INDIAN'S 'FIELD OF DREAMS' RUNS AFOUL OF DRUG LAWS

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."

[SIDEBAR]

FACTS ABOUT HEMP

Hemp and marijuana are both derived from the cannabis plant. Hemp is grown
for industrial use, while marijuana is grown for recreational and medicinal
use. Marijuana has much higher levels of the hallucinogenic THC
(tetrahydrocannabinol).

Hemp is grown around the world, but it is illegal to produce in the United
States. Recently, the Drug Enforcement Administration also clarified a
long-standing ban on hemp products. The ban, enforcement of which has been
postponed, applies only to ingestible hemp products such as potato chips
and candy bars made with hemp oil. Arguments against the ban will begin
Monday in federal appeals court in San Francisco.

Several states, including Montana, North Dakota and Kentucky, have passed
laws allowing farmers to grow hemp, but federal regulations supersede those
laws. Hemp legalization in Colorado has failed.