tractor could make it in to the site that morning. We loaded the tools in the tractor's front end bucket and slogged in through the mud. We started slowly, laying out the second story walls. As the day wore on, we shed layers of clothes, the clouds eventually went away and were replaced by clear sky and sunlight.

Kevin Biko Casini
2nd Generation Plenty Volunteer

We took our time getting ready, and finally arrived at the site around 8:30. Tom had taken off for New York early that morning for his uncle Julius' funeral, so we wouldn't see him any more this trip.
Some of Tom's crew showed up, and it felt like we were returning to full strength. The pace of work accelerated as the afternoon wore on, and we worked till 7:00 PM, really pushing it. By the time we finished, we had the entire second story and all the rafters up except one small section over the stairwell. Neal Bloomfield and Jeff Becker,, who were leading the building effort, felt satisfied that they had transmitted enough information to Tom's crew that they could finish the job.

As we left the site and looked back, a framed-out two story house stood where five days earlier nothing had been visible.

Volunteer Jeff Becker brought his 20 years of building skills and all his tools to the project.

Housing is at a premium at Pine Ridge, and so this was a significant accomplishment. This will be one of the most substantial houses on the Reservation. Hopefully it will also represent the beginning of the further cultivation and use of industrial hemp by the Lakota people. For the Plenty crew from the Farm, there was a sense of pride, and gratitude that we were blessed with good weather, friendship, and the opportunity for useful work.

Work has continued on the Pine Rdge Hemp house. Plenty has donated a woodstove to help provide heat, and Tom Cook's crew have roofed, sheethed, and have layed the outside layer of hemp brick.

To learn more, or to lend your support for this important
project, contact:

Plenty International Pine Ridge Hemp House